If you're hitting a lower-lofted Sterling Irons a little bit too low and you need a little bit more height, or you're just not holding greens and coming in too low, I've got a couple things that can hopefully help you with that to get that height with the lower-lofted clubs, so that you get up in the air a little bit more and can hold those greens.
So, the first thing is a technical thing. Now, typically, in the golf instructional world, we're often told to come into with some amount of shaft lean, and what that does effectively is it – let me grab this little tool us so we can see the loft – so, when you come in, if you have the club, if the shaft is straight up and down, then this is what the loft of this particular club is going to look like, but as soon as you move the shaft forward, it delofts the club here, so that's going to help hit the ball a little farther and it's going to have less spin on it as well when you're coming through like that. Now, that's okay for tour players in particular because they have really high club head speeds and they often need to bring the ball down; they have the opposite issue that we're talking about here of hitting too high, so when you see pro analyses, analysis – whatever the word is there – for pros, typically, you'll see that with shaft lean and the thinking is like, oh, the good players are doing that, and then everyone should be doing that, but when you get down to amateurs or people with lower clubhead speeds, then that's fine with, say the higher lofted clubs; your wedges, a nine, maybe an eight because there's still enough loft to that club that even if you deloft it a little bit, it may make those irons go farther, but there's still enough height that you can get away with that, but when you get to the lower lofted clubs, say a five-iron or a four-iron, or something like that and you're leaning it forward, then the trajectory comes down too much for a slower clubhead speed like that. So, I think what I would say here from a technical standpoint is to watch the amount of shaft lean that you have. If you're a slower clubhead speed player, I don't even mind having a player come through a little bit more vertically like this or just slightly forward but not excessively forward, that's going to help with just height in general on all shots. Some instructors might kind of talk about that flipping or scooping, or some kind taboo term like that, but from a functional standpoint, from a lower clubhead speed, if you're going to be playing irons and your clubhead speed isn't that fast, then you probably don't want to have that too much shaft lean. Either that – I mean, or if you do want to have the shaft lean, then you'll probably need to switch to a different type of clubhead. Hybrids help get the ball up a little bit higher than irons, and then fairway woods get them up even higher, then of course, you're moving [0:03:51] that gets up even higher. The clubheads get bigger and you can move the center of gravity back lower, so that's an alternative. If you want to stay using your irons though, just watch the amount of shaft lean that you have because it can work, again, for the higher lofted clubs but not so much for the lower lofted clubs. That's the first thing I would say.
Then, the second thing on a related note, I was talking about clubhead speed be a factor here. Well, clubhead speed isn't a factor here. Tour players have the speed to get lower lofted clubs and have shaft lean, and still get those of lower lofted clubs up in the air, but what if you don't have that speed? So, the thing to do there is to address the speed issue, and you can do that – I'll put my club down here – if they can do that with some swing speed training, so go over to swingman golf and we've got some swing speed training programs over there. That's one of the other websites, other of my websites, I guess. So, you can do some swing speed training programs, we got those outlined there, but just as a basic level, if you want something to help you out without buying anything, I guess, there's two main components to increasing your clubhead speed. The first is just practicing swinging fast. If you want to get better at anything, whatever skill it is, it makes logical sense that you just practice that and work on it, and the same actually applies to clubhead speed, so if you want to increase your clubhead speed, but just take a little time to practice it. It doesn't have to be that much, it helps to get a sports sensor swing speed radar, those cost about $120, that way you can get some feedback as to how fast your swinging. We have those available on the swingman golf website, and that you don't even have to do this at the driving range. Generally, I recommend hitting balls while you're doing this, so you get used to the feeling and get comfortable swinging faster with your driver with hitting balls, but the important thing is just practice swinging fast, so those can be with some straightening aids or speed wound, swing fans, superspeed clubs, anything that you can swing that you can measure the speed of, or just practice swinging fast, and do maybe 30 reps twice a week and don't do the reps all in a marathon right in a row, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Put sometime between it, mimic like how you're going to be doing it on the golf swing or on the golf course. On the golf course, you make one swing, you are way in a couple minutes before you hit again, you make another swing, so you don't have to put that much gap between it, but maybe just like you are casually hitting balls at the range. Make a swing, check your finish, make sure you are getting good balance, give it a good grip, and then maybe check your speed, wait a second, set up, then do it again, and you can do five, maybe a set of five of those, is just do six sets of those. So, that's the first part, is practicing singing fast.
