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Struggle to hit your fairway woods cleanly? You’re not alone. In this lesson, Piers shows you exactly how to set up and swing your fairway metals so you can stop topping the ball and start striking it consistently.
You’ll learn:
✅ The correct ball position and setup for consistent contact
✅ How to use your shoulders and weight shift to avoid hitting up too much
✅ The swing feel that helps you compress the ball and find the sweet spot
✅ Why fairway woods are becoming more popular than ever on Tour
By the end of this video, you’ll finally understand what great fairway wood players do differently and how you can do it too.
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All right. In today’s video, we’re talking about how to use the fairway wood off the ground. Now, we’ve got quite a lot to talk about. I’m going to go through some faults that we see, how we want to actually hit this club, what clubs we should be using, but also make sure you hang on to the end because I’m going to talk about one of the fairway medals, which I think is fast becoming the most important club in most people’s bags. Actually, what is it? Post down in the comments. Is it a fairway metal or fairway wood? Who knows? Right. The first question we have to ask is, do we hit the fairway metal off the ground like an iron or a driver? It’s a tricky question because it kind of looks a little bit like a driver and the iron takes a divot. Do we want to do that with a fairway metal? We 100% want to hit a fairway metal more like an iron. So, there needs to be a descending blow. So, we need to be hitting ball brushing the grass. So, with the full swing, we want to see an attack angle which is actually going downward. And I think this is where a lot of golfers get confused. And this is some of the faults that we see is a golfer putting the ball on the inside of the lead heel. As soon as we do this, if we think about it, then once once the ball is forward and we set up like a driver, so we’re getting well behind it, what are we probably going to do here? We’re probably going to bottom out too early. So, we’re going to hit the ground before the golf ball it or thin it. Now, ultimately, when we’re on the ground, we want to be definitely not setting up with that same driver setup. So, we want to make sure we avoid that. I’ll show you how we go about what we want in a moment. One of the other things that I see for a golfer is that when they’re trying to hit the golf ball in the air off a tight line, these are pretty tight, by the way. I’m just warning you in advance. We’ll often find that a golfer will try and help it into the air. So, they’ll hang back. They’ll be trying to hit off their back foot because if they were to get a good strike, the ball would go too low and it wouldn’t really carry in the air. And now that becomes more of a club problem than a swing problem. And then the one thing that I really see in the golf swing as well, which is a real common one, and it generally happens with the longer clubs, it can happen with a driver, it can happen with long irons, and definitely with fairway metals, is that when we swing down, often we’ll see this move here where the elbows get quite spled and we get this kind of chicken winging move happening. The hands come too high up towards the body. And if we think about that now, it’s very difficult to get that downward hit. You’ll hit a lot of shots very clean. So, I want to just go through how we’re going to get rid of this move and get more of this move through the golf ball. First of all, Titus GT2 16.5°. So, I’ve got a slightly more lofted fairway metal compared to a 3-wood. So, I would call this kind of a forward when I’m hitting it. Okay, that was nice. Maybe a little bit out of the toe. So, the flight may be down just a little bit. But if we look at this here, 2.4° down. So, that’s hitting down on it 2.4. That one there, 232 yards carry. I quite like that. The height on that one was 103 feet high. So, I’m happy with that. That’s how I was fitted at tight list. Those are nice numbers. Hitting down on the ball plus getting the ball in the air. What I will say, if I hit a 15° off that lie, that apex won’t be as high as that. So, I won’t be able to get the golf ball into the air. So, setup, there’s two things really. Number one is ball position and number two is figuring out where we distribute our weight in our body. So from here, if we have a club head inside the lead heel, that’s a really nice place to start. Now, it does depend on how you hit the golf ball. If you generally hit the golf ball really high, you can afford to move it a little bit further back than that. Or if you’re like me who hits the ball quite low, we may have to move the golf ball slightly further forward than that. But again, that depends. But I think for the majority of us, if we start there, that’s a good point. Once we’ve got the ball position where we want, we don’t want to be doing this. Remember this early fault, we don’t want to be on that