Expert reveals key secrets why lofted fairway woods are perfect for the average golfer

Mark Townsend 06 Mar 2025

The modern game is seeing more and more of the world’s best turn to more loft in their fairway woods.

Scottie Scheffler now has a 7-wood in his bag while the likes of Tommy Fleetwood, Ludvig Aberg and Xander Schauffele are fans of moving away from the standard set-up.

Luke Higgins is the custom-fitting expert at Torque Golf, an indoor performance centre in Manchester which houses four simulators, facilities for chipping and bunker play as well as a Zen Green Stage, and here he explains all you need to know when considering whether to add a 7 or even a 9-wood to your bag for the coming season.

Why the need for more loft?
What we see a lot with a lot of club golfers is that they tend to de-loft their fairway woods through impact. So the reason why people get more performance out of a higher lofted fairway wood is because really, through impact, they’re changing their 7-wood into more of a 3-wood.

That’s why we see a lot of golfers who struggle to generate clubhead speed and launch then gaining a lot more performance out of a lofted club.

One of my favourite fitted clubs at the moment would be a 7-wood with a 3-wood length shaft. So you get a bit more clubhead speed and power because of the length of the shaft but you also get the performance of the launch angle and spin rate of a 7-wood.

Why is fitting so important?
Fitting for a fairway wood is key. The launch angle is definitely important because the last thing you want is a fairway wood to launch low and have no flight. Ninety per cent of the time with a fairway wood you’re probably hitting into a green so you still want to have that stopping power.

We see a lot of golfers hit their fairway woods well, as they’re very forgiving clubs, but the ball is coming in very low and then they struggle to stop it on the green. So by getting fitted, we can change the shaft, torque and weight to help generate a better spin rate and launch angle. So you still have that stopping power on the green without losing distance.

I’ve always been a big believer in getting the launch angle up for golfers who struggle to launch a fairway wood and, because of what’s happening on tour and through more education, we are now more open-minded to having a more lofted fairway wood.

Lofted Ping fairway woods

How do you go about gapping?
I’d get the golfer to hit their longest iron or longest hybrid which gives us a baseline. They would hit their driver/longest club so we know what we’re trying to fill or improve on and then I’ll watch them hit their own 3-wood a few times or whatever club they’re looking to replace. So I just want to see how they launch it and how it spins and from there, I normally start with a new model in the same brand and same set-up.

With the new model, the centre of gravity will have changed quite a lot so we want to see how they might launch that a little bit differently.

Then we can play around with the shaft to get more spin at launch or mess about with the loft or change the brand maybe to see if a different brand launches it. You always have the odd thing where someone might swing it very differently with a different club. We had a guy recently who swung his own driver at 105mph and then the new Callaway at 112mph and he wasn’t swinging it any differently.

About Luke Higgins
Luke did his PGA training at York GC where he spent eight years. He then moved to Bolton Old Links before being offered a job at Torque Golf where he does all the custom fitting as well as other elements. There are seven PGA Professionals at Torque who cover the swing, 3D Biomechanics, putting, short game, speed and distance and junior development and two fitness specialists who work with golf-specific gym equipment. So, essentially, they’ve brought as much of the golf course indoors as possible.