The 5 Worst Wedge Mistakes in Golf – And How To EASILY Fix Them

Struggling with your wedge play? 🏌️‍♂️ In this video, I reveal the 5 WORST wedge mistakes golfers make—and more importantly, I’ll show you the simple fixes that will instantly improve your short game.

From poor setup to bad swing habits, these are the errors that cost you consistency, distance control, and those all-important up-and-downs. The good news? Every mistake has an easy solution that you can apply right away.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll know exactly how to:
✅ Strike your wedges more cleanly
✅ Control your distance and spin
✅ Avoid fat and thin shots around the green
✅ Build confidence in your short game

If you want lower scores, it starts with your wedges—and fixing these mistakes could be the quickest way to shave shots off your handicap.

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00:00 Introduction
00:14 Too far away from the ball
01:55 Too Much Lag
05:04 DO NOT Stay Down
07:40 Swinging 100%
09:28 Having 1 Shot

These are the five worst mistakes that you can make with a wedge. And I’d almost guarantee that you’re going to be guilty of some of these. And stay tuned for the last one because there’s a very good chance that what you’ll be doing is the complete opposite of what you should actually do. Got a 20 yard chip from just short the green. Pretty straightforward shot. But one of the worst mistakes you can make from here, and I see this all the time with the golfers that I coach, is standing too far from the golf ball. adopting a setup which is too similar to a setup that you’d use if you were making a full swing with let’s say a pitching edge from the middle of the fairway. The reason that is one of the most one of the worst mistakes you can make is because it causes the golf club to move too much inwards on an arc and causes the club head to stay too low to the ground. Therefore, what we get is a lot of club face rotation and we get the club staying low to the ground. So, the approach angle is too shallow. And when we have those two things present, direction can be a little bit more difficult to manage. And certainly when you’re stood too far away and the club works too much inside, really easy to have issues with your strike. That’s actually not worked out too bad, but I wouldn’t fancy doing that every single time. That was very much ground early contact. And that’s going to happen if you stand too far away. What you’ll see from great short game players, great chippers and pitchers of the golf ball is when they’re in these situations, they’re standing in really, really close to the golf ball. So, really simply, all you do is you take the golf club and you just raise the grip up. The heel will lift up a little like from the ground, the toe gets pushed down a little bit, and then simply you just walk into that golf ball. So, you can see that that is a significantly different setup to what I just demonstrated a moment ago. Now, from here, naturally, the club is going to work straighter back. There will still be some arc to it, but it’s straighter and the club head is going to work more up into the air. So, it gives me the opportunity to have a steeper approach angle into the green. So, many poorly struck pitches from around the greens happen because there’s too much lag in transition and into the down swing. Let me show you why that’s an issue and then I’m going to give you a really simple drill to help you fix it. So, we take, let’s say, a really nice setup to the golf ball and think about the distance between the sole of the golf club and the buttons or the zip on my top. Think of that distance. That distance is almost as as great as it can be because the club shaft is fairly neutral. What happens all too often is the golfer might make a pretty decent back swing movement, but the change in direction is too aggressive and the hands start to drive forwards, creating this lag. So, you can see as I do that, we get this lagging motion. Now, that’s great for a driver. It’s great for a seven iron, but for a short shot, it’s really quite costly because I haven’t got any time to get rid of that before impact. So, what happens is we arrive at impact and because I’ve got that lag. Now, look at the distance between the club head and my zip. It’s shortened. Very simply, I added in this movement. So, that shortens that distance. So, when we get that lagging transition, we can’t get rid of it. We often thin it. Now, it doesn’t take many shots of you thinning it to realize that’s not the strike you want. And then how do you stop thinning it? You start to drop the knees. You start to do lots of things to get down to the golf ball. And you just in a whole world of trouble. So, you’re either going to be kind of hitting thins like that because you can’t get the club far enough away from you or as we said, you get the opposite which is you trying to sort of drop down and then you’re going to get all those kind of shots. So, if you’re someone who thins it, fats it, you can’t seem to get any kind of consistency, there’s a very, very good chance. This is why. So, here’s what you’re going to do when you’re around the greens. It depends a little bit on the shot, but you are going to need some sort of wrists happening. The key thing would be if you want to introduce the wrists, get them moving early. Do not get them introduced late into the golf swing. This feels like it would be really powerful and great for strike. It’s the opposite. So, here’s what I’d like you to do as a little exercise. Take a setup. You’re going to start the club head moving with your wrists. So you can see that my lead arm doesn’t move a huge amount. Wrist go. Then I add some turn. And now the feel would be with my wrists I push the club down to the ground. And as I’m pushing it down I then start to turn. Pretty good. That’s gone to a couple of phase. Much much better shot. So that was a little exercise. because it was a kind of stop start movement, but it starts to get me to understand the sequence of events. It’s going to be wrists start, body turns, and then the wrists almost start the down swing as the body’s turning. What happens is we get back to an impact, which mirrors your setup a lot more. That’s how you start to be more consistent. So, let me show you that as a one movement shot. Wrists go, wrists go, and we get much, much better results. So, that’s how I want you to play these shots around the greens. Understanding that lag in the short game is one of the worst things you can have. It’s really going to be costly to your striker. Golfers who struggle with consistent contact around the greens often tell me they’re trying to stay down to get that perfect contact or they’re trying to keep their eye on the ball right until contact. Worst thing you can do with a wedge. Let me explain why. great chippers and pitchers of the golf ball through the golf ball, this might surprise you, are doing two things with their body. They are rotating towards the target. I think we’d all agree that’s happening. But they are also pushing away from the ground and