Barney Puttick on Hitting Solid Hybrids (Video)

Golf Monthly's Top25 coach Barney Puttick has some tips to help you hit your hybrids better.



Note the big takeaway here: A hybrid is more like an iron than a fairway wood. That means you want to hit down on the ball, not sweep it off the ground.

First, the ball position is different. Most players put the ball near the middle of their stance for an iron and near their lead foot for a fairway wood. Go for halfway between them; that means the ball goes halfway between the center of your stance and your lead foot.

Although Barney doesn't say it, you can see that he soles the club with the shaft vertical, not leaning forward. Your lower body action will take you a bit forward at impact, so under normal circumstances you don't want to lean the club forward. Hybrids give you their benefits because they hit the ball higher, so you want to use the full loft of the club. Let your legs create the downward strike at impact.

If you do that properly, you'll take a slight divot in front of the ball, which means you hit the ball first.

Finally, Barney says you should become familiar with how far you hit your hybrids. But really, shouldn't you learn how far you hit all of your clubs? You have to know how far you hit your clubs in order to 'gap' them properly, which just means you choose the clubs in your bag so you don't have a huge gap in distance between two adjacent clubs and then virtually no gap between the next two.

It's mostly common sense, I know. But common sense often leaves us when we're actually playing a round. Make the right choices before you go out -- by setting up your bag correctly and learning how to hit your hybrids properly -- and you'll tend to do the right thing instinctively when you actually stand over the ball out on the course.