Everyone Is Bad At Irons Until They Learn This

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If you’re frustrated with your irons — fat shots, tops, shanks, pulls, weak contact — you’re not alone. Most golfers are bad with their irons, not because they lack talent, but because they misunderstand how an iron is supposed to work. In this video, Coach Ed Schwent explains the core concepts that create solid ball-first contact, consistent distance, and crisp divots.

You’ll learn why trying to “lift” the ball or forcing a steep downward strike ruins your low point, and how thinking of your swing as a circle immediately fixes major contact issues. Ed demonstrates simple drills — including the lead-leg drill, towel drill, and club-parallel checkpoints — to help you feel proper weight shift, bottom out in front of the ball, and control the clubface through impact.

He also breaks down the most common trouble shots: why you pull your short irons, how lie angle affects direction, how to diagnose shanks with a box or towel, and the real reason some players hit low-right “bullet” misses. Finally, you’ll learn why tracking carry distance (not total) is essential for scoring and how indoor practice can distort your numbers. If you want cleaner contact and more predictable iron play, this is the guide you’ve been waiting for.

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Hey, you’re watching this video because quite frankly, you’re lousy with your irons. Well, a lot of people are. I’m going to show you the concepts you need to learn to improve. I’m going to show you some drills to do that will really help your ball striking and we’ll talk about at the end some especially trouble shots that I see a lot with irons. If you’ve got the shanks, if you pull your short irons, stay tuned and we’ll address all of this. And if you’ll put these drills into practice and understand these concepts, you’ll start hitting the best iron shots of your life. I work with a lot of guys that either hit their driver great and can’t hit their irons or vice versa. Uh we’re going to talk about irons today. If you’re struggling with your irons, I’m going to show you what I found what’s happened to most people and where they struggle hitting irons. And usually they have a misconception of really what they’re supposed to do to hit an iron. A lot of people’s image in their mind is that they know that has a lot of loft on the club and the ball’s supposed to go up in the air. And so they’re literally trying to make the ball go up in the air with their swing. That presents a lot of problems where you’ll hit a lot of fat shots or top shots. Um or you’ll just add so much loft to the club that it that you just won’t go anywhere. Your your seven iron will go a nine iron distance or a pitching wedge distance because you’re adding too much loft. The other problem that I see is the exact opposite is everybody’s been told that they’re supposed to hit down on their irons. And so they’re getting so steep with their shoulders and their arm swing on the way down that it also pres pre presents a lot of trouble um with their angle of attack and their path and their consistency of striking the ball. Typically, the more I would go down on it is the more I would tend to hit the ball way out on the toe of the club. And that’s going to cost a lot of distance, too. So, what we’re trying to do with any club that we swing, a wood or an iron, is we’re still trying to swing the club in a circle around us. And we would like the low point of that circle to be in front of the ball an inch or two. And one of the things I like to show is with my hula hoop, if I swing in a circle motion like the hula hoop and it would bottom out right at the ball, um that would give me an angle of attack of zero on a Trackman. And we would like it to be negative with the irons. And so if you can imagine um as you’re swinging your club that you’re trying to swing in a circle like this, but we want that low point to be an inch or two or three or four out in front of the ball. A tour player with a sand wedge would probably bottom out 8 to 10 inches in front of the ball. And so that’s how you create a ball contact first and then a divot in the turf after the ball. And it’s a pretty good concept to have in your mind of having this hula hoop. And what we’re trying to do, what creates that low point to be correct is is I would get in my back swing and my weight would be on my right side as I’m going back. Um, on my forward swing, when my weight transfers left, that should move the low point in front of the ball. And so the biggest mistake I see with people they’re trying to lift the ball up in the air is they would be on their trail leg at impact too much and then they would be on the upswing. So one of the my favorite drills really for you with irons is if you get set up correctly um I like to just stand on your front leg and just put your toe or your back foot on the ground for balance. But I really want you to feel like you’re swinging this club and you can feel this weight on your front leg at impact. And so it’ll look like this if I if I do it. You don’t have to swing hard and try to hit it a long ways, but if I can just put all my weight forward and and I just make swings with uh all my weight left, you can see I get an angle of attack of minus six. My club path is still pretty good. Um, I hit that about a 100 yards with that effort to swing and it’s one of my favorite ways to get people to learn to feel at impact um where their weight should be. And if you’re having trouble taking divots, having a negative angle of attack, that’s a great drill for you to practice. It’s one of my favorite ways to feel that. You can do it with a seven iron like I have here, or you could do it with your wedges. It’d be great practice just hitting pitch shots, 30 or 40 yards with a sand wedge with all your weight on this front leg and and just just hit shot after shot. So, you can feel that sensation. and it’ll really help you um with when we’re learning to hit irons correctly and