Why You Need This: Discover "Iron Basics for Straighter Golf Shots"

If you want to hit consistently straight iron shots, you only need to do 2 things...

...make consistent, ball first contact...

...and come through impact with a square face.

I get that it's easier said than done...

...but once you understand this trick with your hips...

...you'll be making consistent ground contact in no time.

I'll also introduce you to a drill that will allow you to feel the momentum of your club's face...

...so you'll be able to square it up every time for pinpoint accuracy (don't miss this drill!).

Before you know it, you'll be hitting consistently straight irons every time out!

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 10:59

Video Transcription:

Clay Ballard: Everybody wants to hit their irons straight, and I don’t blame you. It’s very frustrating when your irons are going left and right of the green.

There’s two parts to this, really. Number one is getting your ground contact correct. It doesn’t do me any good to hit it straight if I’m chunking them and thinning them.

That comes from momentum of your hips. I’m going to talk about how you should use the momentum of your hips. You can almost imagine there’s a grandfather clock kind of hanging from your belt buckle here.

I’m going to use the momentum of that swinging back and through to time out my low point. Once I get this rhythm, it gets really easy to hit the ground a consistent spot over and over.

Number two, I’m going to talk about how to get the momentum of this face to release so that you can square it up.

Let’s jump right in to the ground contact piece. Like I said, most people, if they have consistent ground contact, are using the momentum of their hips and their body to make that happen. Let me give you a great example of this.

I can just take with one hand, my left hand only, and I can swing and use the momentum of my body, and I could consistently hit the ground in the same spot.

So I’m exaggerating hitting down a little bit more than I probably would with a normal iron shot, but you can see four, five, six swings in a row, I’m hitting the ground. They all started right there, the divot was in front every single time.

It’s really not very difficult, once you get down that proper momentum. Let’s get into it here. I want you to imagine that you have a grandfather clock, a pendulum, hanging from your belt buckle.

We’re going to start this pendulum swinging to the right and then to the left through the shot to get all the momentum moving down and through, making that ground contact in front, and your entire body’s momentum working down the fairway.

Now, what I see players that struggle with ground contact, when I see players that struggle with that, they’re usually not using the body momentum correctly.

A lot of times I’ll see players, again imagine you this grandfather clock pendulum, this big pendulum, 5, 10, 15-pound pendulum hanging from your belt buckle.

A lot of players will try to stay left in the backswing, not really get a shift to the right at all, and then they’ll fall back to the right. So there’s no real momentum of this moving through the shot.

The best players, what they do, is they start with a very shift to the right. As my hands get to here, that’s as far to the right as my weight is going to shift. So it’s very early.

Some players may even start with about 60 percent of their weight on their right foot, that makes things easier.

So imagine as soon as you start your swing, you’re going to get those hips and the momentum of the hips going to the right very early. It’s not going to happen late, by the time I’m here, it’s completely to the right, it’s as far to the right as it’s going to go.

Then from there, I’m going to begin my weight shift to the left to start that clock, kind of that pendulum moving back to the left then I’m going to make my downswing.

As I make my downswing and hit through the ball, all of the momentum of this pendulum or my hips should be moving through the ball down toward the target like this pendulum’s getting slung out toward the target.

So it’s that early shift to the right, then I begin my shift to the left to make all the momentum start moving to the left. Then everything’s swings through together and flies out toward the target.

Here’s another way to feel that if you can’t quite visualize the pendulum right away. Imagine my hips, you’re just looking at my hips, my belt here.

In the backswing, I’m going to start my belt buckle and my momentum moving to the right very early.

From there, I’m actually going to have a little swing down as that pendulum would be swinging down and back to the left, I’m actually going to squat down with my legs a little bit, let my knees bend slightly. That’s all really good.

Then I’m going to post up to my front leg. You’ll notice when I finish here, I have all that momentum moving through the shot.

My belt buckle is now facing the target. That pendulum would be thrown out toward the target from my hips, and my right foot is off the ground.

If you finish and you’re here, and your right foot is still on the ground, you’ll know that you’re going to have trouble with this.

What that’s telling me is, is that you’re not getting that momentum through the golf ball, you’re cutting the momentum off and kind of falling back, and your body and your arms are going to be working against each other.

It’s going to be really difficult to create that consistent ground contact.

So now that we have this idea, let’s grab a club here and I want you just to visualize that momentum to the right, and then everything’s being, the momentum’s being slung from your hips down to the left.

If I had that tied to my belt buckle, there’s an early shift to the right and then as I let that momentum swing on through, it’s almost like if this was that pendulum, it’s going to be thrown down toward the target.

I’ll talk about what those two sticks are here in one second, that’s going to be our face contact to get that nice and square.

So 10, 15 practice swings, get the feeling for that. Then from there, we’re going to let that momentum carry this ball, carry this club and our body in synchronization down toward the target line.