And, the second part is he crazy the strength of your golf swing muscles. As you move from amateur clubhead speed to professional clubhead speed, the long drive clubhead speed, there is a strange correlation there, and long drive guys tend to be really, really strong. Not necessarily big, but really strong. So, strength is a factor in power, and the most important muscles you want to improve the strength of are the ones you are using in the downswing because everyone strives to zero up at the top of the back swing, and it gets down to whatever they are on impact. So, what you can do is get some resistance bands, and we have those over at swingman golf as well. I like those because they have the carabiner clips, so you can add on more resistance if you want to take off more resistance if you want or take off more resistance. They are numbered so you can try to progress. They are lightweight, they don't take up much space, and these particular ones have like a rope inside, and so you can stretch it that at some point, it's not going to stretch anymore so it's nice from a safety standpoint –the bands aren't going to snap in that regard, so get some of those bands that you can do some band downswing, band isometrics, so you want to hold as much resistance as you can at the top of the back swing for 8 to 10 seconds, and then anchor the weight up here and pull it down halfway, and then anchor it lower end to pull at the impact, and all that for 8 to 10 seconds, so you need to hands of the top halfway down, and that impact, and then you do right hand only, left hand only, right hand only, left hand only, right hand only, left hand only and you will find that that works different parts of your body with the trail side. You might feel a bit more at the chest here with the leading side, you might feel it a little bit more in the back and your shoulder here, and then maybe the two hand ones, you'll feel a little bit more in your core, so add a set of those in with the practicing swinging fast, and the great thing about that kind of thing is you don't need to have some fancy gym or $3000 equipment or whatever, $20,000 equipment. It's something that does not cost a lot, you can do it in your home or in your office, or whatever, and that will do those couple of times a week, moving up the resistance when you can, using the radar to put yourself to try and go faster, so the idea here is you have a max speed and a playing speed, so over the course of the month, you want to raise your max speed so that your playing speed goes up proportionally, or feel like you are saying the same amount relative to your backs, but because you've raised your max, you've raised your playing speed as well. So, those are the two things that I would offer you from a swing speed training standpoint to help address hitting your lower lofted irons too low.
So, that's, I think, all I want to say about that for right now, for this particular video. Again, from a technical standpoint, watching the amount of shaft leave that you have. It can help with the higher lofted clubs, but it can hurt the lower lofted clubs, so you may want to arrive at impact a little bit closer to shaft vertical even though that's a little bit taboo. It will help raise your shot height which is what you want to do, and then all so, work on your clubhead speed because the more clubhead speed you have, the higher the shots are going to go, so those two things will really be able to help you a lot if you are hitting your irons, your lower lofted irons or the sterling irons too low.
Glad you love them! Hope you enjoyed your round Tony Dadika!
If you have been on the golf course and face the situation where you've got a plugged bunker lie and you either didn't play it too well or you just struggled with those shots. In general, you don't really know what to do, I've got five things here for you that can hopefully help you play those a little bit better.
