How To... Weight Shift With Your Irons

Nov 18, 2016
2 min read

Hanging back is a simplified way of saying a lack of weight transfer or pressure shift into your lead leg at impact. This can cause a variety of issues from strike to trajectory.

From a strike point of view, it shifts the low point of your arc more towards the trail foot meaning a mixture of heavy strikes where you take a divot before the ball or thin shots where you catch the ball up the equator. To cure this, many players will simply move the ball position back; although this is a simple cure, it doesn't attack the root cause of the problem. As a rule, it will generally increase the launch and peak height of your shots due to more dynamic loft being presented at impact and the lack of arm extension available after impact. Most players will often chicken wing the lead arm through impact due to the lack of body rotation available through the pressure being back in the trail foot. In the slideshow below, it shows what hanging back actually looks like at impact, where the low point moves to and how the arms and body work after impact.

To improve your ball striking with the irons, you must have more pressure in your lead foot at impact. This will generate a steeper angle of attack which is desirable for good iron play. Most of the top iron players on the tour will have around 80% of their weight on the lead leg at impact. As you can see below, if you put more weight on the lead leg at impact, it leans the shaft forward which lets the sweet spot of the club look at the ball and also reduces the dynamic loft. Putting all of these things together will increase distance and give you a more consistent strike on your irons.