Why You Need This:

In this video, you’ll discover how to use your club’s bounce to hit clean wedges.

You’ll be able to hit pitch shots from the green without taking a divot!

Yep, that’s right…

Your local superintendent may not like this drill very much…

…because you could easily chunk shots and leave nasty divots on the green…

But using my step-by-step instruction will keep you out of his dog house!

You’ll find out the 3 most important pieces to get that perfect contact the pros make.

Check this video out today, practice the drills I teach you, and you’ll never fear another pitch shot!

What's Covered: Drill to activate awareness of the pitching flat spot. Goal is to achieve the shallowest angle of attack possible for ball contact.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 5:58

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back to the wedge series. In this video I’m going to go over one of the best drills you could ever do for your wedge game. We’re actually going to come over to the putting green and chip some balls off the green, or actually pitch some balls off the green I should say.

Probably not your superintendent’s favorite thing, but I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me, but this is really going to help you get that shallow angle of attack, and get used to contacting these balls perfectly.

You can see here as I’m making these swings, I’m going to be quiet here and see if you can hear one of these divots of this club thumping the ground. So you can hear that I’m hitting the ground, you can that just a little bit, I know it’s probably not very loud on the speakers, but I am coming down and hitting the turf.

I’m actually getting a good thud on the ground when I’m actually hitting the turf, but I’m not getting the leading edge to dig down into the ground. If you look at your wedge, you want to have a nice amount of bounce on the bottom of the club.

I usually use around 14° of bounce or so from my 56°, for my 60° I usually use at least 8 or 10. I don’t like a real low-bounce wedge, that’s going to allow me to hit these really good, clean pitch shots as I’m doing that.

What I don’t want to do is put that ball back in the stance, get the shaft forward, and start chopping down into it. Obviously the green isn’t going to like that, it’s going to leave a big hole there.

But if I do that, what’s going to happen is I have a very small margin of error. If I get my ball back, I’m coming down, imagine this is a steep angle of attack, well now if I hit let’s say a half inch behind the ball, I’m going to slam the club down in the ground, I’m going to chunk it.

Or if I hit a half inch in front, now I’m coming down into the ball, and it’s going to shoot across the green, so my margin of error is very, very low. Versus this one, I’m going to go ahead and hit, purposefully hit, about an inch or two inches behind this ball, and I should be able to still get some pretty good contact just like that.

So you can see that I hit the ground, I actually hit the ground two or three inches behind the ball, but the ball still got up in the air, had some good spin on it because my angle of attack was so shallow.

Now let’s talk about a couple of things that we’re going to focus in on to be able to do this. As nice as it is to say just perfectly hit it clean every time, go practice that. Well that’s not very realistic.

The first thing we want to do here is we want to make sure we’re pretty shallow with our plane. So with a wedge shot, again, if I put it back to my stance, I don’t want to be coming down and being very steep or vertical like this.

I want to have that nice, wide arc and I want to be shallow, meaning that the club shaft is working shallow and then coming into the ball shallow. So it looks something like this, just like that, see it’s coming in shallow, and now I’m clipping that ball, I’m clipping the ground, but not digging down into it.

The second thing I want to work on that we went over in the set-up video, is keeping those arms nice and wide. So if I start to bend up with my arms and pick up with the club, I’m creating a steeper arc. You can see how that club is picking up on a very up and down, steep angle.

As I start to keep my hands and arms wider going back, now I’m creating a big wider arc, a very shallow plane, and I’m going to still get a little bit of wrist hinge in there, but it’s going to be nice and wide. As I’m standing up and down with my spine too, I can consistently ground out.

The third piece of this is what’s going to create the flat spot. So we’re getting some lag, we have a shallow plane, we have a wide arc with our hands and arms, we’re coming down and our hands are a little too close to the ground, we have some lag.

Now from here, I’m going to be pushing up and back with my left foot, my hips and my shoulders are going to be moving up and back, and that’s going to allow my hands to move up and as the club’s coming down, it’s going to be like a 747 landing on the runway here.

It’s coming down and then it levels off flat with the ground and then comes back up. That’s how the club’s going to be coming through there. So I don’t want it to go down into the ground and right back up. It’s got to shallow out, and I do that by my hands working back up.

So you’re going to feel a little bit of up and down with the body, just a slight amount of that. So I’m going to put all three of those together, thumping the ground, hitting those good, crisp, clean wedge shots, there we go. So that one flew about 35 feet or so, no disturbance to the turf whatsoever.

Last thing I want you to be aware of, and this is a common mistake that I see people make. I can very easily open up this face of my club and start to slide across it this way, and now I’m getting this kind of slice spin on there.

The reason I don’t want to do that is because now that opens the bounce up, and now I can kind of glide across it, but now I’ve got this glancing blow. Shorter shot you’ll still get some decent spin doing that, but as I go farther and farther back, now my club is wiping across the ball, I’m getting it to move this way, where it isn’t getting the club to move squarely through the golf ball.

So if I watch it again from this side, again I’m going to be thumping that ground, but my club is moving square through the ball as I release it. There we go, so that’s going to be nice, and clean, and straight.

So good luck to you guys, work on these key things.

We’re going to be flatter with our plane, our arms are going to be nice and wide, our hands and arms are going to be working back up, we’re going to go ahead and take that ball, but we’re not really going to pick it, we’re going to thud smash the bounce into the turf, and we’re going to get those good, clean, low-spinning wedge shots.

So go ahead and do about 100 repetitions on the edge of your green. If you want to start out on a downslope, that helps to keep it a little shallower so you won’t dig right into the turf if you’re new to this.

As you get better and better, we’re going to go to dead flat land, and we’re just going to hit shots over and over again. If you get to where you can hit them about 20 to 30 feet in the air, you’re going to be doing pretty well.

Good luck to you guys, work hard, I’ll see you all soon.