So, the first thing is just making sure you have a basic understanding of the components of the wedge and what they do because understanding this can be important for being able to effectively play the shot. So, the first part here that I want to point out is when you come down the clubface on the wedge here around to the bottom, this pointy part is called the leading edge, and then the part underneath there is called the bounce, this little curvy part here, and those two things are really important with bunker play and just short gameplay in general, understanding those, because of this leading edge here part, if the club comes down to the ground and particularly if the shaft is leaned forward or just the club is pretty square, you are like best, the leading edge can grab and the dig into the ground whereas if you say un-may be a normal bunker situation where you open the club face here and expose this bounce so when the club comes down, you got a little protection here and the design of this is going to help keep the club from going down in the ground. So, with this particular situation, we have the balls sitting down in the sand, so we need to go down and down into the ground and get it, so for something like this, you will want to be using the leading edge a little bit more, and if I get into that, actually, let me back up, and just knowing the leading edge, bounce here, different wedges have different amounts of bounce. So, usually, the sand wedge has the most amount of bounce and that's typically because that's the situation where you will need the most amount of bounce, but for this plugged life actuation, you don't want the bounce because remember, the bounce is going to keep you from getting to the ground, whereas the leading edge will help you dig so you need something that's going to help you dig into the sand there. So, for a plugged bunker lie, you probably don't want to use your sand wedge. You can play a shot with a sand wedge but you probably don't want to. Maybe you will be better to use a lob wedge for a gap wedge, or pitching wedge, something with less bounce than the sand wedge, and that will depend I guess a little bit on how far of a bunker shot you need to hit. If you need to get it up pretty quickly and you don't have a lot of room to work with, you probably want to use a lob wedge. If you've got a little bit of a clearance to get out of the bunker and you maybe you get a longer shot, maybe you want to use the gap wedge or pitching wedge, but basically, the point is, you probably don't want to use the sand wedge for this shot because it has the most amount of bounce and you want the least amount of bounce for this particular shot. So, that's the first part here, just understanding what the wedge does. The couple main parts here. Second part, using the wedge with the least amount of bounce.
The third thing is a little bit more about the setup. So, when you are setting up to hit the bunker shot, you probably want to have the ball – let me back up here again – unlike most bunker situations where they tell you to open the club face, with this particular one, because when you open the club face, it exposes the bounce a little bit, you want to play this one with more of a square clubface because then, that square clubface, we can take advantage of that leading edge and get the wedge to dig into the sand is there a little bit. So, that is one thing, keep the clubface square when you set up. You may want to have a little bit of shaft gleaned and began, though more the shaft leans forward, the higher propensity I guess for this leading edge to grab and dig, so having a little bit of shaft lean is okay on the situation, so you can either – I almost dropped the wedge – you can either have your hands a little bit more for word to get the shaft lean or you can maybe tilt yourself a little bed so that when you swing, you're going to basically get the same effect where you are hitting down on it with a little bit of shaft lean and it's going to use that leading edge to dig into the sand and get down in the sand, get down to the ball, and then the last thing I would say is just too, when you hit it, you want to try and hit – remember in bunker shots, you want – on normal shots around the green, usually, you want to hit the ball first, and then the ground, but in bunkers, you want to hit the sand first, and then the sand deflected, shoots the ball out, basically. So, with this particular situation, normally, with a regular bunker shot, the ally is pretty good, you can hit anywhere between one and maybe 3 inches behind it, and you're going to be okay, but this particular situation where the ball is sitting down, you probably don't want to be too far back. You are using the wedge without a lot of bounce, you maybe got a little shaft lean, maybe you are tilting a little bit to get down in there, so if you go too far back, you're just going to get too much sand and the club is just going to stall and die, and it's not going to come out, so for this one, you got to play a little bit closer, maybe an inch or two behind the ball, and then get down in the sand by again, using that leading edge with a square face, a little bit of shaft lean, maybe a little tilt and hitting down in there, and then get the club to go down in there and pop that ball out.
So, that's basically how to play that shot. Just to recap real quick, understand the different part – the two main parts of the wedge there, the leading edge and the bounce. The leading edge is going to dig, the bounce is going to skip, so for this situation, you want to dig, so you use the leading edge. So, that means you keep the face square when you set up. Pick a wedge that have the least amount of bounce, so probably not your sand wedge, have a little bit of shaft lean or maybe tilt yourself to encourage the shaft to be a little bit more forward so that that leading edge does get in and dig under there, and then lastly, just make sure that you are hitting a little bit closer than you normally would. You cannot get away with hitting too far back, so maybe you want to two inches behind the ball and that should be enough to get it out, and with having to go into the sand, you may have to give it a little bit more of a swing. It doesn't mean give it a hard tense swing, you still want to be smooth and loose and relaxed, I guess, but you may have to make a little bit bigger backswing or just give a little bit more speed, like soft, supple speed, I guess to get the club to get down in there as well. So, hopefully, those things will help you, give those things a try.