Understanding How Your Golf Wedges Work (Video) - by Pete Styles
Understanding How Your Golf Wedges Work (Video) - by Pete Styles

So if we now have an understanding of what bounce is, it’s now important we understand how that bounce can affect the golf ball and why it's important to us. Let's initially consider that we had a wedge with no bounce at all, it was literally just a leading edge and a parallel edge straight to the back of it. Every time that club comes down into the golf ball it would hit the turf and it would want to keep travelling downwards into the soil on the same angle of attack you approach the ball on. So your angle of attack will be coming down, let's say for example four or five degrees. Now that’s a good wedge angle. It would come into the back of the ball four or five degrees and it would keep going four or five degrees down into the ball pretty much until the club got stuck, there would no follow through. It would hit into the floor and it would follow through so would see this little thing; the club would just dive into the floor and stick. And we're not used to seeing that sort of thing because we have bounce on a club. So bounce is the flange at the bottom that stops the club digging in. So generally when we hit down into the turf and we take a divot, the club bounces off the surface and comes back up again. Now we can have different wedges with different degrees of bounce. Generally we have high, medium and low.

A high degree of bounce would be 12-15 degrees of bounce. That’s a club that’s very resistant to getting stuck into the ground. So we're talking ground as in sand and soil here but also the sand in a banker where the club isn’t going to dig, it's not going to take a very big divot because the bounce angle will hit the surface and start propelling the ball back upwards again. So that would be a high bounce wedge. Then 10, 8 degrees something like that that would medium bounce and then six, four, two that would be lower degrees of bounce, much less bounce. Those clubs are much more likely to dig into the ground or the sand. Now there are times where we want low bounce wedges particularly if we were playing flop shots, you know opening the face, opening the face of a shot and cutting underneath it. That's quite useful with a low bounce club, but then if we're playing from thick fluffy grass off, thick fluffy sand having a low bounce wedge could be quite difficult and a high bounce wedge would be more beneficial. So later on we might look at the makeup of your set and how different wedges can produce different types of shots and how we don’t necessarily always want to have the same type of bounce angle for our wedges throughout our whole set. 2015-11-05

So if we now have an understanding of what bounce is, it’s now important we understand how that bounce can affect the golf ball and why it's important to us. Let's initially consider that we had a wedge with no bounce at all, it was literally just a leading edge and a parallel edge straight to the back of it. Every time that club comes down into the golf ball it would hit the turf and it would want to keep travelling downwards into the soil on the same angle of attack you approach the ball on. So your angle of attack will be coming down, let's say for example four or five degrees. Now that’s a good wedge angle. It would come into the back of the ball four or five degrees and it would keep going four or five degrees down into the ball pretty much until the club got stuck, there would no follow through. It would hit into the floor and it would follow through so would see this little thing; the club would just dive into the floor and stick. And we're not used to seeing that sort of thing because we have bounce on a club. So bounce is the flange at the bottom that stops the club digging in. So generally when we hit down into the turf and we take a divot, the club bounces off the surface and comes back up again. Now we can have different wedges with different degrees of bounce. Generally we have high, medium and low.

A high degree of bounce would be 12-15 degrees of bounce. That’s a club that’s very resistant to getting stuck into the ground. So we're talking ground as in sand and soil here but also the sand in a banker where the club isn’t going to dig, it's not going to take a very big divot because the bounce angle will hit the surface and start propelling the ball back upwards again. So that would be a high bounce wedge. Then 10, 8 degrees something like that that would medium bounce and then six, four, two that would be lower degrees of bounce, much less bounce. Those clubs are much more likely to dig into the ground or the sand. Now there are times where we want low bounce wedges particularly if we were playing flop shots, you know opening the face, opening the face of a shot and cutting underneath it. That's quite useful with a low bounce club, but then if we're playing from thick fluffy grass off, thick fluffy sand having a low bounce wedge could be quite difficult and a high bounce wedge would be more beneficial. So later on we might look at the makeup of your set and how different wedges can produce different types of shots and how we don’t necessarily always want to have the same type of bounce angle for our wedges throughout our whole set.