From about 110 yards and out, we control distance by the club we select. The seven or eight irons/hybrids in our bag, with their graduated lofts, take us comfortably and predictably out to about 200 yards. Inside 100 yards is a different matter, since we don't have clubs for the incremental distances we want to hit to. There are three ways of solving this problem.
1. Most iron sets run through a 4-degree progression in loft. Each iron has four degrees more loft than the previous one. If you continue that progression through your wedge set, you can start from your pitching wedge, which is generally 48 degrees, and add wedges in lofts of 52, 56, 60, and 64 degrees.
All you have to do, then, is hit each of those clubs with a full swing and you will have a set of consistent, predictable distances for shorter shots. The drawback is that every additional wedge you put in your bag means some other club has to come out. The choice comes down to how much each club contributes to your scoring, and whether the strokes you save by adding one club will more than offset the strokes you lose by playing without another. It's something you have to think about and experiment with.
The benefit of adding clubs is that your technique doesn't have to change to get different distances. If you don't go with additional wedges, you are now required to alter your technique so you can get more than one distance from a single club. There are two easy ways to do that. You can alter the length of your swing, or you can alter the speed of your swing. Both are ways of controlling clubhead speed at impact. Let's start with swing length.
2. The length of your full swing is one. The length of the swing that brings your hands back to hip height is two. The third swing is halfway between those two. This swing makes a full shoulder turn, but doesn't bring your hands all the way up. How that is expressed is up to your individual feeling, but it will feel like it is halfway between the full swing and the hip-high swing. Find out how far each combination of these three swings and applied to the wedges you have in your bag hits the ball. This is the Dave Pelz method. It is quite accurate, but requires that you have a consistent strike on the ball and it takes continual practice to maintain consistency.
3. If swing speed is your distance generator, the speed you swing when you hit a 9-iron would be one speed. A second speed would be an easy, "walk-in-the-park" speed. A third speed would be to swing at the fastest speed you can while still being in control of the club. That's three speeds: slow, medium, fast. Three swing speeds, three distances with one club. This method works best for people who are musically inclined and innately understand tempo and rhythm.
Both of these swing alteration methods demand a certain amount of feel on your part. They cannot be described more precisely than I have done, but that's all right. Each of them is based on an innate sense of movement or a sense of rhythm that tells you this is where to stop, or this is how fast to move. There are discrete stopping places and tempi that just make sense to you. If you try it, you will see what I mean.
By the way, I would argue against the clock method of altering swing length that you sometimes read about, because the "clock settings" might not align with your internal feel. Mechanical methods tend to break down under pressure. What you will fall back on is what you trust, and that is your internal sense of feel.
So here are three methods to control distance under 100 yards -- different clubs, different swing lengths, different swing speeds. Each method has only one variable. Pick ONE method and learn to become effective with it.
See also Three Wedge Shots That Will Save You Strokes
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