While we all fall out of love with every club in the bag at some point during our golfing careers, there’s usually one that stands out as being especially difficult to hit. This will vary from player to player but according to data from Shot Scope, there’s one that, on average, loses golfers the most shots during a round.
And the guilty club is... the five-iron. According to the stats, golfers lose up to 0.37 shots with this club depending on ability level and interestingly, the five-iron is statistically the worst club in terms of Strokes Gained for every standard of golfer.
So why is that and what can we do to help turn this club into a secret weapon? We sought out the advice of PGA Pro and YouTube golfer Matt Fryer.
“There’s not much loft on a 5-iron and they’re getting stronger every year,” Fryer explains. “The difficulty is two fold - golfers struggle to launch a club of this loft but also find it hard to control the curvature. The head is pretty compact too, so this curve to the flight is exaggerated by any miss-strikes.”
It would also be fair to say that a lot of golfers over-estimate how far they hit their five iron, with a 15-handicapper average 169 yards of total distance.
In terms of the correct technique with this club in hand, Fryer has noticed down the years some common mistakes that golfers employ.
“The big mistake I see is golfers adopting the technique of a 7-iron,” Fryer adds. “They have the ball too far back in the stance and then coming into impact, golfers knowing the lack of loft often tip backwards to try to help the ball up in the air. This backing up causes shots where you strike the ground too early or top it.”
Fryer goes on the say that a remedy for this fault would be to have the ball position a little forward of middle in the stance - this helps with launch and also creating a shallower angle of attack.
A good practice drill to enforce the correct movement is to create a short zone with two tees about a clubhead-width apart. The feeling into impact that the club is just brushing the ground where the ball would be and afterwards with small swings. You shouldn’t be taking big divots here - as your pressure shifts forwards, you pick the ball off the turf cleanly with a small, shallow divot.
Of course, a more drastic solution would be to swap out the five-iron altogether for a more forgiving alternative. There are a host of options out there - be it opting for a combo set with a slightly bigger model in the long irons to assist with launch and forgiveness, or adding a hybrid or high-lofted fairway wood.
