Why You Need This: Today I'll show you "How to Hit Golf Wedge Shots with Backspin"

I know you've watched the pros hit an approach shot into a green and control their spin perfectly.

And today you're going to learn how you can do the same thing!

Discover the two steps you can do pre-shot to set yourself up for maximum spin on your wedges.

And there are 3 keys to perform during your shot that will have you spinning the ball just like the pros.

The third key is what I rarely see done and can set you apart from your playing partners.

Let's get started....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 11:22

Video Transcription:

All right, today we’re going to talk about how to hit those wedges that have one hop and stop, nice spin on them, really good action.

There’s a few key things you can do that make this a lot easier and to know how to spot the right conditions where you can hit those spinning shots.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so let’s dive right into it. This video isn’t going to be tons of fluff. I’m going to get right into the technique and we’ll talk about how to do this.

Piece number one. You want to make sure that you’re really aggressive, accelerate with your body, and accelerate through the shot.

So if I have a little shorter backswing and I really move on through there aggressively, I don’t want to start to slow down.

When my body slows down, what ends up happening is my hands and wrists take over, I start to flip it a little bit, and that’s that shot that drives us crazy where it just kind of floats up I the air, not much spin, a lot of times it lands short of the green, really, really aggravating.

It’s nice to have those low penetrating shots that cut through the wind, stay nice and low, tons of spin on them so we can hit over a bunker or something like this, and then really get the ball to grab.

So that’s the first key, have to be really aggressive through there when I’m hitting the shot.

Number two, I like to open my stance a little bit and pre-set my hips a little bit open. If I do that, so if I go ahead and open my feet slightly, I’ll even have my right foot slightly open here along with my left foot, that’s going to help me to open everything up.

As I start to open everything up, that makes it easier to get this shaft leaning forward so I can make a cleaner contact on this ball.

Now I’m going to hit a few, some of them are going to be good, some of them aren’t going to be that good. We’re going to try to hit a nice low spinner on every single one of these.

Now, aggressive through the shot. I’ve opened both my feet up, and I really feel like I’m going to pinch this ball under the turf, kind of smoosh it against the club face.

Not too good on that one, hit it a little off the heel. Not too bad. Definitely hit a decent shot up there, not as much spin as the one before.

So the third key here, we’ve got our aggressive acceleration through the ball, we’ve got our feet open, let’s talk about why we want to have our body open, why we want that forward shaft lean.

There’s something called – a lot of people refer to this as spin loft mountain – basically what this says is, if you can kind of imagine my angle of attack or how I’m hitting into the ground is fairly level, I’m taking a little bit of a divot here, but I’m not chopping way down into it. Hitting down just very slightly.

Now if I don’t have very much loft on this face, then it’s not going to create much backspin.

Imagine I had a sledgehammer, and I’m just hitting this golf ball with my sledge hammer, it’s going to knock it up there, it’s going to be low because there’s no loft on the sledge hammer, but it’s just a knuckle ball.

The ball’s not going to have any backspin at all. As I start to add more and more loft, the difference between how I’m hitting down into the ball which would be this angle, so say I’m hitting down very slightly, and the difference in loft on my face starts to get bigger.

So here’s the sledgehammer, swinging level, no loft. As I start to add loft to my club face, that creates more spin.

So this is what they call spin loft, and the more spin loft you get, or the bigger the difference between the direction the club’s swinging and the loft on the face, the bigger the difference between those two, the more spin you’re going to get.

That’s why you always want to use like a 60° wedge or at worst a 56° wedge when you’re doing this. So as I add more, and more, and more loft, all the way up to playable, kind of high 40s, low 50s amount of loft on the face, that’s going to give me the most spin.

If I keep on adding loft, so kind of imagine as a mountain, as I get more, and more loft, the spin goes up, and up, and up.

It kind of reaches that max around 50° or so, and then it starts to lose a little bit of spin because I lose friction.

There’s a little bit of dirt in the way, there’s a little bit of water in the way, whatever it is, you lose a little bit of friction between the club face and the ball.

So as I add too much loft and I have this face way open like this, like a flop shot, it will go high but it won’t have any spin on it.

So what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to take a lofted wedge so I keep that loft up to get the spin, but I’m also making sure that I can be nice and consistent, and hit ball first by delofting it and swinging through.

If I took a lower lofted club like a pitching wedge or a 9 iron, and I went ahead and flipped it and got the same amount of loft as I’m doing here, you really wouldn’t get the spin because my strike would be too inconsistent.

You wouldn’t really get that compression on the golf ball, or it would be one of them you compress, one of them you wouldn’t compress. It’s tougher to control it.

So again here, now that we realize that, I have my 60° wedge, I’m going to play that ball when my feet are open.

If you’re looking at it from my left heel, it’s just barely behind my left heel. If I had my right foot in there, it’s kind of just in front of my right foot.

That’s about where I like to play it to really allow myself to hit down slightly, have the shaft leaning forward, and still get some pretty good spin.

So again, I got my 60° wedge and because I’m opening my shaft is really going to lean ahead, I’m going to deloft this club slightly, I’m going to get around that 50° spin loft.

That one I chunked a little bit, didn’t quite hit it as well, so not as much spin on it. Still a decent shot, but you’ll notice how that one rolled out a little bit.

