HITTING YOUR IRONS THIN

Although there are many reasons we can catch our iron shots thin, the two most common ones are arguably ...

Loss of posture, or standing up through the shot.

Swinging on too flat a plane. Either of those will make it hard for you to get the centre of the clubface down to the ball. Let’s look at a drill and an exercise that can improve both these issues ...

Heel down, handle up

Hit balls with your heel on the clubhead – just some gentle pitch shots will do at first. Don’t worry too much about where the ball goes: your sole focus is to keep that trail heel down – and the clubshaft and handle up – right through to impact.

Perfect posture

An intention to keep some pressure down on that trail heel through the strike has a really positive effect on your posture. It helps you avoid the common and very damaging ‘hip launch’ move, where your hips thrust out towards the ball and cause your upper body to straighten up. Practise this move to see how ‘heel down’ helps you keep your chest facing downwards through the strike … and enables you to get the club’s sweetspot behind the ball.

POSTURE LOSS DRILL HEEL STRIKE Standing order

Pull a wedge and place it face-up on the ground. Take your stance with your trail heel treading down on the clubface. This will cause the shaft and handle to rise up off the ground.

Foot fault

When golfers straighten up and lose their posture during the downswing, that rising head and upper body invariably pulls the trail heel up off the ground. With this drill, you’ll instantly know if you have this problem because the wedge under the heel will fall to the ground.

PLANE EXERCISE TRAIN STEEPER SHOULDERS

In its simplest form, the golf swing is a circle on an angle. The angle is basically the plane of the swing. If that angle is too shallow or horizontal, you’ll always struggle to get the club down to the bottom of the ball. Probably the clearest marker of a swing plane that is too flat is a lack of tilt in the shoulders’ rotation. This is something you can attack directly ...

Handle/shoulder to ball

Take your iron and pin it against your shoulders. Form your regular address position. Now make your backswing, rotating through your core. Your mission here is to get the shaft of the club angling down to point at the ball. In practice you will probably not quite manage it; the shaft’s angle will point slightly outside the ball. But the intention is a great way to feel and train the shoulder tilt you need to swing the club on an effective plane.

Throughswing repeat

Now repeat the move for the throughswing. Turn through until your chest faces the target, but keep the same intention to have the shaft point down and through the ball as you rotate. For golfers who have become a bit flat in their upper-body rotation, this will feel like hard work and take a little work. But persevere and you will be rewarded by a better plane, fewer thins and more consistent ball-striking.