One of the more difficult aspects of golf, in my opinion, is learning the “touch” shots; those less-than-full swings that you need to score. It seems the vast majority of golfers are challenged by these, more than they are by the full swings, in fact. In my research and many sessions with recreational golfers, that shot comes up more often than any as one that people want to learn.

There are two basic camps of instruction on this shot. In one camp you have the people who advocate using the same club all the time and just learn to feel the distance. In the other are the advocates of using three different lengths of swings for all your wedges and then learning the distances of each different swing for each club.

I think either of those are OK…for golfers who are willing to put in lots of hours of practice. But I have always been focused on the typical recreational golfer who is just not (or cannot) going to invest that time. So I’m going to offer a slightly different approach to those “in-between” wedge shots–not quite a full swing, but more than a short pitch.

But it is true that this part of the game takes as much practice, or more, to develop as the full swing shots. In order to have touch and feel, you have to have a “database” of shots you’ve successfully executed to draw from. The more good ones you have in that database, the more likely you are to be able to pull one out of your arsenal with confidence. But that all starts with having a technique you can rely on, so let’s build that.

I’m a believer that the closer you get to the green, the slower you work. I compare the short game to the house painter. Painting walls allows full and powerful strokes with a large brush or roller, but as you get to the trim work, you work slower and more deliberately. Wedge play is a lot like that. I believe you can be more precise with a longer, slower swing, than a short “jabby” one. I’m also a proponent of controlling your swing power and clubhead speed with the rotation speed of your body core. To hit the ball further/harder, you rotate through faster. To hit the soft touch shots, you rotate through a little slower.

The key to that is to keep the hands “quiet”, so that you are not flipping the clubhead, and let the upper body, arms and hands work in perfect unison. If your hand speed (and therefore the clubhead speed) are always coordinated with the pace of your body core rotation, you’ll quickly learn how to manage the pace of that rotation to produce various distances.

One analogy that I like is to think of your less-than-full wedge swings like driving in various speed limit zones. The longer shots are “country road”, somewhat slower than a full “highway speed” swing pace. Beneath that is “city driving”, where the pace of body core rotation is even slower. And the shortest “half wedge” shots put you in “school zone”, which is defined by slower and more attentive.

I suggest you spend time with your gap and sand wedges, and practice this core-driven approach. Learn how the ball will fly the same shortened swing and various speeds of your core rotation. Once you get a good feel for that process, you can further vary the ball flight by gripping down on the club to different points on the grips–the shorter the club, the lower and shorter the ball will fly.

This is a very broad topic for such a short forum, but I hope that this different approach to those ‘half wedge shots’ will help those of you who are still searching for “the secret.”