Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

With this swing tip, we are going to have a look at what the main advantages are of having a hybrid golf club over your standard irons or your longer irons. And hybrids are so much easier to hit than this longer irons, because they’re basically the best of both worlds of a fairway wood and an iron. There are a hybrid of the fairway wood and then iron. So you’ve got the length of the shaft of the iron making it very, very easy to control the club head, but you’ve got the club head of the wood, which is a much bigger club head making it a lot easier to hit. So main advantages are with this club, the club head is a lot, lot bigger. So initially when you set this club head down next to the ball, because the club head looks bigger and you are not looking at a very thin narrow spot line on an iron. You just confidence wise you’re going to feel like you are going to be able to connect with that ball. And also because the club head is bigger you can see much more of the loft of the club than you would with the irons, so the loft is much more apparent making you much more confident that you are going to get the ball into the air.

Okay next advantage that we got with the hybrid over the irons is, because it's got this much bigger club head, if a club head is much bigger, it has a much bigger sweet spot, so you’ve got a much larger area to be able to strike the ball from compared to much smaller area on your longer irons. So that makes this golf club much, much easier to hit and it’s a lot more forgiving. You can be slightly off centre, but still within the sweet spot here, whereas with your standard iron you are going to be absolutely banged on making it more difficult to hit from the middle. Okay next advantage we got with this club is because the club head is bigger; the centre of gravity for this cub is much lower in the club than it is for the iron. And that makes it a lot easier to get this club airborne; so when you strike with this club the ball is going to fly a much higher launch angle, really get the ball into the air and the more the ball is up in the air and the more its going forward, the further you are hitting the ball. This standard iron, the centre gravity isn’t as low so it's more difficult to get the ball airborne, you got to swing the club a lot harder to get the same sort of performance from it.

Okay, moving on we are now going to look at the fact what this bigger club head is got a much increased moment of inertia. Now moment of inertia just means the clubs ability to resist and in twisting effect. So if you’re looking at this golf club and you are hitting the ball off the toe, in iron what would happen is this area of the golf club will slow down. But this area of the golf club where there’s no impact won't slow down, so it will flip the face, the club won't be able to resist this twisting effect. However with this hybrid club, because the club head is much bigger the central gravity can be pushed away from the club face and more toward the edge of the club on the side. So the club is able to resist that twisting effect, so even if you don’t hit from the centre, the club is able to resist this twisting effect from off centre hit. Meaning you will have a much, much straighter golf shot.

Okay, so we’ve got a much bigger club head, a much larger sweet spot for you to hit from, lower centre of gravity and this resisting the twisting on off center hit, making this a much easier golf club to hit, much more forgiving. Okay, finally we are going to look at this and say that the leading edge here to the bottom of the club, hasn’t been designed to cut into the turf like it has on a standard iron. So the standard iron is very easy to get the iron to dig in to the turf and to lose all; your club head speed, because it goes in to the turf. This club is not designed to dig into the turf, so you will strike the ball cleaner, but also a glide over the turf more and you will keep your club head speed up meaning that you will hit the ball a lot further. So type of clubs when comes to well should you hit an iron or a hybrid club, if you are struggling to hit your irons hybrids are so much easier to hit, so much more forgiving that really you just want to look at replacing those difficult to hit clubs with a hybrid; and if you have a look at the Thomas Golf Website you will see there is a variety of clubs on that, they do every club in every loft from drive up all the way to the way through the bag right down to the wedges, so you can replace any of those clubs that are difficult hit, with a much easier more forgiving hybrid. Really will have you improve golf game, you’ll get back to enjoy playing and you will lower your scores.