Why You Can't Strike Long Irons & Hybrids (Common Mistake)

Get This Free Practice Plan

Transcript Summary-

When it comes to hitting your long irons and hybrids, most golfers don’t realise just how important club face direction and setup are. You might think you’re swinging the same way each time, but if your contact and ball flight are inconsistent, there’s something small but crucial that’s off in your setup. So today, I’m going to show you how to position yourself perfectly every single time, and share one simple tip that worked wonders for one of my recent students — a little adjustment with your arms that helps you strike these clubs beautifully.

Now, you might have noticed on that first shot, my club face was actually pointing a little right of target, yet the ball finished on the target with a lovely draw. Most golfers think the face needs to be dead square, but that’s not quite true. I’ll show you why that works in a moment, but first, let’s get the setup right so you can start hitting your long irons and hybrids high, long, and straight.

Here’s what I want you to do: start with the ball at least one club width inside your lead heel. Then, push a bit of weight forward — maybe 60/40 onto that lead foot — and lean the handle slightly forward. You’ll notice this creates a little wedge in your trail arm, forming the circle your club moves on. That’s key. If the handle gets too far back, you lose loft, come off that circle, and everything goes wrong — the ball goes left, you lose height, power, and direction. But when you set that wedge, weight, and handle forward, you’re in the perfect position to compress the ball properly.

From there, all you need to focus on during the swing is maintaining that circle. Keep your weight moving forward through the shot, and keep your arms fairly close together as you swing through. If the arms separate, you’ll throw the club off the circle, lose loft, and hit weak shots. So, think about just one of those two things at a time — either moving the weight forward or keeping those arms close — don’t overload your mind with too much.

Now, let’s talk about what happens through impact. You see, the club doesn’t hit the ball at the very bottom of the circle; it strikes it just before that, as it’s still moving slightly to the right of target. That’s why my club face was pointing a couple of degrees right, yet the ball finished straight. The path was about 4 degrees to the right, and the face slightly left of that — that’s what creates that beautiful little draw.

If you tend to slice, your weight’s probably staying too far back. When that happens, the handle gets thrown out, the club cuts across the ball, and you lose both distance and control. By getting your weight more forward, you keep the club moving on the right part of the circle, strike the ball cleaner, and even start seeing that nice little draw without having to think about it.

So, set up with your weight and handle forward, arms close together, and focus on staying on that circle through impact. You’ll hit your long irons and hybrids more solidly, launch them higher, and gain that distance you’ve been missing.

If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who struggles with their long irons — it’ll make a big difference to their game. And if you’d like to know how to hit your fairway woods just as well, check out the next video right here.

Full Transcript- So, when it comes to hitting your long irons and your hybrids, most people aren't aware of this. Take a look at where this club face is pointing. Where do you think this ball is going to go? Well, watch this.

Look at that little draw setts off slightly right of target, draws back. Most people don't understand how to hit the long irons and hybrids, and it's costing you distance and direction. If you're finding that they're going a similar distance to the rest of your clubs, what we're going to do is I'm going to show you how to set up to them perfectly every single time. I'm going to show you one thing that worked an absolute treat for a recent student. Just a little tip with what you need to do with both arms that will help you hit your long ends and hybrids absolutely beautifully. Before I get to video looking though, if you're new to the channel, one of your first lessons of mine, please consider subscribing. I do videos just like this one every single week to try and help you improve your game. Plus, you never have to remember a thing. Everything I do here, I'll put your free download practice guide in the description box below. So, you'll notice with that last shot I hit, my club face was actually aiming to the right of target, yet the ball finished on the target, even with a little bit of a curve right to left like a draw. How did I do that? I'm going to cover that in a second. But before we do, what I want to do is I want to show you first of all, how do you make solid contact with your hybrids and long irons? And I want to show you how that you get those balls up nice and high up in the air because that's one of the secrets that's going to give you the distance on it. And it's not what most people do. If I said to you, "What would happen to the height if we move your weight forward and your handle forward?" What would you think? Most people would probably say, "Well, that would surely send the ball lower." And this is what people are falling into. The trap that people are falling into. You see, notice this. When I move my handle forward and my weight forward, something magical happens. I want you to look at this here. I form this kind of little angle, this kind of little wedge here in my trail arm. Now, why this is important is if I take that position here and I move it back there. What do you notice? I've got it here. I'm on the circle. I'm on this beautiful circle we've created. I can bring that club back. Look and apply the maximum amount of loft on this club directly down that target line. Yeah. Compare that to this. If I was to move my handle backwards too much level like this, notice what happens now. If I take that position and I've got it here. Now, suddenly the club look is no longer on the circle. It's off the circle. It's not just off the circle. We've created a new circle now that's heading left of the golf ball. What do you notice to the loft now? That's right. We've taken all the loft look off the golf club. Now we're swinging across the golf ball. We start to do weird stuff. We either hit it miles left or get the chicken wing here to try and correct all of that. And it's a nightmare. We're losing power. We're losing accuracy. We lose height. We lose distance. You name it. All I want you to do to start with to start hitting these long irons and hybrids is this. Get the ball position maybe at least a club l at least a club width. Maybe even more inside your lead heel. There's the first thing. Push your weight maybe I'd start off push it nicely forward onto your left foot. Maybe 6040. Move your handle forward. Right. Set that little kind of wedge up here at the start of your swing. Now, by doing that, what you're really doing is is you're saying, "Look, this is the circle I'm moving on." Right? There's the circle right there. No, there's the wedge. There's my circle. Right. Fantastic. That's your setup done. The only thing then I want you to start to concentrate on is looking after that circle as you come through this shot. All right. And to do that, you just need to do two things. You need to make sure that your weight is continually moving towards your target. Not, by the way, where most people are. Most people are excessively rotating. And what happens if you excessively rotate the where's the club gone? is come over the top. We're now delofting. Notice this. Keep the weight going forward. What happens? The club stays on the circle. And then finally, just make sure your arms stay fairly close together as you're swinging through. Right? If you do that, look, we've looked after the circle. If we allow those arms to spread apart, what happens? The club then gets thrown off onto the other circle and gets look delofted in the club back into that weak position. Super simple, right? So, let's turn trap man back on and let's hit a shot first of all in that place. So, all we're doing is we get yourself set up here. We're going to have our weight favoring our lead foot here. We're going to have our handle forward and we're going to pause for a second. We're going to feel what that's like to have the arm there. Then, what we're going to do, we're going to move back just to kind of get familiar. All right, that is my setup position. I started there, right? Move back here. That's my setup. That's my setup. Perfect. I'm going to move down on that circle, moving my weight forward, keeping my arms fairly close together here. So, I'm looking after that circle, and I'm delivering the maximum loft on that golf club. So, when I'm working with my students on this, I don't want to them to think of too many things. So, we'll have only one thing to think about during the swing. pre- swing, I make sure that they've got the bulb sit in the right place, the handle forward, weight forward, and they really have these arms feeling they're fairly close together here. Right. So, with the setup, absolutely spot on. Now, all we'll do is one of those things. We'll either get them to concentrate on moving their weight more forward as they are going through. That would be one thing, moving this way. Why? Because it cancels out this motion. They've got lots of this and we want to get them more forward. So, I'm really getting them to really move laterally into their lead foot. That would be one thing. The second thing, we ignore that and we go, "Right, just keep just look at those distance of your arms here." Now, when you're coming through, make sure that you're maintaining that distance all the way through. Don't throw the club and get them spread apart because when you spread, as we've seen, that gets you coming off the circle. We're in real trouble and we've delofted the club. We can't do it. Okay? So, just focus on one of them to start with. That's all we do. Weight forward. Wh trapman gone again. Let's get cracking. So, get ourselves set up and let's go. I'm going to focus here on getting my weight forward to make sure I make solid contact.

