- 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.
