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Tyler Ferrell is the only person in the world named to Golf Digest's list of Best Young Teachers in America AND its list of Best Golf Fitness Professionals in America. Meet your new instructor.

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Finesse Wedge Set Up

Good finesse wedge set up starts with 3 key factors.

  1. A weaker grip
  2. A narrower stance
  3. A more vertical spine

With those three factors, you'll set yourself up for a weakly powered, but highly accurate, wedge swing.

Playlists: Finesse Wedge - Chipping and Pitching

Tags: Poor Contact, Pitch, Chip, Set Up, Drill, Beginner

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The drill is looking at the setup for the finesse wedge.

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So the two major components to set up are going to be our body posture and then our grip and arm posture.

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So the setup as far as the body goes is fairly simple.

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You're going to want to put your feet about a clubhead with the part.

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We don't really need a whole lot of weight shift in this swing.

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So we're going to bring our feet together to help our body control low point.

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By having the feet together, you're not going to have the same kind of desire to create any real lateral movement.

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That'll help us create more vertical movement, which will help with the cast release pattern.

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So feet about shoulder width apart, and then the spine is going to be fairly vertical.

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So with the full swing, we tend to get a little bit of access to it, especially as we start to get into the longer clubs just a bit.

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But we always want to keep that spine relatively stable or relatively neutral and have more of the pelvis control.

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Well, for this shot, we want to be relatively vertical and we want to be just slightly open.

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One of the dangers for wedge play is getting too much inside or too shallow.

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And frequently that happens from having the shoulders too close.

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Now, a big influence on that is going to be the grip, but we'll get to that in a second.

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So during, so with setup, we've got the feet shoulder width apart.

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Weight is fairly neutral to slightly favoring the front leg.

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It's not going to be 100% on the front leg, because when most people try to get 100% on the front leg, they're going to lean their body forward like this.

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Instead, what we do is by having just a little bit of rotation compared to the lower body.

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That's going to position more of the weight on the front foot, but not by shifting your lower body.

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Lower body and upper body are pretty much stacked, where the upper body is more or less on top of the lower body.

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Now, as far as the grip goes, we are intentionally trying to be weak with this shot.

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And we're trying to have the bottom of the swing pretty close to the golf ball.

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We're trying to use the bounce.

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These are three things that we don't really do with the full swing, so we're going to adapt our grip slightly.

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With the normal grip, where the hands are rotated a little bit more on the right side of the body, you can see that bias is me to put my right shoulder low.

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And that bias is me to want to have some shaft lean, so the face isn't too closed.

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This makes it hard to then have that normal grip and get in the body position that I talked about, because if I get in that body position with my normal grip,

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that club face is about 20 degrees closed. You can see it's pointing way over there.

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So what we're going to do is we're going to use a weaker grip, especially with the trailhand, where the trailhand is more on top.

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That trailhand getting on top helps with that, getting the lead shoulder to be a little bit more closed, kind of like this.

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So I'll exaggerate it. There's my stance, kind of like that.

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And now that sets me up for all the movement, you know, the kind of more of the stacked backswing and the cast pattern, where the upper body tends to stay in that tea position and just kind of go forward and up.

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And the arms are going to cast, but we get into that in some of the other drill videos.

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For this video, all we're looking at is setup, so we've got the feet shoulder with the part, pretty neutral spine, but slightly rotated.

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And weaker grip, where the right hand, especially, is more on top of the club, instead of towards the side like your full swing.

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If you do that, that's going to make it a whole lot easier to control low point. Use the bounce, make solid contact, which allows you to then dial in your distance for these finesse wedges.

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So exaggerating, everything's pretty stacked. Just going to rotate a little bit, right hand is more on top, so that my shoulders are level.

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Instead of if they were stronger, that tends to make them rotate the other way.

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And then I'm just going to make my normal little finesse wedge swing.

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So that'll help you with your distance control around the greens. It all starts with a good finesse wedge setup.

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