Toms Golf Tips

Where should the ball be in my stance for a 7-iron?

I get that question at least twice a week. And for years, I gave the same answer everyone else does: ball position moves progressively from the center of your stance with wedges to inside your lead heel with the driver. Nice and tidy.

A clean little system. Except it’s mostly wrong. Or at least, it’s way more complicated than that.

The Myth That’s Probably Messing With Your Game

Here’s what nobody told me until I’d already grooved some terrible habits: ball position isn’t really about the club. It’s about where YOUR swing naturally bottoms out. Think about that for a second.

We’ve all been taught this universal system – ball here for this club, ball there for that club – as if every golfer swings the same way. As if a 6’4″ guy with long arms and a flat swing plane should position the ball identically to a 5’6″ player with an upright swing. It doesn’t make sense when you actually stop and think about it, which I didn’t do for an embarrassingly long time.

What Actually Determines Your Ideal Ball Position

Your low point – that spot where the club reaches its lowest point in the swing arc – is personal. It depends on your posture, your spine tilt, how much lateral movement you have in your swing, and about a dozen other factors. Some players naturally bottom out two inches ahead of center.

Others bottom out right at center. Both can hit the ball beautifully, but they need different setups to do it. I spent two seasons fighting a thin miss with my irons.

Tried everything. Stronger grip, different shaft, you name it. Turns out I was playing the ball too far forward for my swing, which has less lateral shift than the “textbook” move.

I was catching the ball on the upswing without even realizing it. Moved everything back about an inch. Problem solved.

How to Find YOUR Low Point

Here’s a simple drill that changed my understanding completely. Go to the range with a can of foot spray or some impact tape. Hit ten shots with your 7-iron and pay attention to the divot pattern – not where the divot starts, but where it’s deepest.

If your deepest point is consistently behind the ball, you’re playing it too far forward. If you’re barely taking a divot at all, you might have it too far back.

The Real Distance Killer

Here’s where this gets expensive in terms of yards.

When your ball position doesn’t match your natural low point, one of two things happens:

Too far forward:

You either hit it thin, or your body instinctively stalls to avoid chunking it. That stall kills rotation, which kills speed, which kills distance. I’m convinced this is why so many amateur players “flip” at impact – their body is actually trying to save them from bad ball position.

Too far back:

You deloft the club way more than intended. Great for punch shots. Not great when you’re trying to hit a high, soft 8-iron into a firm green and it comes out like a bullet.

What I’d Actually Tell You to Do

Start with the conventional wisdom as a baseline – it’s not useless, just incomplete. Then adjust based on your own low point tendency. Most amateurs, honestly, would benefit from playing the ball slightly further back than they think they should.

We’re not tour players with perfectly synchronized lower body slides. I’m not 100% certain this applies to everyone. Some players genuinely do match the textbook positions perfectly.

But in my experience teaching and playing with recreational golfers, most of us don’t. The best investment I ever made in my game was accepting that my swing is my swing, not some idealized version from a YouTube thumbnail. Ball position taught me that lesson the hard way, one thin shot at a time.

It was the third hole of a charity scramble. I’d already changed my glove twice. My playing partners kept asking if I was okay.

Honestly?

I didn’t even know what I should tell them. My hands were cramping, my forearms were screaming, and every shot was turning right at the trees like my clubface had a GPS lock on the fattest part of the woods. A guy I wouldn’t even call a golf buddy—some retired club pro roped into our group—watched me stand over my ball on the fourth tee.

Before I even swung, he strolled over and just… ran his hand along mine. Said nothing. Just felt my grip. “You’re strangling it,” he said. “On a scale of one to ten, you’re gripping that thing at about an eleven.” I just smiled and told him that I always gripped firm because that’s what my dad told me. “Control the club,” he used to preach.

But the lazy old guy just shook his head and asked me to try something. Hold the club like I was balancing a tube of toothpaste, with the lid off. Firm enough so I couldn’t spit toothpaste out with my swing, but not so tight I squirted paste all over the place.

I thought he was nuts. Did it anyway. That drive went twenty more yards than anything I’d swung all day, and landed in the middle of the fairway.

The Grip That Kills Your Speed

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about golf when you start out: tension is the enemy of speed. And grip pressure is where it all begins. If you grip that club too tightly, the tension travels through your forearms and up into your shoulders, and suddenly your whole swing is this stiff, robotic thing with zero rhythm or flow.

You lose lag. You lose clubhead speed. You lose everything that makes golf swings work, and you won’t even know you were doing it because you feel in control.

That’s the trick: tight grip feels like control. It feels like you’re doing good, like you’ve got a responsible grip on that club so it doesn’t fly out of your hands when you get to the downswing. But physics doesn’t care about how you feel.

