Russell Henley takes advantage of this growing iron trend. You should too

Listen up low-handicappers, we’re not telling you it’s time to replace that 4-iron with a hybrid — although if you want to, we won’t stop you — but it may be time to look at a more forgiving option than the rest of your set.

Enter this week’s winner, Russell Henley, who like many players on the PGA Tour uses a combo set of irons, swapping out the 4-iron that matches with the rest of his set for a more forgiving model.

Specifically, Henley employs a set of six-year-old first-generation Titleist T100 irons for his 5- through 9-iron (the vast majority of Titleist staffers use a Vokey pitching wedge instead of the set one), but within the last year, Henley decided to swap out the T100 4-iron for a more forgiving current generation T200 hollow-bodied 4-iron.

Now, this isn’t a move because Henley doesn’t hit his T100 4-iron well or high enough. He won his most recent PGA Tour title before this past weekend with the full set of T100s and had played with that setup until this season.

While we don’t have a window into exactly how Henley found the T200 4-iron to be a better fit, the more forgiving and faster design of the T200 likely led to an improvement in ball speed retention and Henley could more easily hit the ball speed window he’s looking for to create proper gapping. It’s also not only that Henley could hit the proper ball speed he needed — he could have accomplished that simply by strengthening the T100 4-iron — but he can hit it easier and more often.

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The Tour-proven player’s distance iron, with the ideal shape, performance, and dramatically enhanced feel. With the new T200, distance has never felt so good. Built with a forged face, hollow-body construction and shaped by Tour technologies, it delivers incredible launch and forgiveness in a pure player’s design. T200 represents a dramatic leap forward in feel. The entire internal construction of this forged-face iron has been reengineered – with a more stable chassis, refined Max Impact Technology and a new dual taper face – to deliver maximum speed with Tour-level feel. ENHANCED FEEL Every component of T200 contributes to its solid feel. The reengineered chassis creates a stiffer structure, while allowing the refined Max Impact Technology to fit tighter against the new dual taper forged face. This leads to better feel and performance across the entire surface. CLEAN AND CONFIDENT SHAPE For all that has changed, the Tour-inspired shape of T200 remains consistent. Players will still draw confidence from a distance iron that looks clean and has less offset, with an optimal blade length and topline thickness based on player feedback. EFFORTLESS TURF INTERACTION Working with Tour Pros as well as the grind experts at Vokey Design, our engineers were able to further improve our Variable Bounce Sole by softening the trail edge to allow the club to flow faster through the turf, even after contact. Developed for T100, it brings a Tour touch to T200. BETTER TUNGSTEN FOR BETTER SCORING By utilizing dense D18 tungsten and a 2000º aerospace brazing process, Titleist engineers can eliminate weld points and shift CG more precisely to optimize every club in the set – from fast, high launching long irons to accurate, forgiving short irons.

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Ideal gapping involves 5 mph ball speed differences throughout a set of clubs, so if the T200 4-iron was more consistently 5 mph faster than his T100 5-iron, it was a no-brainer to throw it in the bag.

Throwing a more forgiving long iron in the top of the set has been a growing trend on Tour for the last few years. Scottie Scheffler, Justin Thomas, Tom Kim, Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood all do it. Even Tiger Woods, in recent years, has removed his blade 3-iron and replaced it with a more forgiving hollow-bodied model.

These aren’t just driving irons either, this is all done to create better gapping throughout the whole bag.

So if you find yourself hitting your 4-iron and your 5-iron similar distances, try a more forgiving option like Henley and see if you can get to that optimal gapping.

Want to overhaul your bag for 2025? Find a club-fitting location near you at True Spec Golf.