Fiberbuilt 4×7 Studio

The Fiberbuilt company is known for making some of the highest quality hitting mats in the golf mat industry. After months if research, we settled on the Fiberbuilt 4×7 studio hitting mat for our simulator here at the OTG golf shop.

This Fiberbuilt review takes a look at the research we did and why we chose this particular hitting mat for our simulator build.

I’ll be straight with you upfront though, there are some things that I don’t like about this hitting mat and that for the price they really should have fixed a flaw in the design. I’ll get into that more into that in “the good, bad and ugly” section of this review.

If you are considering a hitting mat for your simulator I hope this review will help shed some light on things to consider when investing in a quality hitting mat like the Fiberbuilt studio mat.

Fiberbuilt 101

Fiberbuilt is arguably the gold standard (or should I say ‘green standard’) when it comes to hitting mats.

They feel great to hit off of, are extremely forgiving to your joints. I’m talking joints like your elbows, shoulders and wrists. Not the rolled ones, that’s a different type of green.

These mats are durable, realistic feeling and forgiving on the body.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes Fiberbuilt a contender in any golf hitting mat decision you are making.

Review – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

This is the current hitting mat we are using in our simulator.

We had a bumpy ride with this mat. This review covers all of it, what I want to call the good, the bad and the ugly about this mat.

The Good

Fiberbuilt is easy on the body.

You can hit down and through without banging up your wrists, elbows and whatever other body parts are involved with your swing. Other brands have ancedotal evidence of eventually causing bodily pain. Golfers elbow, wrist pain and more. The solution recommended the most was to go with Fiberbuilt. This was the main reason to invest in a top of the line hitting mat like Fiberbuilt.

What steered me to the FB mat in the first place was the the large amount of social proof across the forums and message boards about how forgiving and easy on the shoulders, elbows and wrists the fiberbuilt mat is known for.

If we are going to make an investment into a golf simulator I wanted to be able to go up and play as much as I wanted to without the fear of injuring myself or doing harm to my joints.

The mat feels great to hit off of.

I’ve hit off of a lot of mats at driving ranges and a handful of indoor golf places in the area and the FB mat feels the best to me. Some of the mats at the ranges are super hard to hit into. You could not hit down and through the ball without smashing your club into the super hard turf and feeling it in your wrists and elbows for me especially. You can see a hitting strips comparison chart here to see the offers for today.

It is realistic to hit off of.

If you hit a fat shot, the ball comes off the mat as if you hit it fat on the course. If you strike it pure the ball reacts as if it was sitting on the fairway. The ball is compressed and launches realistically off of the Fiberbuilt.

It is super durable.

They have a 300,000 shot guarantee. So in all reality we are not going to wear this thing out for many, many years to come. After six months of regular use, the hitting strip area looks nearly brand new. There are no green plastic ‘clingwrap’ pieces left on your clubs like you get from some hitting mats at cheaper driving ranges.

The Bad

It does not take a real tee.

You can not use real tee’s in the hitting mat as it will not hold them firmly for you. They do have an optional built in tee made from a durable plastic that is locked into place on the mat once you install it. It’s semi-permanent meaning that it doesn’t fly off after every shot, but you can remove it by lifting up the hitting mat and taking it out from the bottom if you want to change it out our remove it.

You can also use golf simulator specific tee’s like the Birtees. My advice with those is do not get the white version, I would stick with the black or dark colors. You do not want to confuse the launch monitor as to what is the white part of the ball to focus on if the tee is white.

A small gap forms between the inside edge of the hitting zone and the stance mat. **This has been remedied with the proper connector bolts installed!

This gap is is a visual negative for the most part, although golf balls do get stuck in the crevice formed when rolling the ball back to the hitting zone. A minor annoyance but for the premium price, the mat should be 100% firmly together as advertised.

They really could have used one more gasket connection from the hitting zone strip to the stance area to keep those pieces secured tightly to one another.

The Ugly – It Shipped Missing Connector Bolts (unknown to us)

It kept coming apart on us.