That’s going to bring in my next key here, is not every single shot you’re going to spin. No matter how good you get at these, unless you’re on the PGA Tour, you’re not going to just spin the cover off of every single one of them. You have to hit it nice and clean.

If I get anything between my face and the ball, that causes it to slide, the ball doesn’t grab the face, it slides up it.

So even a little bit of dirt on the face, a little bit of grass, little bit of water, anything like that is really going to cause it to lose some spin. So you have to have your wedge really, really clean.

So here, I like to keep a little brush with me, I don’t know if you can see this on camera, but I just have a little brush on my bag and I just wipe off the face, keep that nice and dry and clean, keep all the stuff out of the grooves.

Grooves actually are misunderstood. If you don’t have any grooves on the wedge, it creates just as much spin, if there’s nothing between the ball and the club.

It’s like drag slicks on a drag car, no grooves, all rubber to pavement, pure friction. Same thing with a wedge.

But in reality, every time you hit, there’s a little bit of grass, a little bit of water, something getting between your club face and the middle of the club, or the ball and the middle of the club, and that’s why you’ll see little pieces of grass in your club face for where it impacted.

Every time that happens you need those grooves to allow that debris to go into the groove and for the face to grab the ball.

If you had a perfect lie, you’re setting it up off a tee or something like that, you wouldn’t even need grooves on the club.

That’s why you spin it so much sometimes when you’re on AstroTurf mats, you can really get a lot of spin on there.

So here, again, I don’t want to get much stuff between my club face and the ball, so the next thing is, when I do this, I want to visualize like I’m staying pretty low to the ground, and I’m just kind of brushing the turf.

I am going to get a little bit of a divot, but it’s not going to really chop down a ton. You can have some good spin if you chop way down on it, but it’s kind of hit or miss, because something you’ll hit a little bit too far behind it, it won’t really spin like you want it to.

There we go, that’s a nice one. It’s going to be a little short, kicked off that downslope, but that had a lot of spin on it. Just got not the best kick because of the downslope there.

All right, so now let’s talk about what we’re going to do with our hips and then our hands and our arms. I open my feet so that when I hit this shot my hips can open up. I really want them leading the way.

Again, that’s going to help me deloft the club like I need to, that’s going to help me have the hands leading the way to be consistent, and I’m really going to be aggressive through the ball, if I can have those hips kind of leading the way as I’m doing that.

That one’s got a ton of spin on it, a little low one. You’ll see one stop and really check up. That thing is coming in low, but then it’s trying to grab there at the end.

The hips are really key to that, feel like your hips are opening up as that’s happening, and feel like your belt buckle, especially, is facing the target.

Now the last piece here again, I have to take a little bit of loft off this club so that I can be consistent and I can get the spin on there.

Here’s the move that most people get wrong when they’re trying to take loft off the club. You don’t simply push the face forward, or push the hands forward, when you do that, look at my club face.

It’s going to open up the club face. When I try to just move the hands forward and hit that shot, it ends up going way to the right, not a very good shot.

I left it short of the green, it’s not really compressed like I want it to be. The key there, is that you have to deloft the club by rolling the wrist or turning the wrist.

If you imagine I’m going to make a little set up position here, and when I come to contact, my hands are actually going to be like this. I’m turning that club face down.

The only reason the face is square is because I have the shaft leaning forward. If I keep the club shaft straight up and down, there is my impact position.

My only difference is when I really impact the ball, I’m actually going to be here like this with the shaft leaning forward.

If I’m looking at it from this down the line view, as I’m coming in to the ball, I’m rolling the face closed a little bit, and then I’m really pinching it, compressing it against the ground or what feel like it’s against the ground, covering that to really get a lot of spin, a lot of bite on it.

Let me go ahead and clean up this wedge one more time, and I’ll try to get a nice low one, again, with a lot of good spin on it. Hit that one nicely.

So those are the keys to really getting those wedges to stop, check up for you. Number one, going to open my stance a little bit.

Number two, I’m going to keep the club nice and clean, I have to have a nice lie. It can’t be wet, I can’t have a lot of stuff behind the golf ball, like be in the rough it’s not going to spin very much.

I’m going to have my hands leaning forward, really compressing the golf ball. My hips are leading the way, and then the real secret to this, I have to have this delofting with my wrist, like I’m rotating this club.

If I can put those together, then I can really pinch that ball, get a lot of spin on it.

All right, so we talked about in this video that kind of move where we square the face up. That’s one of the biggest differences I see between middle handicap golfers and Tour professionals.

If we can square that face up, now I can really compress that golf ball, not only am I going to hit good wedges like we talked about here with a lot of spin on them, the cool thing is I’m actually going to compress my irons better.

I’m going to hit my driver better. Everything is going to be more crisp, it’s going to be more solid, I’m going to get a lot more power into it.

Now this video really helps with that, it gets us started with this, but if we really want to ingrain it to where you don’t even have to think about it at all, you just naturally swing that way, we’re going to want to work through The Move section of the Top Speed Golf System.

Go to the Instruction tab, go the TSG System, then go The Move section and start to work through that series of drills.

When you first do that it’ll start to feel better, you’ll start to compress a few more of those shots, but it’s not quite ingrained yet.

You want to work through each of those videos, do all the prescribed drills, and that’s the way it makes it second nature.

Best of luck, and I’ll see you in The Move of the Top Speed Golf System.