I dumped my irons for 30 days....

30 days ago I did something that most golfers would think is ridiculous. I took every iron out of my golf bag. And I don't mean just one iron, not two irons, every single one of them. And for the last month I've played every single round without them in the bag. And when I told people I was going to do it, the reaction was as you'd expect. Now some people thought I was stupid and some people thought it would ruin my game. And let's be honest, it was neither. 30 days later and I'm not sure I ever want them back. And what I mean by that is we've got a fixation on how a bag should be made up. And let's be honest, it looks like this. Drive a three wood, five wood, set of irons, couple of wedges and a putter. But it's about time we changed that mentality I think. After filming a number of videos over the last 12 months, I've started to question, have we got clubs in our bag because they actually make the game easier, help us play better golf. Or have we got clubs in our bag simply because that's always how we've assumed it to be made up. So I thought it was about time to explore some serious alternatives. And when I say alternative, I mean for every iron I currently carry. Right the way from wedges, all the way to the longest iron in the bag. Give me that bounce. Go on, get close. Sip ball. So this is a full bag of hybrids from Eleven Golf. From gap wedge right the way to three hybrid. And when everybody sees these, they soon form an opinion. And I did too. But before we justify that opinion rightly or wrongly, let me tell you what I found over the last 30 days. And the biggest surprise I had over the last 30 days, it wasn't about forgiveness. It wasn't about distance. It wasn't about control. It was all about confidence. That was the biggest thing that changed in my swing, my own performance. And I'll tell you the reason why. You see, the big change was my concentration became on nothing else apart from tempo. And that tempo was because I let the club head do the work. I wasn't concerned about finding that small sweet spot at the centre of a long iron. My concentration was on tempo and just letting the club head of a hybrid iron do all the work for me. But maybe that's stating the obvious. A hybrid alternative for a long iron. That's been around for a long time. But what happens when you go down to the short end of the bag? Grabbing a nine iron as a hybrid iron. Surely that can't work. The thought of a nine iron hybrid just challenges the mindset of so many golfers that they struggle to come to terms with it. But when you see performance like that, trust me, your mind soon changes. Now it stands to reason that one good thing about hybrid irons is that they launch the ball incredibly high and incredibly easily. That's a massive positive. But it's also potentially a negative. Certainly when the winds blow like this. But the short end of the bag, I am absolutely gobsmacked at the performance of these things. They give you loads of loss. They give you loads of launch. And they spin. But they don't lack in ball speed. So that thing keeps on going forward. So here's a day where we've hit really nice wedges, nine irons, eight irons. And honestly, stay on ball. Great ball flight. Back end of the green. These things have been far different than I would ever imagined. And I mean that in a very much a positive way. And a part of the game that I thought I could never adapt to would be using a hybrid as a gap wedge to chip and run. And I've got to say, it's been completely the opposite. But what I want to know is this. Despite all this positivity that I'm relaying in this video, it's hard to pick fault, in my opinion, in this set of clubs. How many of you out there will really consider trying out a gap wedge in a set of hybrids? Would you go all the way and go from gap wedge all the way to three hybrid? Have you got faith? And have you got that mind that you will open it wide enough to allow these kind of things to make golf a little bit easier for you? Because I'm not sure you do. Now this is a situation where I never thought that I would ever be more comfortable with a pitching wedge hybrid in hand than obviously your regular iron you'd be familiar with. Now there's a couple of things this does. One, it presents a huge amount of loft. But that's what a pitching wedge equivalent iron would do as well. But it seems to sit really well on the floor with a really super wide sole. Again, that's what a hybrid is. We all talk about bounce where we've got a wedge. Bounce is our friend. Well, there's no greater bounce than that because what we end up with is a situation where all you've got to do is sort of brush the turf again with a very simple stroke and let the club do its thing. We've leaked that one away, not red the green, but that's pin-eye in terms of control. Stop ball. And it just simplifies things that can be super complicated. Lots of golfers get round here. I'd probably go with putter ordinarily, to be honest with you. But they get round a tight lie like this and it'll frighten the living daylights out of them. They pick up their 60 degree wedge and, you know, straight into the ground and knock it a couple of yards here. Or the opposite, they'll blade it straight through the back. You've got a club here, a pitching wedge hybrid. You do a gap wedge as well and all you're doing is bruising the turf and making golf a damn sight easier than it might ordinarily be. Final challenge upcoming, the 18th hole at Kingston's absolute belter, 270 downhill. This hybrid is going to do a trick very, very surely. But before we get there, I want to finish by saying this. We have hopefully opened the minds of many golfers over the years when we've reviewed golf clubs. We've introduced seven woods long before they became in the bags of tour players. We're looking at nine woods a couple of weeks ago. We looked at chippers and my whole thing has been about one simple thing in golf. Trying to make the game more enjoyable. Now, enjoyment is different things for different people. You might want to stick a set of irons, a set of blades in your bag and carry on looking for that pure strike. I get that. I love nothing more than that. But if you're a golfer that plays once every other week, doesn't practice that great, enjoyment is a key part of that game and confidence is a key part of that enjoyment. All you want to do is pick up a club, swing it freely, watch the ball go up in the air and then move on. And that's what these clubs do in abundance, very, very simply, very, very effectively. And as you've seen, surprisingly around this golf course today, even in these extreme conditions, they performed far better than I ever would have imagined. We don't really pay that much attention to what Eleven have done with these clubs in terms of how they've been made up. They're easy on the eye. They sound good. They feel good. They look good. Right. I say no more. You can find more on the website. I'll chuck it as a link below. We've got a four hybrid. We've got a green that I believe we've got a way, a way left off because of the big tambourine. And let's see if we can get one somewhere down there. Right. I think that might be a bit too far left. Here it comes. Oh, it's left. Go on, ball. It's like coming down a ski slope and it's still going. It's still going. Well, we're a tad short with a four hybrid. That wind has been absolutely just relentless all the way through the round. Kington has been fantastic. I hope you've enjoyed the video. It's been a battle to put it together. But either way, plenty of good information there for hopefully a few at least to take notice of. I'll see you all soon.