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.
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Let's say that your shoulder height backswing hits your 56 degree wedge 80 yards. And now, here you are on the course, and you are 76 yards away. There are lots of ways that you could adjust your distance 4 yards, but one of the biggest ways to make sure that you have good distance control is to have a consistent tempo. If you have consistent tempo, then a small change in backswing length, or a small change in griping up or down on the grip will make small changes easy. Here are some logical ways to see what strategies work best for you to control your tempo:
- Look at follow through position. If it is consistent, then the force was probably consistent.
- Make sure your upper body, or club, doesn't stop at impact but continues to chest height
- On a scale of 1:10, aim for a 5 or 6 out of 10 when swinging a distance wedge.
Playlists: Find Your Best Swing Quickly, Master Your Distance Wedge
Tags: Pitch
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In this drill video, we're going to look at the technique to dialing in your distance.
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So when you're going through your dialing in your distances and you're working on your
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hip height, your chest height, and your shoulder height, and your three different swings,
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focusing on this stack backswing and revers sequencing, there are a couple little pitfalls
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that I find a lot of my students make.
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So the first one I'll say is if you're trying to do anything where you're going to
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control distance, the easiest way to monitor that is to do what I call finding gravity.
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Now this is just another way of thinking about finding a good tempo, right?
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A consistent tempo, but I call it finding gravity.
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Gravity is essentially your rate of acceleration.
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Whatever your body wants to accelerate at, if you can find that we're going to call
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that gravity because it's going to be a constant force.
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And if you have a constant force and all you do is change the length of backswing,
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you're going to hit it a slightly different distance.
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So then you can become very skilled at either controlling your backswing or your follow-through
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distance and hitting the shot a certain distance.
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If you have a hard time finding gravity, then now you've got two variables.
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You've got the rate of acceleration and the length of swing and that's going to make it really
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hard to get really good at dialing in your distance.
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There can be a couple major reasons why people have trouble with dialing in your distance
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or finding gravity.
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The two major ones that I see are either creating too much downcock or stopping it impact.
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So by creating too much downcock, what I mean is if you're very driven by your lower body
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and your legs are your main power source and what will happen is you'll get to the top of
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your say chest height swing and that lower body is going to create so much lag in the club
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that the leading edge is going to be exposed and you're going to have a small margin of air.
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You know, you've heard me say it many times, I'm all about big margins of air.
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So we want to make sure that the swing is being led more from the shoulder.
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So even though the lower body starts with that weight shift, it's not a very dynamic or fast
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weight shift. It's just kind of a gentle little weight shift as if I was doing this little toss.
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And then I let my arms and I let my body find the rate of acceleration that you're comfortable with.
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Now the other one that I tend to see is stopping it impact.
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So a lot of golfers, especially if you lose posture early, extend, if you tend to stop your
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body at impact kind of like so becomes very difficult to gauge the rate of acceleration because
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the hands are just going to get very wippy or move very very quickly down at the bottom.
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So the two ways that I like to think about controlling those would be a,
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make sure your chest continues to turn through impact and b, make sure that your hands are finishing
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up and about in front of your face. Even on the nine o'clock little backswing,
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you'll see that my hands finish more or less in front of my face.
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Those two keys will really help you develop a smooth rate of acceleration,
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maintain your posture, all those good things that will help you with contact,
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and help you get really good at adjusting your swing by only a couple yards,
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which is the main goal of this distance wedge swing.