Grip tightly and your wrist hinges won’t work properly. And that’s where most of your power comes from. I’m not a biomechanist, so I can’t be sure but I believe that correct wrist cock can make up fifty percent or more of your clubhead velocity.

Lose that, and that’s a different game altogether. I spent years wondering why tiny guys half my size could tee off further than I ever could. Turns out they weren’t more muscular.

They were looser. It’s Not Just About Power, It’s About Sensation That’s when it really hit me, but what took longer to really grasp was how the amount of grip pressure you use affects your feel around the greens. And honestly, this is the aspect where I think golf most desperately needs to improve.

When you’ve got a long putt—say 30 feet—and your hands are tightly gripping your putter, you lose all sensation of what the club head is doing. You can’t feel the putter, its momentum, the natural tempo it wants to swing with if you’d let it. Same kind of thing with chipping.

I used to tap so many of my chips fat, and I always blamed everthing—the technique, the wedges, the lie, the grass type, the weather, my childhood. But the real problem was that I was griping the club like it owed me money. Keeping that grip light enough to feel what the club and the clubhead are doing as you swing is the key difference between typing with a numb finger and typing normally.

When your hands are gripping really tight, the information isn’t there in front of you anymore—it’s like you’ve turned off the machine feeding it. This is why I will always stand by this statement: grip pressure is the most overlooked fundamental in golf. People get obsessed with how wide their stance is, where the ball is in the stance, how far they’re taking the backswing, all down to the nitty gritty details—but they don’t check their grip on every shot.

And they should. It reminds me of how people are interested in the shiny things and overspend on those, when it’s the fundamentals that really matter. Like for instance, the real estate investment that you start by checking out the tenure and the location and the transport connections—then read its marketing just for fun. Much like how KL360 emphasizes its foundational strengths first—world-class amenities, strategic KLCC location, proximity to Raja Uda MRT, and solid freehold tenure—before highlighting its distinctive features.

Golf could do the same: certainly the fundamentals must be right before the flashing lights are turned on. How do you fix this?

So let’s get on to the practical side

I want to tell you why this fixes it, not just tell you to do it. Get a tube of toothpaste, take the lid off, and squeeze it till all the toothpaste comes out. This is pretty much what will make your brain understand exactly what it is you want to be doing grip-wise. “Squeeze lighter” is too vague.

Your nervous system doesn’t know what that means when you’re standing over that pressure shot. But “don’t squeeze this tube of toothpaste out”—that’s precise. Your brain has that experience stored somewhere.

Second, check your grip pressure in your pre-shot routine—not just at address. What I’ve found is I tend naturally to tighten up between the time I take my stance and the time I swing. There is a three second window between checking distance and setting up the swing where my grip pressure goes from “okay” to “way too tight” without me noticing.

So I do a quick squeeze-and-release before I get to my backswing. Squeeze to about an 8 out of 10, then consciously ease to about a 4 or 5. That contrast is enough for the lighter grip to be easier to keep.

Third—and this one sounds nuts—pay attention to your breathing. When you hold your breath your whole body tightens up, including your hands. I’m not suggesting a yoga-breathing routine or anything—I just relax my exhalation during my swing trigger.

Shockingly effective. Oh—and just to be aware of: good players naturally grip firmer when under pressure. Tournament rounds, first tee at a big tournament, matches you care more about that they have dollar value even if it doesn’t matter to anyone else.

Knowing that is half the battle. Make sure you consciously relax the tension in those moments. At first I’d like to think it doesn’t matter, but it’s going to be a work in progress for me forever.

Some days I leash death grip by about 5 holes and have to completely reset. I’m sure I’ll get better, but I just can’t get perfect on that. The strangest discovery of this entire process has been how the thing I thought I needed to do—hold on tight—was actually the thing that’s been holding me back the most.

I tried for three months, absolutely wrecking my swing in pursuit of lag. Three months. That’s roughly 90 range sessions, 4,000+ balls, and a highly puzzled swing coach who eventually put me on the side of the range and said, “You know what you’re doing wrong?

Everything.” See, I’d watched those same YouTube videos you probably have, the ones where they freeze-frame Rory at the top and draw those gorgeous lines across his hands showing how his wrists are still fully hinged when his hands are already waist high. The ones that made you go, “Oh, I just need to hold this angle longer.” So I held. And held.

And turned a perfectly fine 8 handicap into a crap show, looking for all the world like a guy smacking away at bees. The issue isn’t that lag is a myth or not important. It is both.

The issue is that I was trying to manufacture something that’s supposed to occur naturally—and in doing so, I was preventing it from happening altogether.

