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How The Distance Wedge Triangle Will Help Golfers With Their Short Game
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Apr 1, 2025
In this video, top 50 coach John Howells demonstrates the wedge distance triangle - a foolproof, three-part system which is going to help golfers get up and down more often from inside 100 yards. It's an underrated and under-practiced skill but if you can improve your short game from inside this distance, your scores should start to tumble. Video shot on location at Infinitum Golf Resort, host of the DP World Tour Qualifying School.
View Video Transcript
0:00
So let's get you better dialed in from inside 100 yards
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We're going to be looking at something really cool called the distance wedge triangle
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Let's get into it. So the distance wedge triangle is made up of three aspects
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The first is centeredness of strike. The second is making sure you've got a nice low dynamic loft at impact, usually less than 15 degrees
0:34
And then the third is altering your swing length to increase or decrease the amount of clubhead speed you've got at impact
0:42
All three of those aspects are absolutely critical to be accurate inside 100 yards
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We've often looked at the third one, swing lengths, that's been well coached and well documented
0:52
but the first two have often been neglected so we're going to really focus on those
1:01
So number one, centredness of strike. What we're trying to do here is make sure that we hit the
1:06
ball out of the horizontal centre, i.e. not out of the toe or the heel but also out of the vertical
1:12
centre as well which means not catching it fat or thin. In order to do that we're going to need to
1:18
do a couple of quick things at setup. I like to see the ball just forward of center of your stance
1:24
left foot turned out, a little bit of weight favoring your left side and maybe even invoke a
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little bit of forward shaft lean at address. We're going to make a nice centered backswing
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that means that we're not swaying our head way off it or moving our weight excessively over to the
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right because that's going to cause us real contact problems with where we hit the ground
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we're trying to make sure that we hit the ground either level with or slightly after the golf ball
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just like that if we can do that we going to get ball first divot second that nice compressed contact with the ball once we learned to hit the ground in the right spot what I like to do then is do the runway drill
2:06
which is all about trying to make sure that we land the club in the horizontal position correctly
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So what I like to do is set up this little tram line, set up to the middle of it here
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and I've given myself a little runway or a tramway there that I can swing down
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You can see I just hit a little bit too close to me on that one. We'll have another go
2:30
Set up those tram lines again. Just go a little bit further back
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On that one, I landed it a little bit too far away from me
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So this third and final one now, I should be able to land it exactly on the correct spot
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Perfect. Right down the tram lines. that's going to give me a really nice opportunity to hit it exactly out of the center and also out
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of the vertical center. Those are going to give you really consistent ball speeds and it's going
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to allow that ball to come off with a controlled amount of spin and launch to get the ball landing
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nice and close to the flag. So the second aspect of the triangle is having that nice low dynamic
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loft the best players will probably de-loft their wedge shots around 15 degrees for a distance wedge
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shot in this region of 70 yards or so what we're trying to do is make sure that we've got plenty of
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shaft lean through impact and that we're delivering that club you know if it was a 58 degree lofted
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wedge i would de-loft this to around 43 at impact the reason we want that is it's going to give us
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that nice low launch angle high spin plenty of friction the ball will grab nice and low on the
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grooves and it'll come in and get that nice one hop and stop type effect when it
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lands so how can we do that well I like to use the alignment stick drill so what you going to do is grip the club with the alignment stick about halfway down the alignment stick and just try and take your normal grip try and fashion it up so that you still holding the stick next to the grip
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And you're going to have the alignment stick just outside your left hip. And what it does is it invokes a nice amount of forward shaft lean even at address
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We're not looking for that necessarily, but it helps certainly with the drill. but what I'm trying to do is make sure that when I swing through, I'm not allowing this stick to
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touch my left rib cage. If I do, I'm going to get really bruised on my left rib cage. So making
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little shots back and through as a drill, trying to just brush the ground with that nice low dynamic
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loft. So let's give it a go. Let's try and hit a shot here. I've got GC quad running
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get into my normal setup position good centered backswing as I've said before ball just forward
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of center a little bit of weight on my left and I'm really trying to deal off the club through impact
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nice low flying distance wedge shot GC quads they're telling me I actually de-lofted that there to
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what's it coming up with, 7044 spin and it was de-lofted to 44 degrees of lofted impact. So a
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nice 14 degree de-loft. That's exactly what we're looking for. Low flying, a nice spin on the shot
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So the third aspect is dealing with the different club head speeds that can control
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the ball speed and how far the shot carries. So how can we easily monitor that
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Well, this is something that's been spoken about a lot by various different instructors over the years
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And it's how to use the clock system in your wedge game
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What we can almost do is imagine where would our left arm swing to in the backswing You could swing your arm you know from down here at address at six o we could swing it to sort of 8 30 maybe 9 30 10 o or indeed all the way up to a full backswing
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those three different sized backswings will obviously give you three different clubhead
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speeds now obviously when we're doing this you can call it what you want you can call it a small
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swing a medium swing a large swing you can call it half three quarter full it really doesn't matter
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What's important is that it's individual to you and you know how far each of these shots goes for you
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What I recommend to players is get the numbers written on the back of your wedge
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Try and see if you can actually practice them at a range, a top tracer range or a trapman range
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and put them down on the back of your wedge so that when you pull the club out of your golf bag
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you know exactly what your three swings are. So I've got a 50-yard shot here
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I know my small 830 swing goes about 46 yards carry, so let's give it a try
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Again, as I've mentioned, monitoring my setup, ball just forward of centre
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a little bit of weight on my left, and a nice 830 back swing. A little bit left of the pin, but it's gone the right distance
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So give those three aspects of the distance wedge triangle a go
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Make sure that you're focusing on centered strikes, on a nice minus 15 dynamic loft at impact
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and get those distance wedges dialed in with three different backswing lengths
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and you'll watch your proximity to the hole get way, way better inside 100 yards
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