So I’m going to split these two orange sticks and then we’re going to talk about how to get the face squared up every single time.

All right, hit that one nice and solid. You could see the divot was coming down in front of the golf ball and again, all that momentum moving through the shot.

If I go left and then fall back right, that grandfather clock is wanting to swing away from the target as I’m trying to swing toward the target.

If I go left and try to stay left, there’s just no momentum there. So I want all the momentum from my body moving through the shot so it’s working with my hands and my arms.

Now piece number two is your club face. This is a great drill, do not skip this part, this is one of the best things you can do to get laser-like accuracy with your irons.

I like to put a little stick, I’ll do 30 or 40 yards in front, I’m just using that as a frame of reference to see where I’m hitting. Ideally, you might have another two sticks another 40-50 past that, 100 yards out.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to start out hitting some little chip shots with a middle iron towards those sticks.

What’s going to happen here, is I want to feel the momentum of this face, and I want to allow the momentum of the face to roll on over to get the ball to go more left or to draw.

I want to feel the momentum of the face staying more open or towards the sky to hit more of a fade. Most people don’t struggle with this. Most people struggle with this one.

So again, I’m going to feel like my hands are rolling over and club face is going more down to get it to draw. I’m going to feel like my hands are staying more open.

So what we’re going to do here is we’re going to start out with just some little 30 and 40 yard shots and I’m just going to be aware with my face a little open.

Let me go ahead and hit one a little bit to the right. Again, I’m going to have the momentum of my body, now I hit that shot a good 10-15 feet to the right of where I was aiming.

If I do that, then I have to get the momentum of the face squaring on up a little bit more. That face was too much this way, it needed to have the momentum rolling on that way. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

I could go into infinite detail of exactly how every piece of the body has to move to make that happen, but I find most players, is they just feel the momentum of my club, they can get all that to happen more easily.

On this one, if I hit one to the right, I’m going to feel that club rolling on over, the momentum of the club rolling on over. I’m not manipulating it to roll it on over, I’m letting it release on over and that’s going to straighten that out.

Let’s go ahead and try one again. There we go, a little chunky, and I actually overdid it a little bit and went to the left.

If I do that, I’m just going to gradually work back and forth hitting these little shots until I can hit these little 40, 50-yard shots with the middle iron and get them to go pretty straight.

Like that one, right through the middle of the sticks, at least from my reference it was through the sticks. Probably looked like that from the camera, too.

I’m just going to keep on hitting until that happens. Then I’m going to go one step farther. So if that was a 40-yard shot, I’m going to go 60 or 70 yards on this next one.

Every time I miss to the right or to the left, I’m going to simply let the momentum stay a little bit more open, or I’m going to let the momentum of the club roll a little bit more closed until I straighten it out.

I just do a ladder drill here. 40 yards, then 60, 80, 100, all the way up to your full swing with this club.

You’re going to get an awareness of this face that you never had before, and more importantly, you’re going to get the momentum of the club working squarely through the golf ball.

Another misconception there is I’m going to try to hold this straight. Well, that kills all the momentum.

Every single good player, that face is releasing, and if we put this on a tool that will measure that, usually anywhere from 1,000 degrees a second anywhere up to 2,000 degrees a second.

Everybody’s face is releasing or closing through the shot. That’s the momentum I’m talking about. I don’t want to hold it and force it straight down the target line.

Now there’s one more piece of this. You know a lot of times players can get this face to square up through the momentum, but it’s still not as solid as you’d like.

The reason for that is we don’t have enough shaft lean. We don’t have these hands leading in front of the club head at contact, and taking that loft the club.

There’s a certain way that the pros use their wrists to deloft this club and deliver it very consistently through contact. I teach you that in The Move section.

So what we talked about here today was the Power Turn, getting the turn back and through like I talk about in the Top Speed Golf System. We talked about some face awareness.

But if you really want to hit it solid, you’re going to have to get that shaft lean, get that club coming from the inside so that you can really compress it.

Even if you do the drills we did here today and you get your ground contact right, you get your face angle straight, it’s not going to be quite as solid as it could be until we get that shaft lean and we start using the wrist in the way that the pros do it.

So shallowing that club out from the inside and really compressing the golf ball through contact. That’s what I want you to do next.

Head on over to The Move section, go to the Instruction tab, Top Speed Golf System, then The Move section. Start working through those videos and you’re going to hit it more and more solid with each one.

There’s only a handful of videos in there. I think you’ll be really surprised how solid you’ll hit it by just following a few drills that I go over there.

Make sure you also do the Tennis Racket Drill. That’s a big one, so that you can square up the face properly with these wrist angles. That’s in the first few videos of The Move section, so don’t miss that one.

I can’t wait to see you over in The Move section. Work on the drills we did here today to get your ground contact and your face right, then head over to The Move so you can really start to compress it and hit it super solid.

I’ll see you there.