Golf Tips: Your Short Irons

For most beginning and higher handicap golfers putting and the short game overall just don’t receive the amount of practice that it should.

I fully understand the need and the desire and the need to work on the full golf swing and getting off the tee in good shape.

But having said that, many golfers just don’t understand how rapidly they can shave strokes off their golf game if they would just spend some consistent time on their short game and putting.

Let’s take a look a couple of real quick putting tips and short game tips that will help you improve both of those aspects of your golf game.

With wedges and short irons, a very common problem that I see is the tendency to play the ball too far forward in the stance. When you play a sand wedge or lob wedge… or even an 8 or 9 iron for that matter; you should position the ball not so far toward the front of your stance.

When the ball is positioned too far toward the front of your stance when hitting a shorter shafted golf club, you really are increasing your odds for failure.

With the shorter shafted clubs (short irons) you will run out reach with your club and your hands will naturally begin to release; and all of this will happen before you actually make contact with the ball (not a good thing).

The result is; you’ll get a ‘flipping’ action with the club head. And depending upon other circumstances within your swing you’ll have a real good chance of hitting the shot ‘fat’ or you’ll catch the ball on the upside of your ‘flip’ and you’ll scull it.

Either way, you’ve just added a couple more strokes to your round.

Before you rush off, you should check out my tips on the footwork, the backswing, and the downswing… just to make sure we’ve got a good foundation from which to work.