How to Hit Hybrid Golf Clubs: Fix These 3 Errors Immediately

Before you give up on hybrids, check your swing for three crucial mistakes.

I’ve been coaching the game for over 30 years, and I can tell you that nearly every amateur golfer—especially senior golfers—develops these exact same bad habits. These errors are the reason for puny distance, lousy launch, and miserable contact.

Fix these mistakes, and you’ll discover why hybrids are celebrated as the everyday golfer’s best friend.

If you really want to know how to hit a hybrid, keep reading. We’ll iron out these mistakes in your swing so you can finally perfect this shot.

How to Hit Hybrid Golf Clubs: Key Takeaways

Here’s the ultra-condensed version of this article:

Step 1: Fix your ball position and improve your contact by positioning the ball off the logo of your golf shirt.
Step 2: Avoid dragging the club to the inside on the takeaway by bringing your lead arm straight back and up. Drill this habit using a golf tee. (Read the section to learn more.)
Step 3: Stop keeping your weight on the trail foot in an attempt to lift the ball into the air. Instead, think about getting your knees to touch at the finish, forcing your weight forward.
Bonus: Overcome the obstacles of traditional hybrid design by finding a hybrid specifically engineered for amateur and senior golfers.

Now let’s get into the details.

1. Fix Your Ball Position

A lot of golfers set up their hybrid shots the same way they’d set up a shot with their iron or driver. The problem is, you’ve got a completely different goal when you’re holding a hybrid.

With an iron, you want to hit down on the ball, making contact before the low point of your golf swing. With a driver, you’re hitting up on the ball, making contact after the low point, when the clubhead is traveling back up.

But with a hybrid, you want to make contact at the low point, hitting the ball at a very slight downward angle. You can only do this if you’ve got the ball in the right position.

How to Make It Happen

The best ball position for a driver is off the inside of your lead arm. For an iron, it’s off the buttons on your golf shirt. For a hybrid, you want the ball between those two points.

The proper ball position for hybrids is off the logo on your golf shirt.

Here’s how I teach my students to find the sweet spot:

Stand with your feet together and the ball positioned in the center of your feet.
Take a medium step toward the target with your lead foot.
Take a slightly larger step away from the target with your trail foot.

These steps shouldn’t be tremendously different in size. Just as a point of reference, if you were to step 10 inches with your lead foot, you’d want to step about 11 inches with your trail foot.

Again, you can check your work by making sure the ball aligns with the logo on your golf shirt.

2. Stop Dragging the Club Inside on the Takeaway

A longer club means more distance between you and the ball. For many golfers, especially “experienced” golfers, this creates a tendency to drag the club too far inside on the takeaway.

This ruins your contact. It doesn’t do any favors for your distance, either.

What you want to do instead is bring the club straight back and up on the backswing. That’ll get you solid contact and better launch, and it lengthens your swing so you can ramp up clubhead speed.

This technique is actually the core concept behind my entire Vertical Line Swing System. I wrote a bestselling book about it (The Bad Lie) and continue to champion the strategy with my students in the VLS Coaching Program. So believe me when I say that straight back and up is the way to go, especially if you’re an “experienced” golfer.

How to Make It Happen

Simplicity is the secret to a better golf game. The less clutter that’s in your head when you step up to the ball, the better.

So instead of having you simply remember to bring the club straight up and back, I want to give you a drill that will help you turn this concept into a habit. Here’s what you do:

Place a golf tee on the target line about 16-20 inches behind the ball.
Take your golf shot, making sure the head of the hybrid works straight back over the tee on the takeaway.

This gives you an easy visual so you can both check yourself for bad habits and practice developing a better one. Practice this drill regularly, and soon you’ll find that your lead arm naturally works straight back and up.

3. Stop Trying to Lift the Ball With Your Hybrid

You’ve really got to watch out for this mistake. It’s easy to make without realizing it, especially when you’re trying to carry a hazard or bunker.

A lot of amateur golfers have trouble launching their hybrids. The design of these golf clubs doesn’t help you out much in that department (more on that in a bit), and it’s never easy to get height off the turf.

Because of this, golfers tend to stand up in their swing, attempting to lift the ball into the air. They keep their weight on their trail foot as they swing through and their head works up.

This causes them to move the low point of their swing farther back in their stance and it brings the clubhead up. Unsurprisingly, they top the ball.

If this sounds like you, you’ve got to stop standing up in your shot.

How to Make It Happen

The secret here is to shift your weight forward on the downswing. In fact, here’s a Golden Nugget you should keep in mind for any golf shot:

Your weight should shift with the clubhead. When the clubhead moves back, you shift your weight into your trail foot. When you swing down, shift your weight back to the lead foot.

This is called the pivot, and it improves your tempo, helps you control your low point, and generates more clubhead speed. And if you’re pivoting properly, you’re not standing up on the trail foot, trying to lift the golf ball.

Again, I’m not big on giving you things to think about mid-swing. So I want to offer a super simple swing thought that gets the same result:

Get your knees touching when you finish your swing.

In order to make that happen, you have to shift your weight into the lead foot on the downswing. Setting that one little objective allows you to make a big change without even trying.

The Best Hybrid Golf Club for Amateur Golfers

There’s one more challenge amateur golfers face when it comes to hitting hybrids, and it’s tough to fix, because the problem isn’t coming from you.

The problem is your hybrid’s design.

The major clubmakers all design their golf clubs to suit a professional golfer’s skill set. Their hybrids have brilliant, innovative features that make the most of a tour player’s precision and swing speed.

Unfortunately, most golfers aren’t tour players. If you don’t have the same precision and swing speed as the world’s best golfers, you won’t get the same results with a traditional hybrid. More likely, you’ll get disappointing distance and a lot of low bullets.

This is why I recommend the VLS Maxvert Hybrid for amateur and senior golfers. Our team designed this golf club around the everyday golfer’s swing.

You can read this review to dig into the details of the difference between the Maxvert and the hybrid that’s currently in your bag. But the short version is that the Maxvert puts you in control of your contact and trajectory while boosting launch and distance with draw-biased weighting and a shaft that conforms to your swing speed.

I’ve already seen a lot of senior golfers smash their handicaps with this golf club. If you want to do the same, follow this link to try the Maxvert risk-free for 180 days.

A great hybrid is the most versatile tool you can own as a golfer. If you get one that’s built for you and learn how to hit it well, you can improve your performance on a wide range of shots down the fairway and even off the tee.

Give these tips a shot and let us know how it goes.

About the Author

PGA Teaching Professional Todd Kolb is a five-time Golf Digest Best-in-State Instructor, Amazon Best-selling Author, and Minnesota PGA Teacher of the Year. In over 30 years of coaching, he’s worked with from newbies to an LPGA major champion. He’s currently the Director of Instruction for VLS Golf and USGolfTV and dedicates his efforts to helping the everyday golfer cut through overcomplicated traditional instruction to find solutions that actually work for them.