back foot. I think here 5050 is really good. I even get some golfers with a fairway metal to put slightly more weight onto that front leg. So, the two things that are absolute, the ball’s a little bit further back and we have the weight about 50/50. But I want you to experiment again with ball position and I want you to experiment with that weight distribution a little bit. But at least you know what areas you should be looking at. So let’s go into the swing. Now think about the two things we spoke about before. Hanging back onto that back foot and the arms playing. So this drill kind of eliminates both of those with time. But the real important thing for you to think about when you’re playing golf, especially on the golf course, is your practice swing. So all I want you to do, mini back swing, and then from there, we’re going to swing through, extend the arms, and shift onto the left leg. And when I’m doing this, look at the ground. I’m brushing the ground and obviously what I’m looking to do is to brush the ground ideally at the same time as the ball or slightly past ball and ground together on this shot isn’t the end of the world because of how forgiving these clubs are. It will actually help you get the ball in the air a little bit better. But you can actually have some swings where you just sort of chip them out there. So just chip it out there where we’re moving forward and brushing the ground and extending the arms. That’s a real nice move and sensation to get in your practice swings or as a drill to help get the club hitting the ground in the right place. So, with those practice swings almost in the bank now, all I’m going to focus on this one is sticking my finish and brushing the grass with a great setup. Okay, now that’s interesting because that was actually quite a nice shot. It only carried 223. The attack angle was still the same, but it was a little bit more on the bottom of the club potentially, and it only went 40 ft high. So, the fact it went so low is what killed the carry. And here’s the big issue that we see now. It becomes an equipment conversation. Now, we need to understand, have you got enough loft on your fairway metal? That is absolutely crucial. So, what I would say, make sure you get the good setup, you get the good move in the swing, and then assess, does the club actually suit my swing and my setup. Have you got the right fairway woods in your bag? I said at the beginning I wanted to actually come to uh show you another fairway metal which is so good and I think a lot of people should be using this. There’s over 20 male golfers on the PJ tour now using a 7wood. So there’s my 7wood Titus GT and it’s 21°. Someone asked me a question recently. What club actually is looking most likely to be obsolete? And I actually really think that a 3-wood for a lot of golfers is becoming more and more obsolete because it’s so hard to hit. It’s fine for a te shot, but if you want to hit the ball off the ground off a tight lie, you’re going to really struggle. So, I’m going to hit a few sevenwoods here, and I’m actually going to show you three main reasons why this golf club is so versatile. So, it’s just a it’s a normal lie here. The grass is quite short. Let’s just see what happens when I hit this sevenwood. Okay, that was nice. Felt solid off the face. Slight pull. Fading back a little bit. That was good. We got good height, 98. We got 239 carry and we’re hitting down 2.7°. That’s great. So, we know that we can get it around about 100 ft for a 7wood for me. I know that the land angle going into the green then is going to be really good between 45 and 50°. This is where this club starts to really go into its own. So, if we put this into bad lies now, let’s hit one from the divot line. Now, all I would do a little bit differently with this shot, because it’s sitting down a little bit, I want to be a little bit more downward. So, I want to hit down on this a little bit more. So, what can I do for that? I could put more weight forward, or I could put the ball slightly further back. But here’s the deal. If I did that with a 3-wood or a forward, even, that ball probably isn’t going to go in the air very well. So, ball slightly further back. Now, it won’t go 100t high, but what it will do is it will go over 200 yards. Look, think of this. You’ve got over 200 yards into a green. You’re in a bad lie. Sevenwood is going to trump your long irons and your other fairway metals. Okay. And that was so good as far as the height’s concerned. I mean, I don’t need to look at the full swing to tell me it went nice and high. 108 ft high out of a flipping divot. There’s no way you would be able to do that. So, it probably just meant I caught it a little bit higher on the face, but it still got a really high carry number at 225. The attack angle went down a little bit more. maybe because again I just put the ball a little bit further back in the stance. So if the lie gets really tight on the fairway or you’re in a divot, this is a great option. There are two other ways that we can use