How To Strike Your Irons Pure|2 Simple Drills

Hi everybody and welcome back to Alistair's Goal. I'm here today at the Forest of Arden where I'm based, bringing you a video on how to strike your irons pure. So essentially today's video is all about making better contact with an iron. Now in an ideal world we need to be hitting the iron round about this area in the club face in the centre and about two grooves to three grooves up. Now in order to do that we obviously need the club to be descending to get the best contact unless the ball is sat up on a bit of fluffy grass. I have done a video which you can check out if you like which is all about does angle of attack matter and it's an experiment testing whether hitting down on the golf ball or hitting up on the golf ball affects ball speed and distance and strike. And effectively what is showed is basically from a tight lie like this kind of tier I'm on today or a fairway you kind of have to hit down on the golf ball to get the most out of the golf club and the ballistics and the ball speed. Out of a semi-rough lie like an edge of the fairway if you like you can probably get away with being quite neutral about a zero angle attack or slightly up but essentially to strike your irons correctly and get the most out of your irons we have to be descending about three to four degrees to get the most out of them. Now what I tend to see with most golfers is if they're a single figure golfer or better they're descending anything from one to four degrees the better players are always three to five degrees or three to four degrees and then the average golfer or the golfer the struggle with contact are normally zero to one to two degrees up on the golf ball. So a lot of today's video is going to be designed around how we can get you hitting down on the golf ball consistently and creating the kind of contact point just after the golf ball if you like or the low point after the golf ball. So how are we going to do that? How are we going to achieve this correct low point and contact point? Now the most common mistake I see with golfers is in the backswing they tend to either sway or tend to move the head off the golf ball too much. Now the people who tend to sway and I'd call this sway here will then tend to stand up as they try and turn to make a backswing and then because they have the upward motion it's very difficult to time getting back to the golf ball on the same level every time you'll either see them with the arms bending and over flexing the body or you'll see them over flexing the body with the arm straight and then burying the club into the ground or you'll see them kind of hanging back and extending the arms and sometimes getting a good contact but quite often getting a thin or fat contact anyway and with all this kind of raising and trying to turn it doesn't make you rotate very well anyway so in order to rotate the best we can we're better off to stay quite wide called centered and rotate our hips and our mid spine effectively. Now tip I want you to do for this is to work very much on kind of your center points your kind of sternum and head so if I take my address position here what I want to feel is that your head in the backswing stays very centered it doesn't move too much behind the golf ball. I'm going to give you two little tips to help you notice if you do this or not. The first tip is going to be to close your left eye at address so if we take our setup and this would be a drill only and close the left eye now if I make a backswing and ideally if I keep good vision of the golf ball it means I wouldn't move my head too far to the right so if I do that again and move to the right I can't see the golf ball now when I move that far over with my left eye closed so you will notice when you lose sight of that golf ball and if you lose sight pretty quickly you know your head's moving pretty quickly so having your left eye closed will give you some feedback on whether or not your head's moving too much in the backswing. The second drill would be to place the logo of the ball on the front edge of the ball so it's kind of just over towards target side and the idea with this would be again to make sure we can see that part of the logo all the way through our backswing and if you have indeed then you wouldn't have turned again off the golf ball so much again you can make this hard or easy about how much round the ball you put the logo but again it's a nice little tip to focus on the front part of the golf ball to encourage you to stay on top of the ball in the backswing move and extend through the golf ball on the way through and feel that the club travels down and through the golf ball so essentially what I'm looking for you to do is to keep your head pretty much in the same spot in the backswing and rotate effectively through your hips and your mid-spine coil up a bit like Pete Cowan talks about the spiral staircase so wind up from the low half to the top feeling that our head doesn't move off the ball too much now you can get away with probably about one inch of movement off the golf ball with your head that's probably the most I would allow you to have ideally for this point of view the video I want it to move zero and in practice zero so the head will move zero on the way down the head stays in the same place just after contact your eyes and head will start to look at the ball and start to push up forward and it would finish further forward than the center spot but not by a lot as a rough guide it probably finished somewhere between the outer point of your left foot the center point of your stance it probably finished halfway between the two so the head would finish kind of like this so the head's going to move forward but I don't want it to move backwards at all with an iron so let's just try a shot okay so I'm going to do my left eye closed for this particular one so I take myself as I would do normally close my left eye and again you'll notice that straight away if you start to move I felt my head just move a fraction there to the right in that one so let's have another go with that one so same exercise again left eye closed take my setup as normal left eye closed that one definitely had less movement to the right so it would show that my head moves a fraction to the right in the backswing which is again you can get away with a little bit but ideally I really want to feel that that head stays quite centered and I pivot around that spot as best we can to allow me then to shift push into my golf ball the right way and create the right ballistics in my body and that the arms and the low point manage themselves in the golf swing so if you're looking to strike your irons better like me and like everyone else have a go with these two drills front of the ball and left eye closed to improve your control of contact area and low point in your golf swing with an iron if you've enjoyed the video please click like down below and please post any comments especially videos you'd like me to do in the future I'm trying to add to my collection all the time so any great ideas you have or any videos you want to cover personally to help your game please post them down below and if you haven't subscribed already please do so I've got regular content coming every single week and it's all for free and obviously if you subscribe make sure you don't miss that opportunity to watch these videos for thanks for watching