The short story is that it was shipped to us missing some important parts. Specifically the bolts that lock everything together.

It would not stay together as the movement and torque of our swing would start pulling the base apart.

We would swing on it a handful of times and the entire thing started coming apart and we would have to kick it back together.

It was a major pain in the ass.

I emailed Fiberbuilt directly. A few days later one of their support engineers emailed me back and scheduled a phone call. We spoke and he quickly diagnosed the issue, shipped some missing pieces to us and the mat works as it’s supposed to.

The longer version of the story is that we did not email Fiberbuilt right away and thought we had done something wrong. In addition to having missing parts, we were missing the installation instructions and parts list. We didn’t think much about it because it was super simple to put together. It was advertised as ‘tool less’ installation and it felt like we had done everything right.

We put everything together and measured and placed the mat to have the hitting zone dead center of our room, which was also dead center of the 16′ wide screen we used. Got everything ‘perfect’ and started testing it out, hitting on it.

After a few holes, it started to come apart noticeably. We had friends over to play on ‘opening night’ and the mat had to be kicked back together on the regular. It was a frustrating first impression of the Fiberbuilt 4×7 studio hitting mat.

We double and triple checked the boxes and our unboxing photo’s to see if we had left something out or had forgotten to use some pieces or parts. No instructions but no extra parts either.

We were wondering if we had set something up wrong and the bottom of the mat wouldn’t grip the low pile carpet below. So we started researching the issue and were speculating that maybe we needed to revise the way the mat was sitting. It sites on top of a low pile rug which sits on top of a concrete floor.

How this mat is constructed consists of a base which is a thick rubber. It consist of squares that are attached to one another via a thick rubber gasket. One section connects to the others and then to the hitting zone. On top of these rubber squares are where the grass stance mats and the hitting strip section are placed.

As a temporary fix we bought heavy duty zip ties and zip tied the rubber squares together. This kind of worked, but the mat still kept coming apart.

Every 4-5 holes we would have to ‘kick the mat back together’ because the stance area was pulling apart from the hitting zone and from one another.

Frustrated, I emailed Fiberbuilt directly. Which I should have done straight away.

Customer Support To The Rescue – Sends Missing Parts

About 48 hours after I emailed them one of their support team engineers reached out to me and scheduled a phone call. He quickly diagnosed the problem, which was we were missing the bolts which you hammer into the gaskets to lock everything together.

A day after talking to them on the phone the mail arrived with a pack of hard rubber bolts that go in from the bottom rubber mat into the gasket and lock them together.

They sent the overnight at their expense which was awesome.

They also emailed me the PDF of the assembly instructions that should have been included in the order from the get go. As a nice bonus they gave me a couple of rubber tee’s as a ‘sorry about that’ and thank you for your business. And for the record I bought the mat from one of the retailers, not Fiberbuilt directly so the issue is likely the retailers. Still, Fiberbuilt fixed the problem for me.

The customer support was top notch. They first emailed me back about 48 hours after my email in to them. And most importantly they fixed the problem.

The bolts were easy to hammer in place and they have secured the mat together much much better.

I do not give it a perfect rating there as I still have one complaint.

Product Details

The Feels

How does the mat feel? Is it realistic? Is it forgiving? Let’s take a look. Of course these are my opinion and things feel different to all of us.

Standing Zone

Standing on the mat feels like fairway with a very slight ‘squish’ underfoot. It’s firm but soft if that makes sense. It feels very secure and good to swing from. The call it the Performance Turf Fiberbuilt grass stance mat.

It does remind me of standing in the middle of a well manicured fairway. I understand many of my golfing friends do not usually hit their second shot out of the fairway so it might feel a bit unusual to them at first.

The footing is secure and the grass feels firmly attached to the hitting base. You can swing with everything you’ve got and not have to worry about the mat sliding around underneath you.

Hitting Strip

The best way I’ve heard the hitting strip described is like a very thick brush with stiff bristles. The bristles (the grass) form a solid area to put the ball on but you can still hit down and through the ball. You’ll always have a great lie.