learning to have a low point that’s in front of the ball. And so that’s that’ll really help you a lot. There’s some basic principles swingwise. Uh this will be true with woods too, but if I have a target line, um when my club is parallel to the ground, I should be parallel to the target line with my shaft. Uh because I have a spine angle at a dress here. Um if my club face is square, that leading edge should match my spine angle here. So, still the most common mistake I see with with golf swings these days is most people are having too much face rotation on the way back and they’re getting this face open on the way back. So, learn to swing this club back in this position on the back swing correctly. It’ll go a long ways towards helping after impact. That club should also swing over here to where it’s parallel to the ground and parallel to your target line on your finish. So that’ll look like this. And it’ll actually, if I swing correctly, it’ll actually be on my heel line over here to where this club would follow through to. And so the people that are trying to make it go up in the air, their club would look like this on the follow through, much too high. So, learn to swing over to this direction on the way through. And that’ll really help you. And when you’re doing this drill where you’re standing on your lead leg, that’s one of the things I really try to feel is through impact, this club’s swinging that direction on the way through. And we can hit shots like that until we can really learn to feel um what that feels like to bottom out in front of the ball. And if you’ll do that, it’ll really help. The other thing I will tell you, it’s it’s good to be wintertime. We have snow on the ground outside here in Missouri right now. And um a lot of you are going to be working inside on mats. And especially when you’re hitting your irons, there’s one thing that I would recommend that all of you do is uh I would get a towel uh just a small towel and um I would place it uh on the mat behind the ball and um you only have to give yourself maybe a club head um width from the tow of the ball or maybe two if if you’re if you’re struggling hitting the talent first. But I used to get calls all the time in March um from players that have been practicing indoors all winter and the weather warmed up and they go out to play and they’re hitting every iron shot fat. And what’s happened is they’ve been on a mat all winter long. And when we bottom out behind the ball, a little bit an inch or so behind the ball on the mat, the mat’s so firm that the club still bounces and skips and they hit a decent shot. But boy, when that soft, mushy turf in the springtime, you’re going to stick the club in the ground and everything’s going to be fat. And so one of the things I recommend, this is great practice on turf outside on the driving range, but especially on mats. I I would hit m I would hit every shot that you hit with an iron with this towel behind the ball. And so as I set up here to hit a shot, um I shouldn’t hit the towel like I did on that last one. But that’s what you’ll find is if my angle of attack isn’t quite right, um, I’m going to bottom out and I’m going to hit that towel. So, I want you to practice as much as you can indoors. It’ll help your golf game come springtime. But boy, put this towel in front of the ball and what every time you’re in your simulator and it’ll really help you. Just keep hitting shot after shot after shot and trying to hit the ball and not the towel. Even good practice with your fairway woods as well. You can see the that time I didn’t hit the towel, my angle attacks minus3. And it’s going to be a lot more effective practice for you and it’s going to translate to the golf course when you get out there in the springtime. Another thing that I see quite often is people that pull their short irons. They’re having trouble. They make good contact, but everything’s 10, 15, 20 yards left of where they’re aiming. The danger of that is if you continue to do it, you’re going to start aiming yourself more and more to the right. And then that’s probably going to cause you to come over the top even more and you’re going to even pull it more and more to the left. But the biggest reason that I see that for people that pull their short irons is they’re set up too far away from the ball and they have their hands too low at address. And what happens is that gets the toe of the club off the ground. And and what happens when that happens is if I sold this club flat on the ground and I put an alignment stick on it, you’ll see that it’ll point straight. But when I lower this handle and I move the toe off the ground, do you see how the alignment stick points to the left? And that’s what your ball’s going to do if you end up at impact in that same position. So, if you’re one that historically hits a lot of pulls with your shorter clubs at a dress, make really sure that this club is sold on the ground correctly and that this end is pointed at your belt buckle or your belly button. If it’s pointing lower than that, it’s probably the reason that you’re hitting pulls. The other thing to consider that I talked about with Patrick in a video a year or so ago is that most really good players, if if they know what they’re doing, um they usually have their wedges a couple degrees flatter lie angle wise than what the rest of their irons are. They might seven iron through, five iron through, nine iron might be a standard lie angle, but then pitching wedge, sand wedge, lob wedge is going to be 2° flatter than that standard angle. And what that does is get the toe down and really helps you not pull these irons. So, if if setup alone doesn’t stop you from going pulling them to the left, it could be that the lie angle of your wedges is just too upright for you. And you might experiment with a wedge that has a flatter lie angle. And and I find that really helps a lot of my students and I think it’ll help you too. So, make sure to address that it’s sold pretty flat and that this handles here and don’t have fight the tendency