[RickPinewild]

I believe that the lie of your clubs is the most important and ignored aspect of club fitting. Most golfers swing poorly and make compensations to score as good as they do. There are more, better players than there are good ball strikers. Most manufacturers make and market their clubs to increase sales.

The trend has been longer, lighter, and more upright. In the 70’s a Wilson Staff 5 iron was 37” long, 60* lie, and 32* loft. Today a 5 iron averages 38” long (harder to hit), 62* lie (too upright), and 27* loft (harder to hit). This is my take on the subject: If the club is too long you have the tendency to hit it more towards the heel and probably hit it left. If the club is too upright you have the tendency to hit it left because the face is actually facing left. If you have less loft you have the tendency to hit it lower. So what we have is lots of low left shots.

What do you do to compensate? Of course you subconsciously aim more to the right, come over the top and pull it left and never release the power that we work hard to store up on the backswing. Then we start to hang on for dear life and in an effort to get the ball up in the air we end up with high, short, right shots or low, right, slap shots. Any way you look at it, the club head is never in position to do its job and you end up with years of frustration and constantly looking for the answer that is right in front of you.

I’m sure there are numerous instructors on this forum that will confirm that many players line up too far to the right. It seems to me that clubs should be made to specs that would encourage a better swing, imagine the results! If you set up at impact fix, this should be the proper lie for your shorter irons. Measure the distance from the ground to the top center of the shaft. Using a simple math formula for a right triangle you can determine what the correct lie should be. For a 35” wedge and 31.5” from the ground to the top center of the shaft, the lie should be 64.16*, settle for 64*. As the club length increases, and assuming the impact fix position remains the same height from the ground, the lie will decrease to 56* for a 38” club length.

At this point you should make some upright adjustment to compensate for the club shaft bowing downwards, this can vary with the flex and can best be determined on an individual basis. I would suggest that all instructors adjust their students lie angle to correspond to their impact alignments and then teach them to swing with a properly fitted lie. Why would you want to learn to shoot a crooked arrow?