The Golf Swing

Short Game Practice at Home

By Sean ⋅ August 3, 2006 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The weather here has been crazy the past few days, the 115 heat index made even the thought of playing a round of golf unbearable. So, what’s a golf addict to do on a miserable August afternoon? Work on his short game of course!

I took to the back yard with 4 beach towels, a shag bag, my 56 degree sand wedge and a bottle of water at about 7pm. The back yard grass is pretty thick, about 2 inches in places, so it provides a great place to work on those deep rough wedge shots. I rarely have an opportunity to work on this part of my game, but thought, heck, I’m sure there is something simple I could do to get a better feel for these shots.

The back yard has about 150 yards of wide open space, with no worry of hitting any windows/houses/etc. It’s quite a luxury really. So I dropped the wedge and water in a good location, and paced off hitting locations in 20 yard increments. A towel was placed at 20, 40, 60 and 80 yards.

My shag bag has about 20 balls in it at the moment. So I tried the following plan. I took aim at the 20 yard towel, hit 20 balls. I picked them up then hit 20 balls at the 40 yard towel, then 60 yards, then 80 yards. This helped me get an understanding of the feel for the 56 degree wedge shot at those distances. Next I hit 5 balls at the 20, then 5 at the 40, 5 at the 60 and the last 5 at the 80. Lastly I took single shots, 1 at the 20, the next shot at the 40, the next at the 60, then the 80, and repeat.

All in all it took about an hour and a half, and I think was a great session. If you have the space, I would highly recommend doing this from time to time. It really helped reinforce the fact that one really doesn’t need to swing ‘hard’ to hit the ball well. Nice and easy, back and through, let the club do the work.

6:30 AM tee time on this Saturday, so we’ll see if this session helped with my wedge distance control soon enough!

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