What is a
‘Hollow Body’ iron?
Today’s golf irons market has been saturated with so many different types of clubs that it may be hard to keep up. Muscle backs, blades, cavity backs, muscle cavity, player’s distance, player improvement, hollow body, forged… there’s a lot of different vocabulary terms out there. One that’s become increasingly popular year after year is the hollow body iron and today with some help from our sponsor at Edel Golf and their new SMS Iron we’ll dive in and tell you everything there is to know about hollow body irons.
The term hollow body comes from the construction of the golf club. As the name implies, these irons are created with a… you guessed it: hollow body; meaning that when they are forged in the case of our Edel SMS irons, there is a cavity in the middle of the head between the back and the face. This hollow cavity differs from a traditional cavity back iron because the hollow cavity extends all the way up the club rather than just a hollow section towards the bottom of the club.
Defining ‘Hollow Body’
This additional cavity space has two primary benefits: increased forgiveness and improved feel. The increased forgiveness comes from taking all of that weight out of the middle of the club, and then spreading it to the perimeter of the club which increases the MOI (which you can read more about here) of the club, thus making it much more forgiving than a typical cavity back style club. This added forgiveness not only enlarges the sweet spot of the iron head but also allows mishits well off of center to be very controlled and retain lots of ball speed. The improved feel come from the material that they fill that void with and this is where companies can really set themselves apart from the rest of the field.
What’s Inside?
Edel SMS irons, like other companies, use a proprietary urethane foam filling specially designed by their R&D team to enhance feel, vibration into the hands, as well as sound. These factors may seem like tertiary factors compared to the performance benefits of the hollow body, but are often underrated. It’s going to be really hard to hit a club that you don't like the sound and feel of regardless of the performance characteristics, and that’s why teams like the folks at Edel are spending so much time and research into these hollow body irons to create not only a terrific performing option, but a great feeling and sounding one as well. There’s also one final benefit to this construction which you can hear about in the following video from our founder Jake.
Thanks to our sponsor Edel Golf for supplying us with the product used to demonstrate this topic. For more information on all Edel Golf products or to find an authorized fitting center near you visit edelgolf.com
