Why You Need This:

In this video, you’ll learn how to hit wedges tight from any height.

Sometimes your normal pitch shot just won’t cut it.

On one hole, maybe you need to hit it high and soft…

And on the next, maybe you’ll need to hit it low with tons of backspin.

You’ll learn how to hit your pitch shots at 3 different heights in this video…

1. Normal, bread and butter pitch shots,
2. Lower pitch shots with more spin, and
3. Higher pitch shots that land soft.

You’ll get a great recap of your pitch shot fundamentals…

And you’ll learn the adjustments you need to make in order to change the height of your pitch shots.

There’s no problem if you want to rely on one wedge shot for most of your lies…

But it’s nice to have more options when you need it.

Watch now to add these shots to your arsenal…

And lower your scores!

What's Covered: How to use a single wedge to hit different shots.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:08

Video Transcription:

Hey guys, and welcome back. Hope you guys are enjoying your practice in the system and getting pretty good with those wedges.

Now today we’re going to talk about how to adapt for different types of situations, and use the same club for different types of shots.

I have a 60° wedge, you could also use a 56° wedge, but I chose the 60° today because it’s going to show you the most difference in these three different shots.

Let’s start out by recapping on the basic pitch. If you’re confused on the setup for the basic pitch, go back and watch those videos first, but really the idea here is that I’m setting up with a normal stance with my pitch shots. Face pretty square, just slightly open.

Then as I come on through the shot, I’m going to go ahead and keep this wrist nice and flat. I don’t want to go ahead and roll the face very much, I want to go ahead and have that stay coming through.

Really my entire body’s moving on through the shot. That’s going to get me a normal trajectory, and then it’s going to have the normal amount of spin on there.

So I can check up a little bit which is nice, but it’s not going to be like a really low grabbing, like super low grabbing shot. This would be good for just your normal lies.

Let’s say that I don’t have a perfect lie, maybe I’m sitting down a little bit. Maybe the ball’s sitting up a little bit, I can hit it from all different types of lies. This is just the one that you’re going to go to, your bread and butter pitch shot.

Let me go ahead and hit a couple of these to this pin so you get a good feel for what the normal trajectory looks like. Then I’ll go ahead and go to the next one which is going to be lower and with more spin on it.

All right, so this next shot we’re going to place them a little bit different. Now this is your super high spin shot, it’s going to come out really low with a lot of spin on it.

Even though we’re hitting a 60° wedge, the reason it’s going to come out so low is because number one, I’m having some forward shaft lean on this. So let me go ahead and tweak my setup even a little bit more.

I’m going to setup with my feet. That ball just kind of off the inside of my front foot, two or three inches behind that. Then I’m going to go ahead, open up my front foot, open up my back foot a little bit.

Now from here, I’m tilting my shoulders in front to where my right shoulder – actually let’s do this. If my left foot is open let’s say 10° or 15°, I’m going to go ahead and put the club in front of my body, open up the face about 15-20°.

I’m going to turn my body until now I’m lined up 15° or 20° in my chest. This would be square, perpendicular to the target, and this would be me opening up.

I’m going to go ahead and set hat club down, and then I’m going to keep my shoulders there, but I’m just going to set that club behind the golf ball.

Now here what I’ve done, is I’ve basically tilted my entire body up forward. I’ve leveled out my shoulders, my right shoulder’s kind of on top and in front. As I come there, I’m going to keep those shoulders kind of moving through nice and level.

What this is doing, because I’m exaggerating that a little bit, and I’m opening up the face, it’s going to give me a lot of forward shaft lean to really grab onto that ball. It’s also going to put a ton of spin on that ball.

Now if you want to cheat on this and get the feel for this as you’re very first starting out, what you could do is go ahead and set up to this ball and then I want you to turn your feet almost 45° in front.

So if I’m going toward the hole here, you’re going to see my feet pointing 45° this way. Then as I set up, now what that’s done is that set my shoulders up in the same position that I’m trying to work on there, maybe even a little bit more to where now I’m 45°, my feet are pointing out this direction.

Now my shoulders are already lined up this way. My spine is leveled out, my weight’s more in front, and then I’m just going to open up that face a little bit and I’m really going to work on hitting those low, super spin pitch shots.

Now here on this angle, you may not have the best view here just because we’re actually on the downslope on the front of the green. I’m going to try to do my best, hit some of these super low spinning shots.

You’ll see they come out much lower than the last ones even though we actually opened up the face. Let’s see if we can get them to bite a little bit, even with that green rolling away. I’ll go ahead and try a few out.

That one was.

All right now with this third type of shot we’re going to get a little bit more loft. With the first two shots, we went ahead and kept that left wrist nice and flat to be good and consistent, keep everything moving through with our body.

This time I’m going to let that wrist break down, and I’m going to let the club fold back up toward my body.

Notice when I do that, I’m going to go ahead and let the leading edge of the club right here stay facing forward. So as I come up, it’s going to come up this way. I don’t want to go ahead and let that fold up and let this roll on over.

See how the leading edge is turning on down? That can be very inconsistent as far as your trajectory. I want to come out low and the next one will come out higher, and so on. It’s very inconsistent.

This one, the first two I had a slope. It’s kind of running away from the green. This time I’m going to add a little loft to it as I’m coming through. Let that wrist fold up, and I’m going to try to pitch it past that slope.

I’m setting up pretty similar to the way I did in both the first two, the face is a little bit open, and then that left wrist is breaking down as I come on through.

Here’s the key. I can’t just throw my hands at it, I want to keep everything moving along as I’m doing this. So this ball should come out nice and high, and stop a little bit quicker because of its height.

There we go.

There we go, so we saw on that one even though I caught it just a hair thin, still got nice height, still got some good spin on it. Not quite as a consistent a shot. See it has some good spin on that one too.

Not quite as consistent, just because of the lie has to be good. This is only when you have a nice lie, but it gives you one more option to get that ball high and checking up on the green.

All right guys, I want you to practice each of those three shots. Get to the same hole, I want you to do one low super spin one, one mid-range shot, a normal pitch shot. Then one where we let it fold up and go nice and high.

You don’t necessarily have to use each of these shots, you may have one shot that used 90 percent of the time. But it’s good to have these in the arsenal so that you can better use your wedge.

You can use it with a pitching wedge, a gap wedge, 56°, 60°, try out all those wedges so you develop a feel of how to use the club in a variety of ways.

Practice those, see if you can hit 12 shots altering low, medium, high, and see how close you can get to the pin. Try to get them into the tap-in range. Keep of record of how many you got into tap-in range from short 20-30 yards away.

Best of luck to you guys, see you soon.