The Drill No One Ever Mentions (Because It Sounds Too Easy)

Here’s what my coach finally revealed to me, and I’m still slightly vexed that it took that long: he called it the “dead hands” drill, but I know others call it the “pump drill” or “gravity drop.” You take your regular backswing—full rotation, all systems go. But then, instead of throwing your arms at the ball, you start your downswing with your lower body while your arms do absolutely nothing.

I mean absolutely nothing. You let them simply fall as if detached. Sounds crazy, right?

It did to me. For the first twenty swings, I topped everything. The ball dribbled forward, and it felt like I had never held a golf club in my life.

My brain was screaming that this couldn’t be right. But then, at around swing number thirty, the club started doing this odd little “whip” through impact. My divots advanced, and the ball began compressing in a manner I had only experienced twice in my life.

The lag I had been chasing for three months was there the moment I stopped trying to hold onto it. Here’s something tour pros know instinctively that most amateurs fail to realize: lag is not something you generate with your hands. Lag is the outcome of sequencing.

It’s what happens when your lower body leads the charge while your upper body follows a bit fashionably late. The angle between your forearm and club shaft remains because the club can’t keep pace with your hips—and not because you’re actively gripping tighter or resisting the release.

The Physics of Why This Is Effective (Ignore them if you must, but trust me, they matter)

I’m no physicist—not much of a mathematician, either.

But I’ve been told enough times what happens when you swing a golf club that I can comfortably relay it without distortion. Playing golf is akin to setting up a double pendulum system—you have one pendulum in your arms, and the club constitutes a second. When you initiate the downswing from the ground upward (feet, then hips, then torso, then shoulders, then arms, then hands), you’re forming a “kinetic chain.” As each part accelerates, it passes that kinetic energy on to the next.

The lag occurs because the club, being the last thing attached to the chain, is the last to accelerate—and, consequently, the last to gain speed. Now here’s the part where amateurs go awry. When you attempt to “hold the lag” with your hands, you interfere with this chain.

You create tension where there should be looseness, you render your arms the engine rather than the connecting link. I’m not absolutely sure about the biomechanics—certainly there are more informed folks who debate over torque patterns and wrist conditions—but I do know this: every time I’ve observed someone improve their lag, it’s been due to sequence improvement. Never from grip pressure.

Never from “resisting the release.” Never from any of those sounds-right-thinks that don’t actually work.

The Tour Pro Advice You’re Not Getting (And I Understand Why)

Here’s a controversial opinion I’ll stick to my guns on: tournament professionals provide poor swing advice because they don’t truly understand what they’re doing. That was a little coarse; let me elaborate.

They understand their actions—meticulous repetition over tens of thousands of swings has assured me of that—yet they don’t consciously comprehend what creates their lag; it just manifests itself. And in response to inquiries, they provide the “feel” they possess—and which is often the contrary. I have observed tour players admit to the sensation of “grabbing the handle,” “clinging on for dear life,” and “preserving the angle as long as possible.” And I believe that’s how it feels to them.

However, high speed filming demonstrates their wrists naturally releasing, their grip pressure remaining fairly steady, and their sequence doing its thing. This is why you can emulate a tour player’s drill and seem to deteriorate. You’re mimicking their perceived sensation, not their mechanics.

The dead hands drill functions because it offers you the appropriate sensation for what’s truly intended. You’re not seeking to force an artificial occurrence; instead, you’re stepping aside.

Practical application:

devote ten minutes at the outset of each range session to practicing half-speed swings where your sole consideration is “lower body initiates, arms are gravity-bound.” Don’t worry about the direction of the ball initially.

You’re instilling a pattern, not executing shots. Once the sequence feels authentic (which may require several sessions, or it may be immediate—everyone differs), you’ll be able to incrementally introduce speed. The essential aspect is that you must believe in the process even when the results initially appear disastrous.

Your body has unlearned a particular method of generating speed—probably involving hurling your arms at it—and unlearning takes patience. The divots will confirm when it’s functioning prior to the ball trajectory. One other matter, and it’s something I wish someone had told me earlier: if you’re truly having trouble with this notion, experiment with hitting balls with your feet together.

It may sound irrelevant, but it compels you to sequence correctly; you simply can’t turn hard from the ground without falling over. The subtle weight shift and the arm drop must synchronize, or you’ll literally fall over backward. It’s mortifying but effective.

I’m long in the tooth and have pursued much of golf’s magical remedies, and I’ve encountered more than my share that were fraudulent. This one isn’t: it transformed my insight into the golf swing. But the aggravating aspect is that it’s so rudimentary it doesn’t seem like a secret.

It doesn’t seem like something worth concealing. And yet inexplicably we overlook it in favor of complex hand manipulations that-