- Hi, Adam Bazalgette here in Naples, Florida
at the beautiful club at Mediterra.
I'm two time PGA Teacher of the Year Award winner
and founder of Scratch Golf Academy.
Today's subject's a really important one,
how to strike irons pure.
(upbeat music)
So how to strike irons pure, obviously,
something we all wanna do.
And will show you some of the things
that you may have heard before,
but I'll show you a real hidden element in this process,
something the people don't put enough emphasis on.
And I'll show you some drills as to how to do it
and I believe these are really gonna help you.
If you like the video, please subscribe to the channel,
we have a lot of free content, more coming your way,
we hope and, of course, scratchgolfacademy.com
is my home website, have full courses in each aspect
of the game, and in the full swing course,
there's a whole segment on iron play.
Let's get started.
So how to strike your irons pure?
Well, let's for the sake of this video,
assume that heel to toe contact is not in play here,
which, of course, it is very important.
We're gonna talk about how high you hit it on the face
and how to hit the ball before the turf.
Specifically, you gotta do three things
to hit your irons pure.
Number one, you've gotta hit the ball before the ground.
Number two, you've gotta take the sweet spot
and tilt it up onto the ball.
And if you do those things properly,
you'll achieve a very important third thing,
which is you'll get more power,
better ball flight on the shot.
We're gonna show you that in just a moment here
and give you some really good drills,
I hope, to help you do that.
Now let me just say, hey listen, this is not in a vacuum.
If you come down on a very poor plane
or with a poor club face angle,
your body is naturally gonna have to battle that
and fight that and have to correct for that,
similar to getting a baseball pitch
way too close to you or something.
You only can really do these things if you're
in a reasonably good position as you approach the golf ball.
We're not gonna deal with that in this video of course,
we're gonna look at these specifics of solid contact.
Now it may surprise you to know that the best players
in the world, as an average, and this is a documented fact,
hit their shots with two clubs less loft
than they were at address.
So that means an eight iron, which is what I'm holding,
at impact for the average grade player has a six iron loft.
That's one of the reasons they hit the ball so far
and it helps you do the other thing.
So let me just show you a couple of close ups here
that'll give ya, briefly,
a sense of how the club is designed to do that
and why that's important.
I think it'll give you clarity and then we'll come back out
and we'll look at some drills to get you doing it.
So here's my eight iron.
I've got a wooden clip board right here to show you this.
If I have the shaft the vertical,
the leading edge of the club,
the bottom edge of the club face
sits noticeably up off the ground.
And that is because there's what they call
bounce underneath it, the back of the club
sits lower than the front edge.
So what's designed to happen is at impact,
when your club is forward,
now the bottom of the club sits more flat
and the leading edge of that club faces is pretty much
if not on the ground, very, very close to the ground,
and that's how the club is built to interact with the turf,
not the way it is at address.
So two more key features.
My eight iron there, practice with it a bit,
has a little bit of a wear spot.
It's kinda convenient to show you about
where the sweet spot, it's not right there,
it's up about here.
Shaft lean at impact tilts
the sweet spot onto the golf ball, so important.
You don't wanna catch the ball down here off
the bottom of the club.
And secondly, when you hit the ball with shaft lean,
you're obviously hitting it with less loft,
as we discussed, and that produces more of a compression
of the ball.
The more loft you hit it with,
the nearer the bottom of the ball you hit,
the shorter and higher it will go.
That's why drivers go so far,
they hit the ball pretty near the equator.
That's where you can apply pressure.
So you wanna take that iron, tilt the sweet spot,
and apply some pressure to the golf ball at impact.
So hope that helps you a little bit.
Now you've probably seen stuff like that before,
maybe that clarifies a couple of things.
I've got some videos out there
on YouTube about how to lag the club,
how to shift your weight, all those things.
It's really not that difficult to do,
but a hidden component or certainly let's say,
an undervalued component or under emphasized component,
let's say, is the roll of this lead hand.
Now you could potentially feel something
with your back hand, too,
but we're gonna look at the lead hand.
And if you do this properly,
even if you don't have a great lag,
you can still achieve the desired results
at impact pretty darn well.
And that is to say the position
the left hand starts here
and it should be very different to the look of it at impact.
Now, I love these little face magnets.
You likely don't have one at home.
You can get these at most big golf stores.
I go to golftrainingaids.com.
They're very inexpensive, I would advise you get one.
They just stick on the club there.
Certainly, they show you direction,
but in this case, you can start to get the feeling
for what it would feel like, not just to have shaft lean,
but how to have less loft.
That's more loft, that's less loft.
And the most important thing is
it's easy to do and you get immediate responsive feedback.
And what you'll find is that the way you use this left wrist
and hand are crucial in this.
As they come in, just turn the knuckles towards the ground
and you'll see the loft peel off that club.
Couldn't be any simpler.
I would encourage you to get one of those.
Now let's say you wanna practice this
and you don't have one.
Open up your glove and take a golf tee
and just stick it in there
and sorta just strap your glove back in.
So it's right just above my knuckle there.
It's very easy to do, to get the tee pointed out.
And you'll get somewhat the same effect with that.
And just practice that
and point the tee more towards the ground.
Not difficult to do, it's as difficult as that.
Again, most people don't conceive of this,
so they don't really feel that in their golf swing.
And even if, again, if you don't have great lag,
you can still accomplish it if you can do this well.
So make some little swings here, point the tee down there.
I'll show you one more drill in a moment,
but let me hit a shot really emphasizing that,
just a small shot.
I can really feel how that hand turned down there.
I probably wouldn't wanna turn it down quite that much
in an ordinary shot,
but that's a great feeling to cultivate.
Now, another little drill you can do,
take a golf ball in your left hand, I'm right handed,
but I'm gonna take it in my left hand,
a little mini golf back swing,
and I'm gonna toss this ball towards the ground,
so it should bounce off the ground,
pretty much in front of me there.
And if I can do that,
I'm cultivating the correct feeling again.
I cannot tell you if you can master this
little fundamental with your left hand.
Play around with it with a magnet or a tee.
It's not at all difficult to do.
Start on a small scale.
You're gonna have so much more success with your irons.
You're not only gonna hit them more solidly,
you're gonna hit them further.
Let's try it on a little bit bigger scale here.
I could really feel I turned some loft off the club.
That was a good solid shot for me.
So hope that helps you with how to strike irons pure,
hope you can practice that, simple drills.
If you like the video, please subscribe to the channel.
Lots of free content, more coming your way, we hope.
Scratchgolfacademy.com is my home website,
hope you'll go there and check that out, full courses.
A whole course on building blocks of the full swing
and an entire course on irons contained with that.
Thanks so much.