(club whacks) – Hello, Adam Bazagette,
founder of Scratch Golf Academy, here at the beautiful Club at Mediterra. Today's subject, three golf
swing drills for irons, and I'll show you three drills I think can really help you build a great impact. They're very impact oriented drills, and we'll take you through those. We'll look at a pro at
one point in the video.
I think it's gonna be
helpful for you, hopefully. (intense music) Well, if you're new to the channel or perhaps you've watched
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really appreciate it if you did. It helps us build some momentum. So hit that red subscribe button and also the bell next to it. If you hit that, you'll
be notified every time a new video is coming your way. If you have any comments, or questions, or anything, please leave them down there and I'll have a look at those as well. So have a look. That black spot on the face
represents the sweet spot. This is a nine iron.
Any time you have loft like that, you have to tilt the
club to get solid contact and compress the ball. A zero lofted club, you
would have to do that. Obviously we don't play
with zero lofted clubs. So that is crucial if you're
gonna hit solid shots, that you have a good
mental picture of that. So our first drill is gonna
be with the lead hand, left hand of course for
the right-handed golfer, and we're gonna have you choke
down midway down on the grip, make that club feel a little bit lighter, and it's really a coordination drill. Can you tilt the sweet spot? Do it statically. Statically in the world of
golf just means without motion, static loft, dynamic loft. Do it statically, practice it,
then hit some little shots. This'll be a test for most people. It takes a few minutes to
develop some sort of feel, just tiny ones. That could really feel like
de-loft at the back of my hand.
I was able to kinda clip the ball with the sweet spot pointed down. Let me try that once again. Hang in there with this. You get good at this, you
will be helping yourself. Let's see how we do. Yep, hit a hair behind it, but did, I think, a good job tilting it down. Now, one other feature
here that's very important, picture a hammer, let's say.
When you a hammer a nail, you don't just move the hammer like that. There's a purposeful pop to the thing. That's what we're trying to create here. So as you come in and do this drill, you'll notice, I'll hit one more, there's very much a
little snap down there. It's not just dragging the
left arm and club through. So, here we go. Get my feel. Right like that, and you should
have a short, firm finish. Okay, let's check out our next drill. Well, if you're going to
be a good iron player, not only have you gotta
tilt the sweet spot, you've gotta have that shaft
under reasonably good control.
It's got to be fairly
stable there at the bottom. If that thing's flipping
all over the place and unstable at the moment of contact or your arms are all out of sorts there, you are not going to apply
consistent pressure to the ball. You're not gonna have
good contact, really, but you're not gonna have
consistent distance control. So our next drill hits some little shots. Again, nine iron's my
choice, something like that.
And the idea, probably
something like a 2/3 to half a backswing, something like that. The idea is that you get down at impact. You're gonna hit it fairly hard but have a really short finish. Picture as though maybe there's a tree limb hanging over you. Bang, hit, and hold it. In order to do that, you've
gotta have your ducks in a row. You've gotta have your core
working, your arms stable, and you'll start to
get a really good feel. So let me try one here. I'm just getting back in about there. Right like that. Now, you'll have to practice it a bit, if you haven't done this,
to get that sorta result where you can hit it hard
and put the breaks on, but when you do, you will have
really really good stability.
Now, listen, if you've
gotten the sweet spot tilted and you're smashing down in there leaning the shaft a little bit and your arms and club are
nice and stable as you hit it, you might find that you
start to dig a little deeply and thump the club into the ground. So let's have a look at a pro, and then our third drill will kinda deal with how to level that out a little bit. So here's Rory McIlroy
hitting a little wedge on the left picture,
just ripping some kind of a short iron on the right hand picture. Let's have a look. I've put yellow dots there.
That's about where the handle
of that club would be there, maybe there, and I'm estimating where the top of his glove is, but you can see, you can just see the
handle there as it went by. Look at the upward arc of
that handle as he hits it, and again, if he had that much lag and the handle didn't go up, he would literally smash
the ball in the ground. Now, you don't see his arms pulling in, you don't see his head going way up. So what you do see, look at his belt line on this picture on the right. What you do see is a thrust of the hips that cause the tailbone
to rise a little bit. Watch this left shoulder over here on the topside of the screen. There, watch that rise as he goes through. It's rotating on this axis. Those are the things,
that thrust of the hips, the rise of the left shoulder
and, consequently, left hand, that are going to cause
that club handle to rise.
Watch this white scoreboard right here, and look how the handle
of the golf club works as he's going through right from the lake up into the scoreboard there. You do this kind of a move, you have a magic combination
for some great iron play. Now, I have a free three
part detailed course on solid strike, solid strike formula. Just go down into the
description box of this video and you can pick your copy
up while they're there. Okay, let's try it.
I've got my nine iron. Could be whatever, six,
seven, eight, nine iron, probably something on the
shorter side's better. Can I tilt the face down? Can I really put some pressure
on the ground but not dig in? This broom's a great image, by the way. Even if you don't have
one, pretend you have one. I've sawed this off a little bit so it's about the length
of a fairway wood, but you could brush the
carpet or brush the ground. In other words, you
could tilt the bristles without smashing the
entire broom in there.
So if I had to flick, you can see how the handle rises a little bit. Again, I'm not trying to lift
up, I'm not trying to scoop. I'm just feeling that as I
thrust my hips underneath me, my left shoulder, my
hands rise just enough to kinda give me the clearance I need. Let's try a couple of small ones here. I really liked that one. That was a nice clip of the turf, but I felt I was able to brush the turf. Took a little divot there,
but still be really stable. Like anything else,
listen, this is a skill. You have to practice
this, and play with this, and vary these things to
get the right mixture, but if you're bad in your mixture or if you're one of the
more typical golfers that slamming way too
much down at the ground then bailing out on it
by scooping the club, you're never, never gonna
be a consistent iron player. You're not gonna hit the ball solidly, you're not gonna have
consistent trajectory, control.
You can do this stuff,
you've just gotta camp out with the drills a little bit. Let's try again. Mid-scale. Yep, pretty good feel there,
even a slightly bigger divot, but at no point did I feel like the club was gonna really pound into the ground. Play around with these ideas. Go back to drill number
one, coordinate yourself, and if you work through them enough, you will benefit with your iron game.
Well, I hope that helps you with three golf swing
drills for your irons there. Please hit the thumbs up button
if you did like the video, if you found it helpful. Again, it's helpful for
us here at the channel. Love to bring you free content. Hopefully this one's gonna make a difference in your iron game. (funky music).