Reading Your Carry Ladder
Every golfer who's fit here eventually asks the same question: how big should the gap between two clubs actually be? The honest answer is "it depends" — but it depends on fewer things than most golfers assume.
A carry ladder is just the sequence of carry distances your clubs produce, arranged from longest to shortest. Driver at the top, lob wedge or sand wedge at the bottom, with every other club filling a rung in between. The idea itself isn't complicated. What's harder is knowing whether the rungs you already have are actually spaced well.
Where the 10–15 Yard Rule Comes From
Most fitting references cite 10–15 yards as a reasonable gap between full-swing clubs, and it's a decent starting point for mid-length irons. But it isn't a fixed law. Longer clubs naturally produce bigger gaps — the jump from driver to 3-wood is often 20–30 yards even in a well-built bag — while shorter wedges tend to compress into tighter 8–12 yard steps by design, since loft changes matter more at short distances.
The number that actually matters isn't a universal target. It's whether your own gaps are consistent with each other, and whether any single gap is wide enough to leave you between clubs on a real shot.
What a "Blind Yardage" Actually Costs
A blind yardage is any distance that falls squarely between two of your clubs, where neither one is the right choice. If your pitching wedge carries 130 and your gap wedge carries 108, a 118-yard shot has no good option — you're either decelerating a full pitching wedge swing or overswinging the gap wedge, and both introduce more variance than a properly gapped set would.
A blind yardage doesn't show up as a bad swing. It shows up as a decision you weren't equipped to make cleanly in the first place.
Overlap Is the Quieter Problem
Gaps get noticed on the course because they produce an obviously awkward number. Overlap is sneakier — two clubs that both carry roughly the same distance rarely feel like a problem in the moment, since you're never technically stuck. But it means one of those clubs is functionally dead weight, occupying a bag slot that could otherwise cover a different yardage entirely.
How We Measure It in a Session
During a full carry ladder fitting, every club gets multiple recorded swings on the launch monitor, and we chart the average carry distance for each one in sequence. Gaps under roughly eight yards get flagged as likely overlap; gaps over roughly twenty yards on mid-irons or wedges get flagged as a likely blind yardage. Long clubs get more room, since their natural variance is higher to begin with.
The Takeaway
There's no single correct yardage gap for every golfer, but there is a correct question: does this club's distance sit at a useful, distinct point relative to everything else in the bag? Answering that for all fourteen clubs at once is the entire premise behind a carry ladder fitting.
See Your Own Ladder Charted
A full-set carry ladder fitting measures every gap in your bag directly, instead of guessing from memory.