ShotIQ Learn/⚙️ Inside ShotIQ

Target Lab: Stop Measuring Distance, Start Measuring Proximity

Every launch monitor ever made answers the same question: how far did that go? Carry, total, ball speed, spin, apex — a dozen numbers about the shot's magnitude.

Not one of them tells you whether you hit it close.

That's the gap Target Lab exists to close. Because on a golf course, nobody has ever written a number on a scorecard for carry distance. What goes on the card is a function of how close you finished to the flag — and that is a different measurement with a different answer.

Why we built it

Here's the thing that kept coming up in real range sessions: a golfer would hit twenty wedges, look at a screen that said "average carry 74 yards, standard deviation 4.1," and conclude their wedge game was in good shape.

Then they'd get on the course and leave it 30 feet short.

Both things were true. The wedge was consistent. But consistency around the wrong number is just a reliable miss, and a launch monitor pointed down an empty range has no opinion about where the hole is. It measures your shot in a vacuum.

The moment you put a target at a known distance and start scoring the gap, three things surface immediately that a carry average will never show you:

• A directional bias you'd otherwise average away. Eleven shots four yards short and one shot eight long produces a carry average that looks perfect. You are not perfect. You are short.
• Which distances you actually own. Most golfers are far better at one end of their wedge range than the other, and almost nobody can tell you which end without measuring.
• What your miss pattern really is. Short-right is a completely different fault from long-left, and the fix for one makes the other worse.

Target Lab is the part of ShotIQ that measures the second number — the one your score is actually made of.

How it works

The logic is deliberately plain. You tell ShotIQ the distance you're aiming at; it already knows how far each shot carried; the difference is your depth error. Combine that with the side dispersion your monitor records and you get a true two-dimensional leave — the real distance from ball to flag, not just the long/short component.

Everything else in Target Lab is built on that one honest number.

Logging a session — three ways in

1 · Your launch monitor's own target mode. Most units (Rapsodo MLM2 PRO, Garmin R10, SkyTrak, TrackMan, Uneekor, Foresight) let you set a target yardage before you hit, and stamp it into the export. Export the CSV, drop it into ShotIQ, and every target is detected automatically along with the device's own hit/miss scoring.

2 · Any session, tagged after the fact. No target mode? Hit ten balls at a flag, export as normal, and on upload set the session type to Target practice. ShotIQ will ask for the distance you were aiming at.

3 · A screenshot. Photograph the shot table on your monitor's screen and upload the image. ShotIQ reads the carries straight off it.

Whichever route you take, one thing is worth saying plainly, because it's the most common upload mistake:

Tag the session honestly. ShotIQ routes target practice away from your bag carries by default. That's deliberate — a shot you shaped at a flag inside your full number isn't a stock full swing, and letting those into your bag averages is exactly how a caddie ends up under-clubbing you. If you genuinely hit full swings at that target, you can switch bag carries back on at upload, and there's a section at the end of this guide about doing it properly.

Reading the outputs

Accuracy by distance

This is the headline view, and it is the opposite of a carry chart: shorter bars are better, because the bar is your median leave. Read it left to right and you get something most golfers have never seen — a profile of accuracy across their scoring range.

The reason median is used rather than average is worth knowing. One shanked wedge would drag an average leave from 5 yards to 9 and tell you your whole distance is broken. The median ignores the outlier and reports what a typical shot did, which is the thing you can actually plan around.

Strongest and weakest

Two cards, no interpretation required. The point of this pair is to convert a chart into a practice decision — most range time is spent on whatever the golfer enjoys hitting, which is very rarely the distance costing them shots.

The proximity map

This is where the pattern lives. Each dot is one shot, plotted by depth (long/short) and side (left/right), coloured by how close it finished.

What to look for, in order:

1. Where's the centre of the cluster? Not the spread — the centre. If the middle of your pattern sits below the line, you are systematically short, and no amount of "hitting it better" fixes that. Take more club or make a bigger swing.
2. Is it round or is it stretched? A tall, thin cluster means your distance control is the problem. A wide, flat one means it's your face control. Those need completely different practice.
3. Only then, how big is it? Size is the last thing to fix, because a tight cluster in the wrong place is still a miss.

