Mavrik

[Ready]

Club lies......using manufacture’s “ standard lie” as benchmark, do lies in irons played by tour pros tend to be flatter than upright?

[iNeedMoreGolf]

Everytime i look at most tour players irons on tv... especially mid and short irons... they seem very upright instead of flatter.  Thats just what i thought i observed...

[SugarLandGolfer]

I feel like this may be a current style (probably based on data) where player stand closer to the ball. If you do that, your club will need to be more upright.
 

Big benefit to that is that the clubface will be closer to straight for more of your swing making it (theoretically) easier to hit a straight shot. When you stand further away, you have a flatter lie angle plus a flatter swing path, but you have to time the bottom of your swing a little more perfectly because it closes differently. 

When I’ve done the online fittings with Sub70 and Ping, they’ve both recommended 2* upright, but when I’ve done a CC fitting, the fitter recommended 1* flat, even after I tried hitting clubs in the recommended online spec. 1* flat just fit me better at the time.

Of course months down the road I go for a lesson and the coach tells me I need to get a little closer to the ball, and that is now throwing off my lie angles again, but everything is a work in progress. 

 

[ssf301]

Can't comment on tour pros, but on amateurs, most mid/higher handicappers don't maintain their spine angles and properly rotate their hips through impact.  They in effect, "stand up" a bit which tilts the club more upright.  Check with your local fitter and I bet they fit significantly more clubs upright than flat, even though static specs (and height, etc) would indicate otherwise (more of an even split between more upright and more flat).

[ChipNRun]

One thing has to do with the amount of "toe down", or "droop", in the shaft at impact. This is one of five measurements yielded by the Mizuno Shaft Optimizer.

 

Quote

Toe Down. A measure of the bowing of the shaft and clubhead toe in a downward direction during the downswing.

 

Picture courtesy of Ralph Maltby's booklet, How Golf Clubs Work / 2e (2007).

 

At one time, I had my Callaway X20 Tours reshafted from PX 5.0 (115 grams) to Nippon NS Pro 8950GH ( 97 grams). Once the reshaft was done, I had the 3, 4, and 5i loft adjusted 1* upright; due to a more flexible shaft, the toe down was flexing more than with the heavier shafts, and I was pushing the ball on occasion. I had the wedges bent 1* flat, because the shorter shafts were not bowing much, and I was tending to pull the ball sometimes. (There's plenty of info elsewhere on problems of too-upright wedge lies.)

 

I would suspect that pros, with higher clubhead speed, generate more toe down than the average amateur.