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Dialing In Your Distance

This is a great feedback device for understanding how far you hit your wedge shots in the air. Take yardage sticks or cones and place them at 10-yard intervals starting at 30 or 40 yards and going up to your shortest full swing. For most, this will be around 70 or 80 yards. Practice your waist height, shoulder height, and full wedge swing until you know about how far you hit each club and swing. Write this on the back of your shaft so that you may check during on course play. When you get to the point where you can hit 3 out of 5 balls within a 5-yard range, then begin experimenting with ways to add 1 or 2 yards to your stock swings and vary the distances and swings more frequently.

Tags: Pitch, Drill, Beginner

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In this drill video, we're going to talk about dialing in your distance for your distance

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wedges.

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So, this is a great thing to practice and if you're re-enjusted up with these, it makes

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it really easy.

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If not, I'm going to give you a couple strategies on how you can practice it.

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But basically to dial in your distance, you're going to have markers.

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Now whether that is physical markers, like I use my yard six.

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So I'll walk out there and place one yard as a stick at 30 yards, one yard as a stick

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at 40 yards, one yard as a stick at 50 yards, 60 yards.

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I've got six of them, so I can go from 30 all the way up to 90 yards.

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That covers my distance wedges.

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So you can use cones.

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They sell these real simple little disc type things that you can put in your bag.

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The issue with that is if you're a public range, they may not want you walking out

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onto the range and you may not want to walk out onto the range.

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So a lot of golf courses have flags.

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There's a famous story of Mike Bender and Zach Johnson.

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Zach Johnson had concrete little targets put in so that when he hit that, you could hear

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that little auditory pung of the ball hitting the concrete.

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Whatever it is, you just need something so that you can get a good guest to it on how far

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the ball is going in the air.

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Because one of the things that you're going to be trying to do is you're going to be trying

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to control exactly how far the ball goes in the air.

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That's why we have these different swings.

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So the waist height, the chest height, the shoulder height, the reason we have these three

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different distances is so that we can adjust how far the ball is going to go in the air.

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And our tolerance, five yards or less.

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That's my goal.

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Now if you're trying to get to a scratch golfer, I want two, three, maybe upper end

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of four yards if you're really good driver, they're golf ball and you're just not very

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good with your wedges.

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But two yards would be ideal.

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Five yards is kind of the cutoff point.

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Because outside, five yards or so, you're going to have a hard time making a lot of

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puts.

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So it's not going to lead to a lot of up and downs.

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So for dialing in your distances, you can either do ladders where you go 30, 40, 50, 60

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and work your way back.

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You can do randoms where you have a dice and you just kind of roll it and jump around.

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But I want you to switch clubs, switch distance swings and just get really good at adjusting

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for slight amount of yardage gains.

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So it's probably the most important way to practice your wedges.

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And I think if you do it only a couple times a month, it leads to a greater success on

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the golf course.

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I know many Tor pros practice this at least once a week.

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You probably don't have the time.

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So if you do it twice a month, I think that's good enough for you to stay within

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that five yard tolerance thing.

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So if you're having trouble figuring out how to control your distance, then please refer

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to the video on the details to dialing in your distance.

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But if you feel like you're pretty solid with your distance wedge technique, you want

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to do this 20, 30 minutes twice a month.

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It will help you become really deaf at controlling the distance you're going to hit the

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ball in the air.

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