Athletic Motion Golf- The Podcast · Mike Granato and Shaun Webb

If You Care About Your Clubs, You Need To Hear This!

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

Filament winding, not sheet wrap, produced the straightest, tightest-deviation shafts in the test.

Michael Neff, affectionately called Nipper, drops in as one of the hosts' favorite guests and is introduced as the President and CEO behind Gears Golf. The conversation opens with praise for how much he has been running around the PGA Show. The hosts move quickly to the value of Gears as a system that captures body data and, just as importantly, club data. That club-side tracking is a major reason they care about what he is building. The conversation then pivots into Ovio, the shaft project that grew out of that work. The name gets a brief explanation too: Ovio means obvious in Italian. The tone stays warm and appreciative throughout. One host talks about seeing Gears for the first time and immediately wanting it. The technical center of the segment is a live-player example. A golfer thought a driving iron swing was bad because the club felt awful. The hosts explain that the actual swing was basically the same as his seven iron swing. What changed was the way the club behaved. They point to droop and deflection as the meaningful differences. Those differences were large enough to make the player feel like he had made a poor swing. The episode then widens into how clubs in the bag are not interchangeable. Longer clubs droop and deflect more because they are longer. The hosts note that iron shafts are not truly identical across the set even when the branding makes them look that way. A frequency machine would show that the flex changes from club to club. They also explain why making every shaft exactly the same would require extra material in the longer irons, which would make those clubs extremely heavy. The point lands on practical fitting reality rather than theory. A four iron and a pitching wedge are designed to do different things at the same speed. The discussion keeps returning to measurable evidence instead of guesswork. It ends on gratitude, fatigue from the PGA Show, and the kind of friendship that survives long days and technical arguments.

As heard by us

A club data deep dive that explains why the same swing can still feel different from club to club.

Nipper keeps the discussion grounded in club behavior, which is what makes it work. It starts with Gears Golf and its body-and-club tracking, then moves into Ovio and the shaft details the team is sorting through.

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Why you'd press play

You want the club-data version of a fitting rabbit hole.

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