this club really well. One of them is in the rough and the other one will save to the end. But let’s go out to the golf course right now and show you it out of the rough. All right, here’s the scenario. So I’ve got over 200 yards to the green. I know I need a long club, but the lie absolutely will dictate what we can do here. So we’ve got three different lies. Look at this one here. This one’s kind of sitting up a little bit. I can get a 3-wood, a four iron, a sevenwood on that. No problem. It won’t be a problem. But these two lies here are definitely sitting down. This one’s probably the worst. You can see how much it’s sitting down there. And then we’ve got this one here. Again, that’s kind of set sitting down. And we’ve got a good amount of grass behind the golf ball. Now, you might be looking at that and going, “There’s not much grass there, Pierers.” But this grass is really tough, so it will slow the club down a lot. hitting a three-wood and a four iron out of those lies. It just is not going to work that well. There’s no real consistency there. So, but I tell you what I will do. I’ll actually have a go hitting the four iron out of that bad lie. This is going to be difficult. Normally, this ball is going to go high when I hit this club. This four iron is going to go in the air, but when I hit this shot here, I’ll give you some feedback. Okay, so almost in that one. I’ve duffed it. It hasn’t really gone that well. It’s got about 170 yards maximum. I’m trying to almost get the golf ball out of that lie because I know the club won’t work that well through the rough. This is why the sevenwood really comes into its own because in order to get the ball out of that lie, I’m definitely going to require some sort of steepness where I’m hitting approaching the ball on the way down. But think of this. By having 21° plus of loft, it’s going to help us get the ball functionally into the air. And what will happen with this kind of lie if I can get any kind of strike on it because of the grasp between the ball and the face, it’ll actually reduce the spin and give us what we call a flyer. So, as long as I can launch it in the air with not a lot of spin on it, it’s going to go a good distance already. But we obviously need to understand when it hits the ground, it’s probably going to run out a little bit more. These are all things you can get used to, but ultimately four iron, threewood out of that eye, not really going to cut it. So, seven would this is a similar light if not worse. This ball should get up in the air a lot easier. Okay. So, we can see that now it’s probably only gone around about 40 feet high. Even if we look at the contact there, we can see the ball was probably around about here. We can see I’ve hit the grass well before the ball. But because of the design of the club, it gets through the grass really well. But what it does do by the time it gets to the ball, because I’ve got more loft on the face, I can get that golf ball up in the air. So, we’ve gone through really tight divity lies. We’ve gone through a really tough rough lie. There’s still one more shot we can play with this beautiful golf club. So, another way we can use the sevenwood is for chipping. Now, that sounds a bit crazy, but if you struggle with chipping and you duff a lot of chip shots, 7wood’s a really good option cuz it’s got a really fat bottom and it’s very difficult to duff a sevenwood. You want to stand in nice and close, nice and vertical, and it’s kind of in between a chip and a putt, but it’s going to go through the grass really quickly. The good thing with a shot like this is because it’s a seven, but it comes off the face fast. So, a shot like this when I’m going uphill a lot, the grass is quite thick, the green is quite slow. You can see I was able to get the speed going there. A lot of golfers would stand here with their sandwich and they hit a chip shot and they’d leave it short. But this is where it really goes up to a good level. So, if I get that ball there, give it, it’s a nice lie, but now I’m going to make it a bad lie. So, I’m now going to stamp on the ball, hit the ball into the ground, now chipping that with a sand wedge, I’m getting shivers thinking about it. But for here, really, all I’ve got to do is just do the same as what I just did on the last shot. It might be a bit more unpredictable, but if I can get this within a flag length, I’m absolutely going to take that all day. So again, the versatility of this club around the greens, especially when the lies get bad or if it’s a very slow shot, it’s so good. So quite a lot of information there, but I know this can help you with your fairway metals. So how would you like to have personal online lessons with myself and Andy? Well, we do that atmygolf.com, and we’ve seen some amazing results. And the main way we’ve seen this is by just clearing up confusion. A lot of golfers are confused, working at loads of different things. They watch lots of YouTube videos, and they’re just not getting better. Help us clear up the confusion for you.