getting taller. They are extending up away from the ground. There is no good chipper or pitcher of the golf ball who is staying down to guarantee the strike. Yeah, I see that all too often on the golf course and on the practice area. Let me explain to you why that is going to be so detrimental. If I take a setup just inside this golf ball, you can see that I have some kind of forward bend. I’m tilted over the golf ball by some amount and the golf club sits on the ground. If from here I simply rotated my body towards the target, that’s all I did. What would the club head do? It’d stay on the ground. All I’ve simply done is just turn my body. If I turned it back, the club would stay on the ground. If I turned it through, the club would stay on the ground. So, if I’m rotating but staying down, how does the club change directions from going down to up? Well, I’ll tell you what happens in most golf swings. They use their arms to pull the club away from the ground. I’m sure you’ve seen these kind of positions before. Really costly, so difficult to be consistent. I mean, I’m going to try and hit a shot doing that, but I mean, it’s going to be There you go. That came out more like a putter. Staying down is really, really be costly. Here’s what you should do. Take a setup. From here, if I was to keep my arms pretty passive, stand up, club raises. If I turn towards the target, is that not a much better position to be in at the end of my golf swing. How did I get there? Two movements. I stood up and I turned. So, if I play a pitch now or do a practice swing where I simply make a back swing and as the club is about to make contact with the ground, I rotate and extend. We get into that position. What it does is it moves the golf club back away from the ground so you get perfect contact every time. You’re consistent because you’re delivering the golf club to the same part of the ground every single time. So very very simply, you’re going to take a setup weight left side. Keep the weight left side and you’re going to rotate and extend. And if you can rotate and extend and actually be confident to push away from the ground. So I’ve got 121 to that flag. I’ve got lobb wedge in my hand for me. That’s 60. And I hit this around about 115 yards full out. It’s a little bit down breeze. So I can probably get to that flag with my lob wedge if I give it 100%. But why would I why would I take a club and absolutely give it 100% when I’ve got other clubs that I could use from this situation? 56° wedge is a much better option. Even 50. I’m going to have to take some off those clubs, but it gives me more control. I don’t want anybody out there hitting their wedges as hard as they can. You see there’s a towel out there. If you ask me to take a golf ball and throw it and land it on the towel, I’ve got to get the direction correct, but I’ve got to get the distance correct as well. So, what trajectory would I use to do that? Well, I definitely wouldn’t throw that ball as high as I can to get under the cell. I’d use a relatively flat trajectory and missed it. But I would use a flat trajectory. So, when I take something like a 56 and I take a little bit off it, I’m not going at 100%. I’ve still got plenty of loft. I’m still going to impart plenty of spin, but having a little bit more control and lowering that trajectory a little bit is going to give me so much more consistency in my result. So, the one of the worst mistakes you can make make with a wedge is hitting them with approach shots at 100%. Let’s take a little bit more club. Let’s take a little bit off the swing and get a little bit more control. So, what type of shot do you think I need from here? No green to work with. All of this kind of water to deal with. Surely that needs to be a really high soft landing shot. And what type of shot do you think I need from here? Well, almost the complete opposite. I’ve got loads of greens to work with. So, here I need something that’s relatively low and rolling. So, one of the worst mistakes that you can make with a wedge is being onedimensional. I’ve got a 60. I don’t want you to see this as a 60deree wedge. I want you to see these as tools. Tools that you can use in multiple different ways to create different trajectories, different spins, different land angles, because that way you’re going to have a lot more solutions when you miss the green. So, let me go through how you can create all those different ball flights. Your practice time with a wedge is your chance to explore, have a little bit of fun. I don’t see enough golfers doing this. So, I’m on the course here, but let’s say we’re on the practice screen. I’ve got a flag. We don’t always need tips that flag. There are lots of things that you can do within your setup technique to change those things that we just mentioned. So, the first thing that I could do would be to change where the ball is relative to me. If I was to put the ball behind me, me being the sort of buttons on my shirt, that gives me significantly more shaffling. That D lost the club and that is going to give me a steeper approach with the ball coming out much lower. If I then push the ball much further up in my stance, clearly I’m going to get the opposite. I’m going to get a shaft which is more neutral. I’m going to get more loft on the club at impact. That’s going to give me a higher launch angle. We can also start to look at what we do with the wrists. If I want to increase the height of the shot, I’m going to have more throw or more release of that trail hand through the golf ball. If I want to hit a lower shot, then I’m going to have more extension of the hands with less throw. And by playing around with all of these things that you’ve got available to you, you can create different ball flights. And when you’re practicing, that’s what I’d love you to do. As I said, treat this like a tool. Experiment. See what you can do. Push it to the extremes. That way, you’re learning and you’re developing more shots that you can use on the golf course. So, let’s go ahead and hit a couple. I’m not necessarily going to hit into that flag. Let’s go with a really low one. So, I’m going to go ball back, weight is on the front leg. I’m going to stand in nice and close. And even though this is my 60°ree, I can produce shots which come out really nice and low and roll. So that second scenario we saw over there, that’s the type of shot that I would hit from there. Then if I wanted to hit the opposite shot, I’m going to put the ball more forward in my stance. I might even open the face a little bit and I’m going to be using a lot more throw of that trail hand that we spoke about, releasing the club up a little higher. And this one, still weight left, gives me a much higher shot, which would be more suited to that particular flag. So I’m versatile. I’m not onedimensional. If I’m onedimensional, my wedges, I’m gonna have to hit the same shot in every situation. That’s going to limit me. If I’ve got multiple shots I can choose from, I can choose the shot that the golf course tells me I need to hit. And that’s really how you become an elite wedge player.