Tyler Ferrell is the only person in the world named to Golf Digest's list of Best Young Teachers in
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Train Your Release
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Getting shaft lean can be great for your stock full swing, but for the finesse wedge shots, it can cause inconsistent contact. To work on releasing the club for the finesse wedge, take 2 shafts and stick them in the ground so that they are aligned in the same vertical plane just slightly in front of the golf ball (about an inch). When working on your wedge stroke, you want to feel like the club is going to hit the bottom shaft before the top shaft in order to use the bounce of the club and increase your margin of error..
Playlists: Train Your Release, Finesse Wedge - Chipping and Pitching
Tags: Chip, Impact, Drill, Intermediate
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The drill is hit the bottom shaft. So this is a great drill for getting the proper
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shaft lean for the finesse wedge shot. We've said it before. I love James
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Seekman, Stanut Lee, kind of the modern way of teaching what the best wedge
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players on the planet do. Well most of us were taught when we first started to
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kind of lean the shaft way forward like so and it just gives such a small margin
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for air especially on really tight really manicured courses that we all had to
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relearn how Tom Perny sort of stand out Lee or Brad Faxon or some of these
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great wedge players, Corey Pavan, what they did to be so good at wedges. Well here's
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a one of the one of the big pieces is instead of having the shaft leaning forward
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which takes away bounced and exposes the leading edge so that it can dig into
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the ground. Good chipper is good pitchers tend to have the shaft a lot more
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vertical. Well this is a great drill where I'm going to take two shafts and
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normally I would stick them in the ground but if I'm practicing indoors
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which you can work on you can just take an old shoe box like I did here and stick
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the alignment rods through them and they'll balance out. So basically it ends up
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they're not in there that sturdy but it ends up looking something like this so
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I have you know two shafts, one of them about four inches off the ground and one
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of them a little bit higher. I'm going to set up to this box right here and in my
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mind I'm going to try and hit the bottom shaft before I hit the top shaft so
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if I face you this will be the easiest view for it so I can see both shafts and I'm
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going to try and basically just let the club drop and hit the bottom shaft
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before the top shaft. Now in reality when I'm taking a swing I'm going to hit
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this top shaft just a fraction of a second before the bottom shaft but if you
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struggle with wedge play there's a good chance that you're using too much body
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and creating too much shaft lean and now you can see that I would clearly hit the
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top shaft before the bottom shaft. I'll do it at that again and a little bit of
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an angle just in case the box was blocking your view so if I was to have too
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much lower body which is one of those kiss of deaths or if I was to get this
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axis till you can see that that club would almost certainly hit the top
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shaft well before the bottom shaft so I'm going to get this feeling of just letting
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the club kind of fall and hit the bottom shaft and if you stick them in the ground
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you can actually kind of make contact a few times so this is a great drill for
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getting that feeling of that vertical shaft and we'll show you what it looks
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like so I don't actually recommend hitting golf balls with the shafts there
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but now I'm going to keep that same visual and I'm going to try and hit that
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bottom shaft just slightly before I hit that top shaft so with all my good
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thinness wedge technique I'm going to try and hit that bottom shaft before I hit
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that top shaft. If you if you struggle with wedge play especially if you're
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bleeding shots hitting fat and thin shots this can really help you bottom out the
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swing in the right place and use the bounce of the club which will give you a
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much bigger margin of error when you're practicing your thinness wedge
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chipping and pitching.