Now, take a look at this. This will explain. Let's go into this number right here. Face angle that is my face is pointing 2.5 degrees to the right of target. Yet we finished on the target and it's actually drawn. Why? Let me explain because it's super important. So understanding this can really help your ball striking and your accuracy. So which is this is the circle we've just been talking about. Now we don't hit the ball at the bottom of the circle. We put that bottom here. Look ahead of the golf ball. Now, what do you notice? As the club's coming down, where's the club actually heading? It's actually heading to the right target. It only starts to work back around when it gets to the bottom part of the arc. Okay. Now, the problem is if for instance, we have our face completely aiming in this direction, the ball would go too straight to the right. So, on that last image, you saw that my club path was four degrees 4.4 degrees to the right. If the face matches that, it will go straight right. So what we do is is we have the face slightly left of that but look still look aiming to the right of target. What that does is it gives us a beautiful draw shot. If I had my face straight now the ball would set off too straight. Combine that with a path that's heading to the right and you're going to get a ball that's going to curve way too far right to left and finish on the left hand side. Most people, unfortunately, who are slice of the golf ball, what they do is they try to close their face by almost moving the low point back here because they're trying to close it like this. Now, the problem is the path starts to head left of target. They hit those shots to the left of target. They then open the face to try and get it back on target and they get the slice. What we want to have a look is the circle moving further and further forward. That's why we have our handle forward and our weight forward. So, we catch the ball on the way down with a slightly closed face. Hey, presto. We hit the perfect draw. So, what does all of this mean in real simple terms? Well, look, if the further you get forward, the more the club stays here in this part of the circle, and the more the club will start to head outwards to the golf ball here. This is great for people who are gonna maybe a slice because it's going to help you draw the ball, set the ball off to the right and draw it back to the left. For those of you who slice, what's happening is is your weight is generally too far back. What happens now is is the handle gets thrown, the club comes out, you're too far behind here, the circle starts to go this way, and we create poor strikes, slices, and a loss of distance. Okay? The more we get forward, the more we stay on the circle, the better strikes we get. And you know what? You get this beautiful little draw completely for free. So, get ourselves set. This is my forearm. Weight forward, handle forward. What one thing are we going to focus on? Let's keep those arms close together. Do you know what? Let's change it. Let's get the weight further and further forward through the impact area here on this one, just as a bit of a difference.

Now, interesting enough, just to finish with that one, you'll notice here I've actually overcooked it. What do you notice my face angle? It's a little bit aiming left at the moment of impact. So, what would I need to do? I got to find out what's caused that to close too much for me. I might set it a little bit more open at address. Or do you know what my bet is is I've just thrown the club a little bit here. Keeping those arms a bit closer together. looks after that face angle a lot more. But if I to get that thrown, that will get the face angle closing. It might look reasonably pretty, but it started off left the target and misses the green on left hand side. So, hope this video really, really helps you get those long irons up in the air, struck really, really well, and you start to gain that distance, which will make such a big difference for your round of golf. Hope you enjoyed it. If you know somebody who's struggling with the long irons and hybrids, please share this video. I'm sure it'll help them. And look, if you want to know how to hit fairywoods like this, check this video out right here. And if you'd like more personalized advice from myself, head on over to dannymore.com. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.