Learn this crucial ball-striking skill and pure your irons like never before

Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you become a smarter, better golfer.

Hitting a golf ball consistently on the center of the face is hard. That’s no surprise; with so many moving parts in the swing, the margin for error is incredibly small, and any small misstep can be the difference between a pure shot and a terrible one.

When hitting your irons, the interaction between your club and the turf is crucial. To hit the ball pure, you have to make sure you’re compressing the ball properly. And to do this, you have to make sure you have control of your low point.

As a refresher, low point is where you swing arc bottoms out during the swing. This point will be different for every club, but it will always be within a few inches of the ball on either side. If you want to hit consistently pure shots, you’ve got to make sure you low point is in the same spot on each swing.

“Low point is the key to compression,” GOLF Teacher to Watch Christy Longfield says. “We need that low point to be moving down. Hit the ball, compress the ball four or five grooves above, and then that nice divot in the ground.”

In the video below, Longfield shares a great drill you can do to practice managing your low point to hit more consistent shots.

How to practice low-point control

To practice your low-point control, grab the sand container off a cart and pour some out in a line on the ground perpendicular to your stance. Then set up as if there were a ball on the line and make a swing.

“I want you to make your divot [in front] of the sand line,” Longfield says. “I want you to feel as if the leading edge of the club goes down through the sand and makes your divot on the target side.”

Once you make your swing, you’ll be able to easily see where your divot starts in relation to the sand line. If it’s behind the line, you would have chunked the ball because your low point is too far behind the ball. While if the divot starts in front of the line, you know you would’ve thinned it because your low point is too far in front of the ball.

Once you get a sense for where your low point is in your swing with each club, you can work on moving it backward or forward to make sure you are hitting the ball in the right place in your swing arc. If you can do that and get a consistent low point in your swing, you’ll be well on your way to hitting consistently pure shots with your irons.