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.
Subscribe now to watch the full video.
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.
Tags: Pitch
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000
In this drill video, we're going to look at the technique to dialing in your distance.
00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:10,000
So when you're going through your dialing in your distances and you're working on your
00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:16,000
hip height, your chest height, and your shoulder height, and your three different swings,
00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:23,000
focusing on this stack backswing and revers sequencing, there are a couple little pitfalls
00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:25,000
that I find a lot of my students make.
00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:30,000
So the first one I'll say is if you're trying to do anything where you're going to
00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:36,000
control distance, the easiest way to monitor that is to do what I call finding gravity.
00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:40,000
Now this is just another way of thinking about finding a good tempo, right?
00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:43,000
A consistent tempo, but I call it finding gravity.
00:00:43,000 --> 00:00:46,000
Gravity is essentially your rate of acceleration.
00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:51,000
Whatever your body wants to accelerate at, if you can find that we're going to call
00:00:51,000 --> 00:00:53,000
that gravity because it's going to be a constant force.
00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:57,000
And if you have a constant force and all you do is change the length of backswing,
00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:00,000
you're going to hit it a slightly different distance.
00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:05,000
So then you can become very skilled at either controlling your backswing or your follow-through
00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:10,000
distance and hitting the shot a certain distance.
00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:14,000
If you have a hard time finding gravity, then now you've got two variables.
00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:17,000
You've got the rate of acceleration and the length of swing and that's going to make it really
00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:21,000
hard to get really good at dialing in your distance.
00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:29,000
There can be a couple major reasons why people have trouble with dialing in your distance
00:01:29,000 --> 00:01:31,000
or finding gravity.
00:01:31,000 --> 00:01:36,000
The two major ones that I see are either creating too much downcock or stopping it impact.
00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:41,000
So by creating too much downcock, what I mean is if you're very driven by your lower body
00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:46,000
and your legs are your main power source and what will happen is you'll get to the top of
00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:52,000
your say chest height swing and that lower body is going to create so much lag in the club
00:01:52,000 --> 00:01:57,000
that the leading edge is going to be exposed and you're going to have a small margin of air.
00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:01,000
You know, you've heard me say it many times, I'm all about big margins of air.
00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:08,000
So we want to make sure that the swing is being led more from the shoulder.
00:02:08,000 --> 00:02:13,000
So even though the lower body starts with that weight shift, it's not a very dynamic or fast
00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:18,000
weight shift. It's just kind of a gentle little weight shift as if I was doing this little toss.
00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:27,000
And then I let my arms and I let my body find the rate of acceleration that you're comfortable with.
00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:33,000
Now the other one that I tend to see is stopping it impact.
00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:39,000
So a lot of golfers, especially if you lose posture early, extend, if you tend to stop your
00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:45,000
body at impact kind of like so becomes very difficult to gauge the rate of acceleration because
00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:50,000
the hands are just going to get very wippy or move very very quickly down at the bottom.
00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:56,000
So the two ways that I like to think about controlling those would be a,
00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:02,000
make sure your chest continues to turn through impact and b, make sure that your hands are finishing
00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:08,000
up and about in front of your face. Even on the nine o'clock little backswing,
00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:14,000
you'll see that my hands finish more or less in front of my face.
00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:18,000
Those two keys will really help you develop a smooth rate of acceleration,
00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:23,000
maintain your posture, all those good things that will help you with contact,
00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:28,000
and help you get really good at adjusting your swing by only a couple yards,
00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:31,000
which is the main goal of this distance wedge swing.
