Learning to strike your irons pure and consistently is an essential skill if you want to stop wasting shots and get your handicap down. So what can you do to improve your ball striking? Watch the video below or read on to find out.
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Understanding impact
Poor contact (fat and thin shots) is generally caused by a poor angle of attack which is too shallow. This means that the ball has reached its lowest point before it hits the ball, and the player then either hits the ground first or lifts up and thins their iron shots.
To ensure solid contact with the ball, a golfer must understand that a player generally needs 80-90% of their weight on their front foot at impact, with the handle of the golf club ahead of the golf ball. This moves the low point in the swing forward ahead of the ball and means you will hit it well.
How do we get there?
Getting into a good impact position and becoming a better ball striker is pretty simple when you understand how the golf swing works. In order to get that ideal position where the weight is forward, and hands are ahead of the ball, the golfer has to swing the club into the ball from behind their hands.
If a player has a steep shaft in the downswing, they have to lean back at impact in order not to drive the club into the earth, so will never achieve this solid impact. Learning to shallow the shaft in the downswing will almost guarantee a good impact position.
Stork Drills
A great drill for this is the Stork drill. Here you address the ball and then pull your rear foot back so far that only your toe is touching the ground just for balance. Once in this position, you will hit some half shots trying to maintain balance entirely on your front foot.
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Doing this drill always shallows the plane of a golfer’s swing, keeps their weight forwards, and allows them to get their hands ahead of the ball at impact. If you do this incorrectly, you will fall off balance, so its great to know if you are doing it correctly or not.
Practice swings
it’s important for golfers who are looking to improve their contact to do plenty of practice swings, always being aware of where their weight is at impact. If the golfer finds it easier to control the low point in their swing by moving the ball back in their stance a bit and setting up with more weight on their front foot, this is fine.
Golfers have gotten to too far down the road of what is technically ‘perfect’ and need to focus more on what works best for them and what is going to allow them to shoot the lowest score when they play.
Swing your swing
If it helps you strike your irons pure every time to address the ball with all of your weight on the front foot, who is to say that is incorrect? Do the drills, work on your contact, and if you need to incorporate some of those drill swings on the golf course, then that’s brilliant!
What do you think of these tips? Let me know with a tweet.
Need more tips?
We will have new tips videos every week in association with Callaway, so make sure you’re subscribed to the Hannah Holden NCG YouTube channel to get them direct to your phone, or you can find them on the NCG website.
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This video was filmed at Close House, and we are wearing Puma apparel.
What’s In My Bag?
- Driver: TaylorMade Stealth 2 HD
- 3 Wood: Callaway Paradym fairway wood
- Irons: Takomo 301mb
- Wedges: Callaway Jaws Raw wedge
- Putter: EVNROLL EV 5.2 Putter
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