Why You Need This:

In this video, you’ll learn the wedge distance ladder drill.

This is a great drill for improving your 10- to 50- yard wedge shots.

You’ll practice the drill at 10 yard increments and back it up every time you stick the ball within a club length of the pin.

And yes…

It does get challenging as you approach 50 yards.

But stick with the drill.

It’s fun and you’ll definitely improve your wedge shots at different distances.

Also, you’ll get great tips at each increment as you’ll need to be more aggressive as the distance increases.

Watch this video now to learn my wedge distance ladder drill.

Improve your wedge shots and stick it close to the pin!

What's Covered: How to start upping your wedge game with a ladder/distance drill.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 5:56

Video Transcription:

I’ve got one of the best games to help you improve your short game, and that’s a little 10-yard increment drill that I like to do.

So we can call this the Climbing the Ladder, we have several other drills in our chipping section where we do the same thing, climb the ladder, go farther and farther back.

Here I’m about 20 yards from the pin to start out. Now on this little pitch shot, I’m going to land it right around the front of the green, and I have to get the ball to get within one club-length of the whole.

You can use this with your 60° wedge like I have right here, you can do 56°, 52°, pitching wedge, whichever you want to use. We’re going to be using a pitch shot technique.

One of the things I want to keep in mind on these shorter shots is, I’ve got to make sure that I accelerate through the ball. It’s too easy to start to pick up this club, get really long going back, and then to stop our swing coming through.

I want to make sure that I’m really aggressive in accelerating through there. If I can be aggressive with my bod, getting a lot of speed through the ball, I can also get a lot more spin on it and get the ball to check up a little bit more.

Here I’m starting out about 20 yards away from the flag, and I’m going to see if I can get one within one club length. If I can do that, I’m going to go back 10 yards.

There we go, just kind of popped that one up. Nothing fancy, that’s probably within a club length, though. So I’m going to go back 10 yards, let’s keep right on going.

So here we are from 30 yards, and one thing that you’ll notice is, even though I’m farther away I’m going to land my shot about in the same spot in the green. In the front of the green is a little bit of a downslope. I’m going to land it there and let it roll out.

My ball is carrying farther in the air, but it’s rolling out shorter because I’m getting some more spin on it, it’s going to check up a little bit better.

Here again, I’m going to repeat from here until I can get one within one club head length, and then we’ll move back to 40 yards.

I want to make sure I’m nice and aggressive, and I also want to make sure that when I set up, let’s remember that we’re going to keep our upper body tilted a little bit more to the left.

A good key for this, don’t bump all your weight to the left, where you feel like you’re 100 percent on your left side and you don’t have anything on your right foot.

I am going to bump to the left, I’m going to favor my left side, but I don’t want to get slid too fa forward or I’m going to start chopping down into the ball too much, and hitting the ground maybe chunking one every once in a while, if we get our weight too far forward.

Let’s get a little bit forward, again be nice and aggressive like we were on the last one, see if we can get it within one club head length.

That one’s going to check up, a little bit too far on that one. I’m going to repeat a few more, see if I can get one within a club head length, then we’ll go back a few yards.

All right, hit the flag. I’m going to go pick this up, we’ll move on back.

Here we are from 40 yards. If you’re just now beginning out with this, you may do five-yard increments. It gets pretty dag-gone hard to hit 40 and 50-yard shots to one club head length from the flag stick.

But I recommend you try to push yourself a little bit. If this game’s easy, it only takes you 5 or 10 minutes, we want to make it tougher than that.

Now when we get out here this far, we’re going to take a little bigger swing. So I’m going to be really aggressive through the ball. I’m going to take a little bit longer of a backstroke. I’m still keeping the same overall technique.

What you might notice though, is in my shorter shots I’m going to be keeping this left wrist nice and flat. As I get more and more speed, that left wrist may have to break down a little bit as I come on through.

Now if you’re looking from down the line, what you want to see is I don’t want to let these wrists flip and the hand, and the club head kind of exit over her. You’ll see that my shaft would be kind of angled that way.

I want to keep everything moving through together, keep that candle moving, and as I finish, my club is going to move more straight up and down like this.

If I do this, my club head moves sideways and that’s the incorrect way. You’ll notice how the face, if I go toward the camera, watch how that face rolls on over as I’m coming through, so the club head is turning on over as I’m coming through the shot. That’s the incorrect way.

It’s very to struggle controlling your distances doing that. I want to keep that face moving toward the camera, and rolling on around. I’m going to finish with my hands to the left of my body, and my club shaft straight up and down.

We’ll go ahead and try a couple of these 40-yarders, this may take more than one or two tries, but I’ll do my best.

All right, there we go. First try, I got pretty lucky there, hit it nice and clean. That’s right about a club head length. Let’s go on back to 50 and we’ll stop off there.

We’re 50 yards away, we’ve got to make sure that we still get some good spin on the ball. If we’re hitting low running shots, it’s going to be tough to get those to grab and check up by the hole.

So we’re still going to have the face just slightly a little bit open, still going to be using that bounce against the turf, and the way that we’re going to get spin is we’re going to be very aggressive as we’re coming through that shot.

Again, I don’t want to have that face roll on over. If this face rolls over, it’s not going to get very much backspin on it. The ball is going to roll out.

I want to keep everything moving, keep my hands kind of in front of the club head all the way on around. That’s going to allow the club head to bite the ball and to get a little bit more spin on there.

Here we’ll try this out, again from 50 yards it may take me several tries, but I’ll do my best.

All right, hit that one pretty close. You’ll notice on some of these longer shots, when I get out around 50 yards, you’re going to see that I’m taking a little bit of a divot, and that’s OK.

On the shorter shots, 20 yards, 30 yards, I’m not going to be taking much of a divot at all. But when we get this kind of speed really coming through the ball, we’re going to have a little bit of a divot and that’s OK.

We don’t want to be taking a really deep one, we want to be nice and aggressive through that ball.

Ah, that’s got to be good. I hit that one perfect. All right, there we go. Right inside a club length.

Remember those keys and with all these shots, we’ve got to stay aggressive, we’ve got to keep moving through the ball. That way we can get the spin.

Best of luck to you guys, see you all soon.