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Hello friends, and welcome back into the Green Grass Golf Shop. How confident are you in controlling your distance with your wedges? Now, in my experience with my students and with myself, honestly, one of the hardest shots for a lot of golfers to hit is that 50 to 100 yard wedge shot. It’s gonna be different for everyone depending on your distances. The shot I’m talking about is what we call that three quarter wedge shot. You’re too far away for a nice soft pitch, you’re too close for a full swing. Other than that same distance out of a fairway bunker…a shot that can absolutely burn in hell…this is one of the hardest in the game. Now, having said all that, it’s seen as one of the hardest because most don’t understand the tricks that you can use to make it easier. But that’s what I’m here for, so let’s dive in! And be sure to stay till the end to learn how you can hit that nice, sexy low spinner that you see on Tour that players hit, looks like it’s skipping all the way across the green until it stops right next to the hole.

Now, first and foremost, the way we should be controlling our distance with our distance wedge shots like this is with the length of our backswing. If you hit your 60 degree wedge 80 yards with a full swing and you’re stepping into a 60 yard shot about to take that same full length backswing to try to hit that shot, you’re making things much harder on yourself than they should be. The way that we make golf easier on ourselves is by trying to take out as many variables as we can that we don’t have the ability to measure. Some of the biggest of those are the force or the effort that we put into our golf shots, and trying to have different swing speeds or different power levels for the same full length swings. The best thing that you can do for your game is allow yourself to take the same force down swing every time, control your distances with the length of your backswing. Now, I’m not saying that’s inherently easy to do, but it’s much easier than having different swing speeds or different amounts of force for different shots, and will make you much more consistent. You just can’t match that shot to shot as easy as you can by varying the length of your swing, something you can do much more easily and match that shot to shot than trying to create as much speed as you can from that point. Always trying to create as much speed as you can from wherever you finish your backswing is something you can do to make the game much, much easier on yourself.

The overarching reason why most golfers hate the shot is timing. Even when controlling your distances properly with the length of your backswing, Most swings, just about all swings, are imperfect in their mechanics and have to rely on timing. That’s not meant to be an insult to anyone. Most golfers on Tour rely on timing as well. If you don’t have an exactly perfect zero across the proverbial Trackman board, meaning a zero angle of attack, swinging perfectly zero degrees down your target line, face perfectly square towards your target every single time, then you don’t have a mechanically perfect swing. I don’t have a mechanically perfect swing. It describes almost every golfer on the planet. So when we’re relying on timing, dialing in that full swing timing all day on the range and taking full swings, then having to use a swing uses a completely different timing, like a shorter wedge shot, it’s almost too much for some to wrap their mind around. And I understand that, I feel the same way. So why do we even do that? We all have a tempo for our full swings. Generally, it’s going to be the same no matter what club we have in our hands. If it’s not, that should probably be something that you work on next time you’re on the range. I think about three to one is it at least something that we fall pretty close to. That meaning that our backswing takes about three times longer than our downswing. Think 1, 2, 3 back and 1 down. Now, it doesn’t matter what your tempo is as long as it’s the same for every swing. You can get away with just about anything. The Pause King, Ben Kruper, certainly doing just fine with his tempo, whatever that tempo is, and doing just fine is an outrageous understatement. I’m not here to tell you to change your tempo or change your timing. Your tempo is yours, and it’s beautiful, and you’re beautiful, and I love you.

The lesson for today is quite the opposite. You need to use that full swing tempo for more of your golf swings that aren’t your full swings. You need to utilize that beautiful tempo more often. When you have a shorter swing, especially if you struggle with contact on these shots, try to take a little slower backswing so it takes the same amount of time to get to that impact that it would on a full swing. We have a swing that needs to produce half of our max distance. Instead of this full swing, where I go (swing) like that. I’m going to try to take that same timing and turn it into a much shorter swing like this (swing). I also tend to have a mini pause at the top of my full swing, so I’ll even try to do that on these swings too and it helps me a lot. A great way to practice this, next time you’re on the range, I think most of us have headphones that we wear on the range these days anyway. But if not, take some with you the next time you go and download a Metronome app on your phone. I’m certain that there are about a billion free ones out there, measure your tempo for your full swings. Once you have that, start trying that out for your half and your three-quarter shots. Take that half backswing back a little slower to match the timing of your full backswing. See how that can make those shots much, much easier to time, much easier to hit. Again, anything we can do to take variables out of our swings, make swings of different lengths, and shots of different distances much more similar, we can make the game much easier on ourselves.

Okay, now it’s time for the fun stuff. How do you hit that super low shot that shoots across the green and somehow checks up on a dime? I’m going to walk through that now, but I need to warn you, actually being able to pull it off the way they do on TV is incredibly challenging. These guys spend eight hours a day (multiple days per week) just hitting wedge shots. The timing is very hard, the way you have to lead the hands, the feel you need to have with the shot is not something everybody is ready to pull off. Not everyone can hit this shot. Even I struggle to pull it off more often than not to the point I don’t really try it much on the course unless I’m really trying to show off. There are two things you need to do to pull the shot off. On top of absolutely perfect contact, you need an incredibly steep angle of attack and an open club face with your highest lofted wedge. So the things we’re going to do at setup here to help with that open the face, right? And then I’m going to retake our grip with that as my square face shot. And then I’m going to put the ball as far back in my stance as I can manage. Something that we’re going to do to make this part effectively easier is opening our stance a little bit, okay? [In doing so] Moving your belt buckle even further forward, effectively moving that ball even further back. Now, that’s the easy part, the setup. The really tricky part is the swing. The way we create a steeper angle of attack with such a short swing is with the hands and the lag we create with the timing of our release. The further that you can get these hands forward for the club releases down towards the ball, you can see the steeper angle of attack I’m going to have down towards that golf ball. The lower that ball is going to take off, and the more it has the potential to spin. The other place that the spin clubs from is the club face. Opening up that club face creates a little extra loft, that is where a lot of that spin comes in, is having that extra loft to combine with that steep angle. This is why the shot is so hard, though, is the swing. Most golfers are not used to swinging with such a delayed release timing like this, right? Because you have to really get those hands forward, get those hands way ahead of the ball, and you can get very, very steep with that. Now if you can make that move more comfortable, by the way, you can bring that to the full swing as well to create even more club head speed. It’s a huge first step to consistently compressing your irons too, by the way. Now from there is where the magic really, really comes in, the way the club is released. There are two ways you can do it, and you can get pretty good check by just kind of chopping down to the left and not worrying about the massive divot you’re taking or trying to make a big follow through. However, if you can time this release where you kind of flip the hands (during/after the impact) and keep the club head pointing towards the sky as much as long as you can and chop that follow-through off, the more you can clip it, the more you can really pull the string. The more you can accelerate, keep that club face pointed in the air, the more you can get for your follow-through angle to match your angle of attack, the more you can zip it. Best of luck, because this one takes a crazy amount of practice hours to pull off with confidence, as you can clearly hear from that beefy contact that I was making with the mat…well before the ball.

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