How It Works | Why a Blended Iron Set Might Be Right for Your Game

What is a blended iron set and is it right for your golf game? Luke Kerr-Dineen stopped by the Titleist Performance Institute to get the answers to these questions for his game and for yours. Watch now and learn how optimizing the fit of each club can improve performance throughout the bag.

Find a Titleist fitter near you: https://www.titleist.com/locator?searchtype=fit&standardFitting=true&radius=50

» Subscribe to Titleist: https://www.youtube.com/@titleist?sub_confirmation=1

If you’re an amateur golfer, odds are the irons in your set are all the same model. But if you’re a tall player, you’re much more likely to have two or three or sometimes even four different iron models in your bag. That’s because the best players in the world have figured out that getting each iron in your set perfectly matched to your golf swing, even if they don’t all match each other, is really the best way to play. I wanted to learn more about this burgeoning trend in iron. So, I paid a visit to one of my favorite places on the planet, the Titus Performance Institute in California, where the concept of blended sets is not just an experiment, but the new standard. All right. So, Chris, I’ve been hearing a lot about blended sets, especially on tour. Yeah. I wanted to learn more about Sure. So, you know, on tour, we see that 80% of our tour players play a blended set of irons. And so what is a blended set, right? A blended set truthfully means that they have a different model throughout their set. Yeah. And sometimes multiple different sets. For sure. Yeah. I would say three, sometimes even four. So traditionally golfers have thought, okay, I’m a low handicap, I need a players iron. Or I’m a mid- handicap, I need a game improvement iron. Or I’m a high handicap, I need a super game improvement iron. But you’re here to say that we should think about this in a new way. Not a lot of players need forgiveness in an iron, right? And so that’s the idea of like having one set throughout your bag isn’t necessarily the best way to think about it. These irons kind of give us the best ability to blend because they’re seamless, right? If you look at them here, you’ll see that they all kind of blend together where it’s, you know, these don’t look all that different. I guess the reason for blended sets, right, is to make sure your numbers with each club sort of make sense relative to each other, right? Like this is the huge part of all of it for sure. So I think the reason for blended sets is for ball flight goals, right? We want every iron in your bag to separate by 5 mph of ball speed. We want every iron to have a good descent angle, right? We want it to stop when it hits the green. And we want your dispersion to be good. Yeah. You want the apex pretty similar across the entire bag, which I never thought about before. I just kind of assumed that your wedges go higher, your long irons go lower, and you came along and said, “No, that’s an upside down way of thinking. It’s truthfully like every club in your bag should go the same height. I think that’s a way not everybody has access to a monitor, right? Not everyone has Trackman. Not everyone can go hit on a machine that that shows them ball speed gaps, descent angles, but there’s an easy eye test, right? When you’re on the course, if if you see a tree, that’s how high your ball’s going or you see a cloud in the horizon, right? Every club in your bag should touch that same tree or cloud. And if one of those clubs is wrong, then I would say it’s it’s time to get fit. It’s time to think about maybe trying to get those to match up. If you can’t go get access to a monitor, that’s an easy way to see if your bag’s working. Nice. So, you ready? I’m ready. Let’s do it. Let’s dive in. Chris started out by having me hit a few of the irons in my own set on a launch monitor so that he could get a good picture of the strengths and weaknesses in my game and my current set makeup. Yeah, eight out of 10 there. Yeah, that was a good one. Let’s see a couple five irons. Oh, that was an eight or nine. How does that become a 10 if that’s only an eight or nine? That’s pretty good. Let’s chat for a sec. Cool. So, I I love bringing the player over here just to really show them what they’re coming with and then kind of showing them, I think, how we can improve. Yeah. Right. And so, and this is where I start to really explain the 3Ds to the to every player I fit for. Your seven iron is really good. Okay. Right. Ball speed’s consistent. Land angle’s really good and it peaks at 100 feet. Okay. And dispersion is really good. Okay. Right. Yeah. Now, every club in your bag, I mentioned this earlier, should separate by 5 miles an hour of ball speed. Okay. If your seven iron’s 122, your five iron should be 132. Yeah. 132. But now that we’re kind of getting here, it’s like, let’s move on to the 4 iron, right? What do we notice about the 4iron? Yeah. So, first job is always ball speed. Ball speed on five iron is 133. So, this should be 138. Yeah. What is it? 134. And so you actually you only see about 5 to seven yards more of carry in the forearm. Yeah. So if you look at now we have two clubs that are too close together like almost doing the same job, right? So now let’s get into the fun part. Let’s show you new T series. I’m going to start you at T100. We’re just going to run you through the entire line first cuz I want you to experience the entire line and then we’ll kind of dive into fitting after that. [Music] Love it. It’s a good start. Yeah. Now, let’s move to T150. The nice thing is is as we’re doing this, right, having you experience the whole line, my fitting gears are turning. Oh, that’s pretty. So, here’s T250. And so, T150 is a little bigger than T100. T250 compared to T150. Yeah, just a little bit bigger. Something to talk about. all of our irons. We also have, you know, talking about how they were designed individually. We have progressive groove design in all our irons, too. Really? So, seven iron through pitching wedge actually have different depth grooves than the mid irons, then the long irons. And what we’ve been seeing really quickly is that we see less spin loss out of the rough. That was really good. Really good there. How far did that one go? That went far. These one feels like they have a little more horsepower. You got a little more jump to it, a little stronger line. Good one. So, that carried 180. Now, here’s T350. This is the ultimate game improvement iron. The deepest CG we make. So, if you’re struggling with a little speed, this thing will really help you get it in the air. Man, that thing went up in the air real easy. And then the final one I want to show you is one I’m really excited about. Um, again, it’s not going to be used, I think, for everyone, but this is T250 launch spec. that thing goes high, right? I mean, it’s probably not for you. I mean, for for a player who’s a lot of this or you’re just losing speed, you know, you’re just an older guy and you’re playing a lot of golf, but you’re losing speed. Yeah, it’s cool. I’m really excited for this one. Really? So, in terms of final recommendations, what’s the prescription? Yeah, so the prescription for you is five through gap wedge in T150. The real win for you is making you’re changing your attack angle, getting your divot in front of the ball, going standard length, and then having a new T-155 iron, right? Hits your peak windows better. So now you have room to have that T254 iron and then U5053 iron in a graphite shaft. That’s why I like fitting. I like being able to figure out the puzzle. Is it a 150? Is it a 250? Is it a 350? And with the new T-series models that we have, I have more puzzle pieces than I’ve ever had. So, it turns out that I should ideally play with three different iron models. And I also got an explanation for why I never seem to use my old four iron very much. Every club in my bag now has a distinct purpose, and I can be more confident and successful with each one of them. If you’re interested in getting your own demo of all the models in the T-ser Ions, go to titless.com to find a fitting specialist near you.