Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "PITCH SHOTS are MUCH EASIER with These Pro Short Game Tips"

In today's lesson...

I have a special guest join me to give you some pro "secrets" with your wedges...

....so that you can dial in your distances and control your spin.

Plus, find out why taking too big of a backswing on your shorter pitches can lead to problems with your consistency.

There are so many incredibly useful nuggets in this quick lesson.

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:37

Video Transcription:

Great to have you here today. I got a special guest with me. Good buddy of mine, Casey Vanil, a for, uh, a fellow Kentuckian, uh, grew up there and he is a really good player. Played on the mini tours, uh, now got his amateur status back and I gotta tell you, he is pretty dangone good with these wed shots. And I wanna show you some of the secrets, some of these pro secrets that he does so well to incorporate those into your game.

And we're gonna do that by hitting about a 50 yard shot here. So let's go ahead and, uh, set up to one and let's make a few swings. Lemme grab you a towel so you can clean off that club. Between shots, but what do you try to think of? So here, you know what I, I, you said earlier that I really liked is you try to like kinda flight it down a little bit and keep your body moving through the shot.

Yep. You feel like that's a big key, like to keep rotation going through accelerate. It's one of the biggest things I used to struggle with was decelerating at the ball, take it too big of a back swing. So I like to focus on acceleration. And, and really just dialing in where I think the ball needs to land.

Okay. So go ahead and hit a couple. And, and I loved it because when he was saying that, I was like, yeah, that's the biggest key for everybody to work on. So notice how as he comes back, he's not gonna go quite as far back and he is gonna really accelerate through the shot. And that was an awesome trajectory there.

So has he hit just a little tiny bit harder to get it all the way there, but that's the real, if you, if you watch these shots, they're gonna take off low and be really penetrating. That's the key for really good wedge players. They're gonna get that flighted down like that. So PR two pretty nice shots there.

So notice how he's always feeling like he's being aggressive through that shot and hitting through it. A good rule of thumb for that is, you know, here he's probably taking about a half of a backswing. Just make sure as you come through that you're gonna accelerate and go at least that far on the way through, if not a little bit farther than that.

So your follow through is slightly longer than your backswing. It doesn't have to be that extreme, even if you make the same length back and through. You want to feel like I'm very aggressive through there and, uh, clean off the club face there. You'll notice some of these really start to grab and spin.

The only way you can get spin on 'em is to really be aggressive through the shot and really try to add speed, you know, coming through there. Now, one other cool thing that I love that he does, And he's, he's one of the best at this, is he's gonna open the face. And most of the time when people see an open face like this, so if this is square, you see my club square, his is almost 15, 20 degrees open.

They think, oh, this is gonna be a high shot. Well, he's not hitting these shots high. He's hitting these very low. And penetrating. What he's doing there is as he's rotating through, he's keeping the entire right side of his body kind of moving through the shot and the face is actually gonna be closing down and squaring up.

So show him one where you get to impact. So this is addressed when you get to impact the right side's coming through and notice how the face starts to like, so if it starts out here where it's a little open, as he comes through with the right side, it actually squares back up and gets it low, but it helps to engage the bounce a little bit more.

And notice how when he hits this one again, very low penetrating shot. The awesome one there. It's got a bad bounce. His greens are punched. Um, so we're not quite getting the zip on 'em that we could if we had new fresh greens, but that was hit really, really well. So another thing that I really like is watch his knees.

You'll notice that his knees pivot. You don't wanna keep the legs still. As he follows through, you'll see his right knee almost goes facing to the target. And go ahead and hold your finish after you hit this one. Ooh, that was good. That was really good and that had a ton of spin on it. Look how his right knee here is almost in front of his left toe, and you look at his heel, I could put an entire club under his heel.

That's really key. A lot of times I'll see players that fall back and what ends up happening is you drop kick it. So you imagine if you fall back on your right side, you keep that heel down. Now all of a sudden, my low point is moving from the middle of my stance to the back of my stance, and I end up drop kicking it.

I hit it thin, I hit it way too high. It's just inconsistent. So that was awesome. Spin on that. One reason we're cleaning the club here is if you wanna get a lot of spin on it, you really wanna be a, a precise wedge player. This thing's gotta be really clean, like you could eat off of it. I, I'd say, A lot of times I say it's not really true cause I've eaten off a lot dirtier things than you need your club to be.

If you're gonna get a ton of spin, I'm talking one blade of grass, you gotta wipe that off there. Any kinda residue at all, get that thing really dry, it grooves really clean and it can really spin a ton there. Now finally, what you'll notice is that I love about this too, is when he finishes it's gonna be very steel.

So on this one, go ahead and hold your follow through again.

Yeah, awesome there. And you'll notice how this club doesn't really move. He's coming to his follow through position. It just settles into it and it doesn't move from there. What I see with players that are inconsistent, they hit that follow through position. They're all falling back or moving around all over the place.

There's actually a, a pretty cool thing that happens here is when you hold your finish, you actually have more time. To feel what you did in the shot that you just hit before, uh, you go onto the next one. So what I mean by that is, If I move to here and I pause my body, my eyes are seeing where that shot went, and I can still feel what I just did inside my body.

If I move here and then move all around and lean all over the place and take five steps and I'm falling back and doing all that, I can't even remember what it just felt like in my swing, and I'm not gonna be able to, to be as fine tuned. I'm not gonna be able to adjust on the next swing as well. So every single good wedge player, go watch on the PJ tour and what you're gonna see every single time.

Watch this finish again. Notice how smooth he goes into the finish and then notice how he holds that the whole way. There's no extra motion there at all, so he's really holding that finish. Now, the last part, I like this last kind of pro tip, we're getting really advanced on it. You mentioned earlier that you really kinda like to drive that right side of the body through.

That's right. And it's almost like that wedge face being a little bit open as he drives the right side through it squares the face up and keeps everything moving through the shot. So that right side driving through and watch this, particularly your right shoulder, you do this as good as anybody. His right shoulder keeps on moving all the way through, and it's almost gonna be facing toward the target a little bit as he hits the follow through.

So notice how his right shoulder is all the way up here in line with his front foot. Again, if you're falling back, that right shoulder stays like this and it doesn't rotate all the way around. Alright, so now if you really wanna take this to the next level, there's still something that you need to do. If you get this great technique and you're hitting it solid.

You gotta be able to hone in those distances. So when you look at tour players, again, they're hitting an 80 yard shot, then a 60 yard and a 40 yard. How do they know how far to hit it? You know, we were talking earlier, you said you spent a lot of time just like I did, you know, speaking my language here, doing the clock swings.

So meaning that if my left arm is the clock face, how far back do I go? To hit a shot a certain distance. So let's imagine that this is six o'clock, we'd be 7 39 and so forth. And I found when I started doing that, it's like a total game changer for me. My wedges got so much better and the, I had to figure out a secret though to make that work.

It's not just how far back you take your arm. There's a special way that you do the timing. So if you're a member of Top Speed Golf, go to the instruction tab, click on the top speed golf system, and then in there go to the short game area and I'm gonna teach you the right way to do the clock system. You could be hitting your numbers dead on, but be getting very inconsistent results, very inconsistent distances if you don't do this piece right, which I show you in there.

So make sure you head on over there right after this video. Uh, thanks again, Casey. Good being here. Yeah, do the, do the drills we just showed you there. Do those tips and you're gonna be hitting some awesome wedges.