Your bag has holes in it. Here is how to find them.

There is a shot that shows up four or five times a round and nobody talks about it. You have 147 yards to a front pin. Your 8 iron carries 143 and your 7 iron carries 158. Neither of those is 147. So you either take the 8 and add something to it, or take the 7 and hold it off, and both of those are swings you do not practise, made under the exact conditions where you can least afford an experiment.

That is a gapping problem, and it is not a swing fault. It is an equipment arithmetic problem that was decided in a shop long before you stood over the ball, and it is one of the few things in golf you can genuinely fix in an afternoon without getting any better at golf.

The catch is that fixing it requires knowing how far you actually hit each club, which almost nobody does. Not roughly. Not the number you say out loud to your playing partners. The carry distance, measured, averaged over enough swings to mean something. Everything below is built around getting that number and then doing something useful with it.

What a gapping chart is

A gapping chart is your bag, sorted by how far each club carries, longest to shortest, with the difference between each neighbouring pair written next to it. That difference is the gap. The whole exercise takes about fifteen minutes once you have the numbers, and it answers a single question: for any yardage you might face, do you own a club that covers it with a swing you can make without thinking about it?

It is worth being clear about what a gapping chart is not. It is not a table of what an average golfer of your handicap hits. Those tables exist all over the internet and they are close to useless for this purpose, because you are not the average golfer of your handicap and the point of gapping is the spacing between your own numbers, not whether those numbers are impressive. A golfer whose 7 iron carries 130 yards with clean 12 yard gaps on either side has a better bag than one whose 7 iron carries 165 with a 24 yard hole underneath it. The first golfer has a club for every shot. The second has a decision to make four times a round.

So the tool below does not ship a benchmark table and will never tell you how far you should be hitting anything. It takes the numbers you give it and tells you where the bag is failing you.

The three things a gapping chart finds

Run this on enough bags and the same three faults come up. They are different problems with different fixes, and the tool separates them for that reason.

1. Holes, where a yardage has no club

A gap wider than about 15 yards means there is a distance in the middle of it that no club covers with a full swing. In practice you handle that distance by decelerating with the longer club or by going after the shorter one, and both of those produce the same result: a shot that comes up short and right, or short and left, depending on which way you miss.

Holes cluster in two places. The first is between the shortest iron that a golfer can hit properly and the longest one they cannot, which in most amateur bags is somewhere around the 5 iron. The second is between the pitching wedge and the sand wedge, and that one has a specific modern cause covered further down.

2. Stacks, where two clubs do one job

Clubs less than about 8 yards apart are competing for the same shot. This sounds harmless and is not, because Rule 4.1b limits you to 14 clubs including the putter. Every slot is finite. A 3 wood and a 5 wood that carry within 6 yards of each other are not two options, they are one option and one wasted slot, and that slot could be a club that covers the 25 yard hole you have between your longest iron and your shortest hybrid.

The most common stack in amateur bags is at the very top: a driver the golfer does not trust and a 3 wood they hit almost as far off the tee. That is a real and defensible choice. It is still worth seeing it written down, because the cost of it is being paid somewhere else in the bag.

3. Inversions, where the order is wrong

Sometimes a shorter club carries further than a longer one. A 4 iron that goes 168 sitting above a 5 iron that goes 172 is not a gapping problem you solve with arithmetic. It usually means the longer club is not being struck well enough to use its loft, which is the standard story with long irons for most amateurs, and it is why hybrids exist.

The right response is to check it rather than to act on it. One bad session with a 4 iron proves nothing. If the inversion repeats over a full set of tracked shots with decent contact, the bag is telling you that slot is wrong, and the club that comes out is the one that is not earning its distance.

Why 10 to 15 yards is the number

The gap thresholds in the tool are not invented. Titleist Vokey's own gapping guidance recommends 4 to 6 degrees of loft separation between wedges, and states plainly that this results in 10 to 15 yard gaps. The same page recommends that most players carry four wedges, on the grounds that it produces tighter distance gaps and more full swings, which is the entire argument for gapping stated in one sentence by the people who make the clubs.

Ten to fifteen yards is roughly the width of a green from front to back on an average course, which is the practical reason the number lands where it does. If your clubs are spaced further apart than the target is deep, then for some yardages your best available club puts you off the green even when you hit it perfectly.

There is one honest exception, and the tool does not enforce a rule it should not. The gaps at the top of the bag are usually wider than 15 yards, and that is fine. A driver and a 3 wood are tee clubs and par 5 second-shot clubs, and precision at 240 yards matters far less than precision at 140. Where a hole in the bag genuinely costs you strokes is in the range where you are aiming at a flag rather than at a general area, which for most golfers starts somewhere around the 5 iron and gets more expensive with every club below it.

The wedge gap that modern iron sets created

There is a specific and very common hole at the bottom of the bag, and it exists for a reason worth understanding before you go shopping.

Pitching wedge lofts have got stronger over the last two decades. Vokey's own gap wedge page notes exactly this: it says there is no standard gap wedge loft, and that as set pitching wedges continue to get stronger, the loft of the gap wedge gets stronger too. A pitching wedge that used to be 48 degrees is now often 43 or 44. The sand wedge in the same golfer's bag is still 56, because sand wedges have not moved. That leaves 12 or 13 degrees of loft sitting between two consecutive clubs, in the part of the bag where you are most often aiming at a flag.

In yardage terms, that is frequently a 30 yard hole, and it is the single most common finding when a golfer runs their real numbers for the first time. It has an easy fix, which is why it is worth finding: a gap wedge, at the loft that actually splits the two clubs you own, rather than the one printed on the box.