Some people say that fat shots are not punished enough but I am not one of them. If you hit behind the ball on this mat the shot is absolutely going to go shorter than a clean hit. It recreates the feeling of real golf to me. It’s not 100% the same but it is very, very close.

Built in Tee Holes

This is optional as you have your choice with hitting strips, but I chose to go this route with the permanent rubber tee’s they also sell. The hitting strip in this mat does not take a normal tee. We have used a few short tee’s with it but opt to use the adjustable tee’s the majority of the time.

You can use special tee’s designed for hitting mats like the Birtees or the claw tee’s but these seemed like they would slow down the overall system to me. If you have to chase down or replace your tee every time use it it is going to add a decent amount of time to your shot and it’s going to add a step to getting set up to hit again after every single shot that uses a tee.

I went with the built in tee’s that stay in place. They do not interfere with the GC2 at all. If you are using a Skytrak then this might be a bit of a closer concern to address.

I was on the fence at first out having a permanent tee. After thinking about it, it is more user friendly to have an adjustable tee that is always there. No more chasing your tee after every shot if you are practicing driver on the the range. The tee’s themselves do wear out over time. Our first one lasted about 2 months and we are still on our second one about 2.5 months later at this time.

If you would prefer to not use the rubber permanent tee’s then you can get this hitting strip without tee holes and then use something like a Birtees tee or another indoor golf tee option.

Hitting Zone

This is more of an effect of our launch monitor, the GC2. But there is a total hitting zone roughly four balls wide and five balls deep.

From the built in tee you can go about one ball ahead of the tee and about three balls to the left of the tee, closer to the golfer. You can then go back even with the tee and then another three balls behind it. It is a pretty wide hitting zone roughly 4×5. Four inches wide and five inches deep.

Hitting On The Mat – Complaints From The Web

There are a small amount of complaints that the Fiberbuilt mat does not penalize fat shots enough. This does not seem to be the case for me, but your mileage may vary. If I hit it fat, the ball goes considerably shorter distances.

Almost all agree that hitting down and through the ball feels good on the the FB mat. You can hit down and through the ball and unless you go way way down you will swing freely without bottoming out and hurting yourself. This ease of hitting down is why some say you don’t get penalized enough.

When I hit it fat, the shot reads fat to me so again your experience may be different.

You can chip, putt, hit wedges and whatever you want just fine off of it.

Putting On The Fiberbuilt 4×7

You can putt on the Fiberbuilt no problem, but I think that putting is the hardest thing to re-create with realistic accuracy using a golf simulator.

Putting off of the mat is not like putting on the green (most of them for sure). I think the putting is just fine when you are considering you are playing simulator golf.

My mat sits on top of my turf so the ball just rolls off the end of the mat towards the screen, down a little ramp.

The launch monitor picks up the putt just fine and calculates how far it goes.

I have heard complaints from some of the more finicky simulator enthusiasts that the putting isn’t great. I agree but it’s one of the things I expected in the first place.

The main thing is that the hitting strip doesn’t become lumpy from being hit too soon so there is a flat putting area. This has mostly been ok with over 3 years of use now.

Competitors to Fiberbuilt and Why We Chose FB

There are a handful of hitting mat competitors out there. Some of which are substantially lower priced and also highly regarded. Let’s take a look at some of the competition.

• Carls HotShot Mats (I would strongly look at these were I buying a mat today. Less expensive and quality.
• Country Club Elite Hitting Mat
• Trustrike
• Divot Action
• Quattro Mat from Eagle One (found on this forum thread)

The bottom line as to why we chose fiberbuilt is because injury prevention and longevity were the primary importance. These two things were by far what mattered to me when choosing a mat. I did not want to hurt myself or cause long term damage to my body to play on my simulator. I was willing to make the investment into the FB mat for these reasons.

Learn More

• Official Fiberbuilt Website
• Buy Fiberbuilt from an authorized online dealer
• Research in the flooring and turf section of the golf sim forums
• See more golf mat content