Tip Tuesday: How to Stop Chunking & Topping Your Irons

Want to hit better, more consistent iron shots? Then this tip is for you! Hear from Scott Tanguay of Coastal Golf Academy in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on how you can compress the golf ball properly with the bottom of your swing arc.

Hey, everybody. Scott Tanguay here at the Coastal Golf Academy at , just right across the street from Myrtle Beach International Airport. If you’re on a buddies trip or something, come by and see me real quick.!

Today we want to talk about the bottom of the arc, or you could say how to compress the golf ball. A lot of people struggle with trying to get under the ball, lifting the ball, just because they don’t quite understand why the ball does what it does. The club is designed to shoot up in the air for you. The more you try and scoop under it and lift it, you’re just going to be clanking it off the bottom.

So this stick here is to represent which side we want to bottom out on. If you’re bottoming out, which means hitting the ground behind the stick, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. You’re going to see a lot of this, where we just kind of nick the middle of the ball, or you can easily chunk it that way. What we want to feel like is that we’re going to hit the golf ball – bam – and then bottom out on the front side of this green stick here. So it’ll look a little bit like that. Right? I’m trying to hit the ball then the ground. That’s how we hit solid shots.

So, if I bring a ball in here, the idea would be to make my little divot on this side of the stick. If we do it back here, we’re going to get that topping or chunking. Let’s see. So I’m bottoming out in front. Bam. And there you go. That’s how you do it. If you bottom out back here before the stick, you’re going to keep struggling with shots like this. We don’t want to do that. So one more. I’m here. Right in line with the stick. We come in, ball first, ground after.

And there you go!