Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Hybrid golf clubs have recently hit the market in the last few years and they’re a great advance in technology for golfers making a lot, lot easier to play the game. So hybrid golf clubs just basically are a mix of a fairway wood and an iron that’s why they’re called the hybrid. They have the best of both worlds. So you’ve got the larger club head that you would see with the fairway wood but the length of the shaft is the length you would see of an iron. So the larger club head of the fairway wood is making it much easier to hit the ball and the length of the iron is again making it much easier to control the club and get the club head back to the ball. So it really is a club where you’ve got the best of both worlds, you’ve got advantages from both of the clubs just mixed into one and it makes them so, so, so easy to hit and very, very versatile with what you can do with them.

So if we look at the hybrid then and this larger club head, the main thing is that the bigger the club head is, the bigger the sweet spot is that you have to hit the ball from. The sweet spot just the middle of the club, so the bigger the club head is, the bigger sweet spot becomes and if you got a larger area to hit from, it makes it much easier to hit the ball from that area, so you become, it becomes a lot easier to hit a good shots with maximum distance and accuracy. Also because you’ve got this larger club head, the centre of gravity of the club head can be placed a lot lower into the club and also a lot further away and back from the club face. Now first of all place in the centre gravity low into the club makes it a lot easier to get the ball airborne. That gives the club a much higher launch angle. So these clubs are extremely easy to get into the air, they fly very high and they land very soft, making it very, very easy to hit the green and attack the pin.

But moving the centre of gravity also away from the club face, it increases the clubs moment of inertia. What that means is that the club has the ability to resist any twisting effect in the club head. So if you think how an ice skater would spin, the ice skater starts into going to the spin and they have their arms out, so they are maximum stretched which is like having a big club head. They don’t spin particularly quickly but as they pull their arms into their body, the spin rate really increases because they lose the ability to resist the twisting effect, and that’s the same for the golf club, the bigger the club head is, the more the club can resist that twisting effect. So if you’ve hit off centre either on the toe or on the hill of the golf club, the golf club will get slowed down as it impacts with the ball but it will be able to resist the twisting effect of the other part of the club not slowing down and wanting to accelerate past.

So larger moment of inertia, the larger club head, means that it’s able to resist that twisting effect; it makes it much, much easier for you to hit a good golf shot because basically the golf club is much more forgiving. We also look at setting the club next to the ball, because the club head looks a lot bigger, confidence wise you are going to feel, you are going to be able to hit that ball better and you can see all of that loft, just waiting to get the ball into the air for you, so just a look at the club is going to make you feel a lot more confident about hitting the shot. So think about swapping to hybrids because you really will prove your golf game especially if the certain clubs that you struggle to hit and that you would tend to avoid. Take those out of your bag and replace them with a hybrid version and if you have a look at Thomas Golf they’ve got a really wide variety of lofts available on hybrids and basically you could replace any club you wanted to and put a hybrid in to improve your golf game.