What does it mean when I here the term "a tip soft" shaft?

What is meant by a “tip soft” shaft?  A shaft can be designed with any variation in its stiffness over its whole length.  So a tip soft shaft is one that is designed to be more flexible in the tip area of the shaft.  Likewise there can be any number of variations in how stiff the tip section of a shaft is designed.  The reason this is done is to help golfers with different swing characteristics find the right shaft that matches best to how they swing.

Most typically, golfers who unhinge the wrist cock early in the downswing are better fit with tip soft shafts, while golfers who hold that wrist cock until very late in the downswing are better fit with a tip stiff or tip firm shaft.  Those who unhinge the wrist cock somewhere in between early and late then are typically better fit to shafts that are more what is called a tip medium design.

But these terms “tip soft/tip firm/tip medium” are completely generic in their description and in no way tell you HOW TIP SOFT or HOW TIP FIRM is the shaft exactly.  That’s why I purchased the Bend Profile Software so that I can see exactly how much stiffer one shaft is than another, and where on the shaft from butt to center to tip is the shaft more or less stiff.

This software demonstrates the FULL LENGTH STIFFNESS measurements of over 2,600 different shaft models and flexes so that I can empirically compare the stiffness design of one shaft to another to help me make better shaft fitting recommendations for the golfers I fit.

You can easily have two different shafts which are designed to be virtually the same exact stiffness from the butt to the center of the shaft, but then different in stiffness for their tip section.  I hope this answers your question.