This end of the bag is also where the strokes are. Shot Scope's tracked amateur data for approach shots from 60 to 100 yards shows an average proximity of about 40 feet from the fairway, 46 feet from the rough, and 56 feet from a bunker. Forty feet from a wedge distance is a two-putt at best. Some of that is strike quality and always will be. Some of it is a golfer choosing between two clubs that are 30 yards apart and guessing.

Carry, not total, and why the difference is bigger than you think

This is the mistake that ruins more gapping charts than any other. If your numbers come from watching where the ball finished on a dry fairway in August, you are gapping against total distance, and total distance is not a property of your swing. It is a property of the ground.

Trackman publishes both figures for the professional tours, and the spread is instructive: the PGA Tour driver average is about 275 yards of carry against roughly 290 total, and the 7 iron average is about 172 carry against 181 total. That is 15 yards of rollout on a driver and 9 on a mid iron, produced by players hitting into firm tournament conditions. On a soft municipal fairway in February, both of those numbers shrink toward zero.

Carry is the number that decides whether the ball clears the bunker, holds the front tier, or reaches the flag on a green that stops the ball. It is also the number a launch monitor measures directly, which is a large part of why gapping moved indoors. If you want a fuller explanation of the other figures on that screen and which of them are worth acting on, we wrote a plain-language guide to launch monitor numbers that covers smash factor, spin, launch angle, and the ones you can safely ignore.

How to collect numbers worth gapping against

A gapping chart built from bad data is worse than no chart, because it gives you confidence in the wrong yardages. Here is the protocol that produces numbers you can trust, and it takes about an hour.

• Warm up first, properly. Your first twenty balls are not data. Hit them, then start.
• Ten or more shots per club. Fewer than that and one fat strike moves your average by five yards.
• Throw away the extremes. Discard the best and the worst before averaging. Shot Scope applies the same idea to its own tracked data, removing 10 percent of extreme results at both ends to produce what it calls a performance average. You want the shot you hit on a Tuesday, not the one you tell people about.
• Use one ball, and use your ball. Premium balls and range balls do not fly the same distance, and range balls do not fly the same distance as each other.
• Do the whole bag in one session. A number from spring and a number from late summer came from two different golfers with two different amounts of practice behind them.
• Record carry, and write it down immediately. Not total, not the number you remember on the drive home.
• Include the clubs you dislike. The 4 iron you never hit is exactly the slot most likely to be wrong, and you cannot find that out by avoiding it.

An hour in a bay does this properly, on the same ball, off the same lie, with no wind and no guessing about where it landed. It is genuinely one of the highest-value hours in golf: not because it makes you swing better, but because it stops you from choosing the wrong club several times per round for the rest of the season.

What to do with what you find

The chart is a diagnosis, not a shopping list. There are four responses, roughly in order of cost.

• Accept it and build a partial swing. Free, and the right answer at the wedge end, where a reliable three-quarter swing is a skill worth owning anyway. It is a much worse answer in the middle irons, where controlled partial swings are harder and less repeatable.
• Bend a loft. A club fitter can usually move an iron a degree or two, which is worth a handful of yards. This closes small gaps and cannot close large ones, and it affects the clubs on either side of the one you bend.
• Swap a slot. The cheapest real fix. If the chart shows a stacked pair at the top of the bag and a 25 yard hole in the middle, the club that comes out and the club that goes in have already been identified for you.
• Get fitted for the problem club. The most expensive option and the correct one at the long end, where the issue is usually launch and spin rather than loft. This is where a fitting earns its fee, because a hybrid that launches for you replaces a long iron that does not.

If the exercise leaves you unsure what the clubs in your bag are supposed to do in the first place, our explainer on the different types of golf clubs goes through every category and what each one is built for.

Doing this on the Westside

Gapping is the sort of task that indoor golf is genuinely better at than a driving range. A range gives you range balls, an unmeasured landing area, wind, and a bucket that runs out. A bay gives you your own ball, a measured carry number for every shot, and the ability to hit forty 8 irons without anybody waiting behind you.

We are building Framegolf in Culver City for exactly this kind of session: four private member bays, an auto-tee on every bay, and a room where you can work through a full bag without an audience. Founding member access will begin at the end of August 2026, and public membership opens in September 2026. If you are weighing that against other options, the LA simulator cost guide has the real hourly numbers across the city, the complete guide to indoor golf in LA covers every venue type, and the neighborhoods hub has your actual drive time. If you are pricing a home build instead, start with the room size guide, because ceiling height decides that question before the budget does.

And if you would rather practise outdoors, that is a perfectly good answer for most of your golf. Our Westside practice guide has every public range and short course on this side of the city. Just do not gap your bag off range balls.

Do this once a year

Carry distances move. They move when you get stronger, when you get older, when you change shafts, when you change balls, and when you have not played in four months. A chart from two seasons ago is a chart of somebody else's bag.

Once a year is enough for most golfers, and the start of the season is the obvious time. Keep the old chart. The interesting information is not this year's numbers, it is the difference between this year's and last year's, and which clubs moved and which did not.

Sources

The gapping thresholds and distance figures cited here come from manufacturer guidance, the Rules of Golf, and published tracked-shot datasets. Specifications and averages are revised, so check the current version for the equipment you actually play.

• Titleist Vokey, Wedge Gapping and Bounce (4 to 6 degrees of loft separation, 10 to 15 yard gaps, four wedges)
• Vokey Design, Gap Wedges (why there is no standard gap wedge loft as set pitching wedges get stronger)
• USGA, Rule 4 - The Player's Equipment (Rule 4.1b, limit of 14 clubs)
• Trackman, PGA and LPGA Tour averages (carry and total distance by club, 2023 season data)
• Trackman, Tour averages reference tables in the Trackman help center
• Shot Scope, Approach shots: average proximity to the hole (tracked amateur data by lie and distance band)

Questions people ask