These are three positions I find are easy to reference. The best way to lock these positions is to practice in-front of a mirror or film your swing to see exactly where the club is setting or finishing, or simply setting and pausing for a few seconds and pausing on the follow through to give the body time to acknowledge the positions and for you to analyze exactly where the club is. Try and be disciplined when setting these positions, the more accurate the hand/arm position the more accurate we can control those yardages. This method will help of the golf course as it will keep you within your self and focused on what you can control rather than getting ahead of yourself and focusing on the result of the ball.

 

This method give much more variety in swing lengths and yardages. It should appeal more to golfers who prefer to use visual and feel keys in their swing to control the distance. The idea is simple, swinging and setting your hands to a specific time on the clock face. If we assume the hands are at the 6 o’clock position at address, if we swing back to 9 o’clock, we would follow through to the 3 o’clock position, 10 o’clock through to 2 o’clock etc. Again maintaining this equilibrium in the swing will help ensure our club is working in that pendulum motion and always impacting the ball with maximum velocity. Some players do prefer just to feel the distance by focusing on their target and just ‘feeling the shot’. I always encourage feel and give most of my students exercises to develop their feel but certainly experiment with these two methods and see which feels better and relates to you more.

 

So we have established methods to give us more control over our distances. Now to dial those distances in! Fortunately with todays technology we can use such devices as Trackman and Flightscope to give immediate feedback with regards to carry distance, total distance and numerous other statistics, however this technology is expensive and not readily available to most golfers. Firstly set up a chart/table as shown in the images to use as a reference for future use. The best way to gauge and verify your distances is to find and open range or green. Set 10 balls for each swing length you’re measuring. Measure 10 well executed shots, with your chosen swing length, if you mis-strike a ball re-hit it in order to get an accurate distance. (It’s not worth measuring a poorly hit shot as we want to anticipate hitting well executed shots on the course, although it can be worth noting to get a better understanding of our limits for poor shots). Once you feel happy of hitting 10 well struck shots, take a mean average and measure out. Try and locate the common landing area of the balls and measure this too, as this will help you with your carry distances. With these yardages logged we can now take them onto the course and be able to play approach shots more accurately and confidently (these yardages may change due to swing adjustments, so its always worth while to repeat this process every month in order to keep your distances accurately dialed in). Now that we have established an accurate average of the distances we hit each wedge, we can use this information on the course. For instance with my 54º wedge set at the arm parallel position that ball carries 63 yards and finishes 69 yards. Therefore if I have a 70 yard approach shot I can resort to my 54º and make a controlled swing back and through to arm parallel. The carry distances are equally important, if we are faced with an approach shot over a bunker/hazard we want to know the exact yardage we need to carry in order for the ball to land safely. Therefore if I have say, 58 yards to carry a bunker, it would be worth me to execute the arm parallel as this would give me a few yards margin incase I were to mis-strike the ball. You may find on the chart that some of the yardages over lap with different clubs. This is fine as it just gives us another option to hit a specific yardage. For instance a full 58º goes the same distance as the arm parallel 54º wedge. This allows us to chose the appropriate trajectory to get close to our target. If the target were tight over a bunker or on the front portion of the green we may want to choose the 58º in order to get the ball to land softer. If we had room to play with we would likely want to choose the less lofted club to run the ball up the green. We will go into more detail in the next lesson with trajectories.

 

Establishing these yardages and checking them regularly will really help you execute your approach shots with more accuracy and confidence, and allow you too manage your game to avoid trouble and shots that could potentially add strokes to your round.