to get lower with your hands and pushing the club out away from you. And it really should help you eliminate this the shots going to the left. The other common issue that I see with people with irons is for shots that go really low and to the right for a right-handed player or really low and to the left for a left-hander. And while occasionally people might hit that shot because they hit it off the toe of the club, most likely you’re hitting it off the shank of the club or the hoszle and you’re hitting a shank. And I’ve had to convince so many people that they’re actually hitting the ball here and not here um that you wouldn’t believe it. But the simplest way to diagnose this problem and to fix it is simply with a cardboard box. You can use a box this size. Um you can use the long skinny boxes that the clubs come in are perfect, but put a box on the ground and have a ball to where you hardly have any room between the toe of the club and the box and just make some swings. If you’re hitting this box on the way down, that’s your first indication that you’re really hitting the hoszle or the club. And so shanks are a disaster. Probably the most disastrous shot in the game. And they can really affect you mentally to the point where you just produce a shot after shot after shot that way. The best way I found to eliminate them is by practicing with a box. You can put a box there. If you’re a little shy of the box, um you can simply take one of your head covers or I like just taking a hand towel again and rolling it up like this. And um putting that towel there that close to the ball. And we’re going to hit shots, shot after shot after shot. and simply trying to hit the ball and not the towel. So, if you’ve got the shanks, this is the fix for it and it’ll really help you now to also help you if you have the shanks. What usually happens they it usually happens with your steepest clubs like sand wedge, pitching wedge more often than it happens with sixiron or seven iron. And the reason that’s the case is those clubs are a lot steeper shaft angle. And if I’m too flat on my back swing, the club’s going to swing away from me on the way down. And it only has to swing that much too far away and you hit the hoszle. So, uh, again, parallel to the ground, parallel to the target line’s a pretty good checkpoint. If you video yourself and you see you’re parallel to the ground, but the club’s back here, it’s probably the number one reason why you’re hitting the hoszle and hitting shanks. So, the takeaway will really help you getting the club in this position on the back swing rather than that position. And then, but simply having a box down or a towel down or your head cover down will really, really help you eliminate that problem. So, I like putting a towel there and we’re just going to hit shots. Um, and we’re just going to make swings and we’re just going to hit the ball, not the towel, and you’ll never shank it again in your life. One of the other things that I want you to pay attention to if you’re working inside is pay attention to your carry distances. Uh because that’s really what the important number is is understanding what your average carry distance is with each club. And and everybody’s different. There’s no right carry distance or wrong. I mean, I’m probably 30 or 40 yards shorter today with my seven iron than I was 30 years ago. And um and so I just have to adjust to that when I play. And so, but if I have a good concept in mind of what my carry distances are, it’ll really help you when you get to the golf course in the springtime. So, that’s one of the great things about launch monitors today is that um you can kind of get a pretty good concept for what your carry distances are. Uh, that being said, um, I’m indoors a lot in the wintertime with students and what I found indoors is I find most people don’t hit it as far indoors as they do outdoors off real turf. And I’m not sure why that is. It it it could be that we get more backspin on the ball hitting it off the mat here. And so Trackman, that’s in their um in their formula for how far this ball’s going. Um, but I find most people are somewhere in the 8 to 12 yard range indoors shorter than they are on the golf course. And um, so keep that in mind when you’re practicing as well. If you’re getting discouraged indoors because you don’t think you’re hitting it as far as you should, it could just be that you’re indoors. I also think people don’t tend to swing as hard indoors as they swing outdoors, uh, just because of the confined space. So keep that in mind while you’re practicing indoors and it’ll help you. But always kind of keep track of your carry distances. It’s a good idea to go through your whole bag and just write down what your average carry distance is with each club so when you get to the golf course you have a better idea of how to how to manage yourself around the course and play correctly. And the reason why that carry distance is important, um, say you played the second hole and you had 150 yards to the flag and you decided to hit seven iron, but the green’s 40 yards deep, so it’s really only 130 yards to the front edge. And so your shot carried 135 yards, but it got one big hop and it rolled up close to the pin and you think, man, my seven iron’s 150. But you get on the third hole and you got 150 to a front pin that has a creek in front of the green and you hit the same shot you just hit. Think you hit it perfect and it lands right in the middle of the creek because you really only carried at 135. And so that’s why carry distance is so crucial uh to understand is you have to understand when you have a back pin or a front pin and you have to make sure you’re hitting the green. And so keep track of your carry numbers, understand them and trust them and you’ll shoot a lot better scores. Hey guys, if you like this video, please hit the subscribe button. It helps the channel. And if you really like this on irons and you also struggle with your driver, uh, we had a video just came out just on driving. I think you’ll like it as well.