I recently made it down to Key West, Fla., for a “working escape” with my good friend Wade Hamilton, the director of golf at Montgomery Country Club (and a great teacher in his own right). We spent an afternoon at Key West Golf Club with student Sam Steele, who was looking to make better contact with his irons. He wasn’t interested in a new golf swing, just in a way to find the center of the face more often so the ball would start doing what he wanted.
The good news is that he didn’t need a rebuild. He just needed four small adjustments to click into place, and once they did, Sam left with more than solid strikes. He left with an actual plan, which is usually the difference between a player who improves and one who just keeps hitting range balls at random. We worked through it with a handful of feels and drills built around those four fixes. You can see the whole session in the latest episode of our Pro Work series below.
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1. Better balance at address
To start, we got Sam hinging at the waist, his weight centered between his feet rather than bunched toward his heels or toes. It’s easy for you to find your own center: Rock out onto your toes, then back onto your heels, until you land on the spot in between where neither edge of either foot feels loaded. That’s a feel Dr. Scott Lynn taught me years ago, and it finds a real, balanced address a lot faster than guessing at it or trying to copy a position in a mirror.
2. Limit lateral slide
When it came to moving his body, Sam’s instinct was a common one. He tended to slide his hips and knees back and forth instead of turning around a fixed point. We wanted him rotating around that center post — which is really just the spine — staying in posture instead of sliding out of it. If you do the same thing, a simple pivot drill helps: Turn your shoulders and hips together around your spine without letting your knees drift side to side, and hold the finish. Once you start making a real turn instead of a slide, your low point starts locating in the same place swing after swing.
3. Improve the grip
The next piece was the grip, and this is where Wade was really good. He asked Sam a question you should be asking yourself every time you practice. How do you grip a hammer, and how do you use it? Nobody grips a hammer in their palm — it sits at the base of the fingers, where the wrist is free to hinge and do its job. Move your hands on the club the same way, out of the palm and into the fingers, and the club will hinge properly and work up and down the plane in front of your body instead of getting stuck behind you or trapped underneath your arms.
4. Move the low point forward
The last piece was our favorite drill, and the one that ties the other three together. It seems like a simple punch shot, but it does a whole lot more. Push off your trail foot and rotate your trail side through the shot, the way a fighter turns a punch over with the hips and not just the arm. That move gets the low point out in front of the ball instead of underneath it, which is the difference between compressing an iron and catching it heavy. And you get a more stable clubface through impact as a nice side effect.
Even good players fall into the slide because it feels like it buys more room to swing the arms fast. It’s one of golf’s classic tricks. The players who compress the ball best aren’t the ones creating the most room. They’re the ones who keep turning around a stable center all the way through the shot.
