New Iron Technology

Sometimes I feel we credit the club to much. I believe most likely the amount of practice you recently put is the reason your handicap went down. Forgiving irons usually have a large face, low center of gravity & a large cavity back.

I wouldn't give so much credit to the driver, it's more likely that you're just improving. Technology is a lot better than the 90s, so if you were using an old driver you would see some pretty big gains...but that doesn't directly translate to strokes. There are too many other factors.

As for irons - it's a lot more important to have a set that properly suits your swing and is fitted to you than to have something "new". There have definitely been improvements in technology, but not to the same degree as with drivers. The designs are largely the same, it's the materials and manufacturing that has gotten better.

With irons the most important decision is figuring out what club type is best for your game and let me say this before I explain: you should NEVER base what kind of club you buy on your handicap or typical score. EVER. Anyone who asks you what you typically shoot or tells you based on a handicap what to buy is an idiot and you shouldn't listen to anything they say.

Why? It's simple: everything has a trade-off, there are pros/cons to every single club type and none of them have anything to do with what you score. There are a thousand ways to get to a particular score/handicap and very little of it has to do with pure ball-striking.

Here's where most people go wrong: where you strike the ball on the club-face has almost nothing to do with anything but distance. Whether you push, pull, slice or hook the ball is related to swing path and face angle at impact. You can hit the dead nuts center of the sweet-spot on a golf club EVERY time and still hit a two way miss on every hole.

People only use handicap to make recommendations for two reasons:

1. there isn't a good way to give advice without intimate knowledge of someone's golf swing. In other words - getting a fitting. Until you see how someone strikes the ball you cannot give any worthwhile advice that isn't based on a lot of assumptions.

2. marketing. It is in the best interests of the golf companies to have you replacing your golf clubs every few years. If you go from 20 handicap to 10 to scratch and go from GI to player's to blades that's 2 additional sets you paid for than if you just got blades in the first place.

Keep in mind that things advertised for "beginners" and "high handicaps" aren't necessarily good...

Forgiveness sounds great, but what is the cost?

For one: feedback, you won't know when you slightly mishit the ball. That doesn't sound so bad right? Well long term you won't be as good of a ball-striker because you can't distinguish slightly off hits from pure ones, with feedback you can fine-tune to a greater degree.

Secondly: your misses will be longer, that's good right? Sometimes. If you generally hit the ball mostly straight then having your slight mishits go longer is good, however, if you generally hit left or right then long can be very bad. Long and off-line is usually much more severely punished, and most high handicap golfers have a poor recovery game (blow-up holes).

So is forgiveness good or bad? It depends. I think for beginning golfers forgiveness is bad, which makes it silly to market game improvement clubs to them as the target audience. High handicap golfers often struggle more with hitting the ball straight than with literally striking the ball. Forgiveness only helps if you can consistently hit the general middle of the golf club (not the sweet spot, but fully on the club-face). As I said before - it does nothing if you push, pull, slice or hook since those are related to swing path and face angle and not ball-striking.

So who is forgiveness for? Middle handicaps. People in the 12-18 range who have solid ball-striking and mostly have a repeatable shot that need a bit more distance when they don't hit well. If you're shooting over 100, forgiveness is bad. You're not going to learn and it's going to cost you extra blow-up holes by putting you in even worse positions.

I could go on but this is already long. If you'd like me to continue post a reply and I'll add some more...

There isn't a need to upgrade clubs every other year or anything like most manufacturers would want you to but if they are from the 90's then you would probably see a benefit. If nothing else from better grooves, more forgiving weight distribution, shaft technology has gotten better and there isn't really a point in reshafting old clubs like that when you could get a good set from a couple years ago and spend just as much money...

Although no irons will replace practice, I just recently upgraded from ancient hand me down eye2's from my 5'8 Dad to GI cobra fly z-xl irons (I'm 6'1) and noticed a world of difference.