5 Beginner Tips to Strike Your Irons Better from a Pro

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Nicolas Drozdoski-Richardson
Mar 31, 2022
5 minutes

One of the greatest challenges for amateur golfers everywhere is to gain the ability to cleanly strike the golf ball time and time again. This is especially true with irons as hitting a golf ball off the ground can be challenging to many.

To help you become a better ball striker, we came up with five key drills to strike your irons more purely than ever, leaving behind chunky or bladed strikes. Be sure to read this one all the way through, it’ll be worth your while. Let’s check out those drills:

  • Two Tees Drill
  • Tees Gate Drill
  • Towel Drill
  • Over The Stick Drill
  • Left-Handed Chipping Drill

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Two Tees Drill

What you’ll need:

  • An iron
  • Golf balls
  • Two tees

How to do it:

  • Place two tees in the ground, one behind another;
  • Set the trail tee just above ground level;
  • Set the lead tee slightly higher than the trail tee;
  • Put a ball on the lead tee;
  • Then try to strike the ball while damaging the trail tee.

The objective of this drill is to help you work on your attack angle on the ball with your irons. This drill will ultimately allow you to develop the habit of hitting the ball first, before making a divot in the ground. This will greatly improve the quality of your iron striking.

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Tees Gate Drill

What you’ll need:

  • An iron
  • Golf balls
  • Two tees

How to do it:

  • Set the two tees in the ground;
  • One about half an inch in front of your iron’s toe;
  • The other, about half an inch behind the sole of your club;
  • Set a golf ball between the tees;
  • Set yourself up at address;
  • Swing your club and strike the ball without touching the tees.

With this drill, you’re looking to work on the accuracy of your clubface at impact so that you’re able to strike your irons better than ever. You can tighten the gate’s gap as your skills and your ball striking improve.

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Towel Drill

What you’ll need:

  • An iron (mid to short-length)
  • Golf Balls
  • A Towel (or a headcover)

How to do it:

  • Set four golf balls one behind another in the direction of your target;
  • Lay a towel flat on the ground, right behind the trailing golf ball;
  • Move aside all the golf balls, except for the lead one;
  • Get into your swinging stance;
  • Focus on hitting the golf ball first, without touching the towel.

This drill will help you work on the low point of your swing. In most amateur swings, the low point tends to be too far back, resulting in poor strikes because they hit the ground before the ball.

Over time, this drill will help you move the low point of your swing forward, helping you produce better results on impact as you’ll come into contact with the ball before the ground.

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Over The Stick Drill

What you’ll need:

  • An iron
  • Golf balls
  • Alignment stick (or another long club)

How to do it:

  • Lay down an alignment in the direction of your target;
  • Set your feet parallel to the alignment stick;
  • Get into your swinging position;
  • Place your club over the stick (on the opposite side to which you’re standing);
  • Start by moving your club into the backswing;
  • When coming down to complete your swing, make sure to come back inside the stick;
  • You can add a ball to this drill once you feel comfortable enough;
  • Place the ball on the inside of the stick.

The goal of this drill is to help you work on the precision of your strike in your downswing to avoid toe strikes. Avoid making contact with the stick on the ground for better results.

If your issues have more to do with hitting the ball off the heel too much, you can still use this drill as a fix. Simply flip it around by starting your swing from the inside and finishing it on the outside of the stick.

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One-Handed Chipping Drill

What you’ll need:

  • A short iron (or even a wedge)
  • Golf balls

How to do it:

  • Set a golf ball on the ground;
  • Get into position behind the golf ball;
  • Take your trail hand off the grip;
  • Begin with quarter-length practice swings without a ball;
  • Introduce the ball when you feel comfortable with the motion;
  • Increase the swing speed as you increase the number of reps.

This drill, while highly simplistic, will help you work on your feel of the golf ball at impact, on top of allowing you to work on the position of your lead wrist and arm through your swing.

You can also utilize this drill to work on your short game as it is designed to help stabilize your lead wrist through your swing.

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Bonus: Line in The Sand Drill

What you’ll need:

  • A short iron (or a wedge)
  • Access to a bunker or a sanded area

How to do it:

  • Draw a straight line in the sand with your iron;
  • Set yourself up at address over the golf ball with one foot on each side of the line;
  • You can place the line right between your feet or slightly closer to your lead foot;
  • Once in position, your goal is to swing your club and make contact with the ground, past the line you’ve drawn in the sand;
  • Keep swinging your club while slowly moving backward along the line.

Make sure to always strike the sand past the line as you move backward. You can repeat this drill for a specific amount of time (I.e.: 30 seconds to a minute), or you can repeat it for an exact amount of reps, but try to set a specific timeframe for this drill to avoid back injuries in the long run.

Related | 5 Tips to Stop Slicing the Ball Off the Tee

Finally, we hope these drills will help take your ball striking to the next level when you have an iron in hand. Each of them will help improve different aspects of your iron swing and together, they’ll allow you to strike the ball cleanly every time.

Until next time,

The Golf Avenue team

Further reading

Hitting the right wedge shot at the right time can make all the difference on your scorecard. Learn how to use them in the right situation.

A good day with the driver will make a huge difference on the scorecard. Our team came up with easy five drills to help you find more fairways than ever!