The single most common read on this chart is a cluster hanging short and slightly left — which is the classic signature of a decelerating, steered wedge. That's a commitment problem, not a technique problem, and it shows up here in a way it never shows up in a carry average.

Elevation — the correction almost nobody makes

Here's a subtlety that matters more than it sounds. Your launch monitor reports carry to the plane it's sitting on. It has no idea where your target is, or how high it sits. So if the flag you're hitting at is up on a plateau, the monitor's number is unchanged — but the shot had further to travel.

ShotIQ works the adjustment out from your ball's own descent angle, rather than the usual rule of thumb of "add a yard for every three feet." That matters because the ground a hill costs you depends entirely on how steeply the ball is coming down: a lob wedge dropping at 52° barely notices an 18-foot rise, while a 6-iron arriving at 38° loses nearly twice as much.

Type the elevation once, per target, and every proximity number below re-scores. Golfers who do this on an uphill range bay routinely find they were several yards shorter than the app had been telling them — which is exactly the correction that stops you under-clubbing on the course.

Turning it into bag distances

If the shots you hit at a target really were full swings, they're perfectly good carry data and there's no reason to throw them away. Target Lab will promote them into your bag — with two guards worth knowing about:

• Mishits are checked first. Thin and fat strikes are identified against that club's own median in that session and left out by default. Two bladed wedges can drag a genuine 74-yard club down to 70, and hand-deleting shots is not a workflow anybody sticks to. Off-centre strikes stay in, deliberately — missing the middle is normal golf, and excluding those would quietly inflate every number in your bag.
• Two clubs at one flag become two clubs. If you hit an 8-iron and a 7-iron at the same target, promoting all of them under one label would invent a carry that belongs to neither. ShotIQ splits them.

Note that elevation is not applied to bag carries, on purpose. Flat carry to the launch plane is the correct number for your bag; the hill only ever changed what the target demanded.

A session worth running this week

Four targets, twelve balls each, about twenty-five minutes:

Hit them in blocks, one target at a time, and don't clean up the data afterwards. The mishits are information. A session where you quietly ignore the four bad ones tells you nothing about the golfer who will show up on Saturday.

Then read it in this order: median leave by distance first (which distance is worst?), then the proximity map for that distance (short, long, or sideways?), then one practice priority. One. A range session with four priorities is a range session with none.

What good looks like

Rough guides from amateur data, not tour numbers — use them to know whether a distance needs work, not to feel bad:

Notice that leave grows with distance — that's normal and expected. What isn't normal is a distance that breaks the pattern. If your 70-yard leave is worse than your 95, you've found something real, and it's almost always a swing you don't have a length for.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a launch monitor with a target mode? No. Target mode makes it automatic, but you can hit at any flag or marker with any monitor, then set the session type to "Target practice" on upload and enter the distance yourself.

Why is my median leave worse than my carry standard deviation suggested? Because they measure different things. Standard deviation describes the spread of your carries around their own average. Median leave describes the distance from the hole. A tight group centred five yards short has excellent standard deviation and a poor leave — and only the second one costs you strokes.

Does target practice change my bag distances? Not unless you say so. Target sessions are routed away from bag carries by default, because a shot hit at a number inside your full swing isn't a stock carry. If they genuinely were full swings, you can promote them — ShotIQ filters the mishits and splits multiple clubs first.

How many shots per target do I need? Six is the minimum for the strike-quality checks to have a reliable median to compare against. Ten to twelve gives you a pattern you can trust.

Should I enter elevation for an indoor sim? No — an indoor sim's target is at the same height as the ball, so leave it at zero. Elevation is for outdoor bays and real greens that sit above or below where you're standing.

What if my monitor doesn't record side/offline data? Target Lab still works — proximity falls back to the long/short component alone, and the app tells you that's what it's doing. You lose the left/right read on the map, not the distance-control read.