How to choose the right loft and grind for your wedges

I often get asked what wedge and grind setup I use and how I alter the bounce angle to my advantage around the greens.

In this video, I take you through my exact wedge setup, how you should get custom fit for wedges, how high and low bounce options affect your ability to make a good strike on different ground conditions and how to select the right club in bunkers!

I hope you like this video and learn a lot from it!

so how do I know which wedge is right for me that’s a question I get asked all the time okay and look at all these different options okay and there’s many many more as well um and I think there’s a lot of confusion in the game uh from amateur about what Lofts and what Li angles and what grinds do you need for your wedges so this video really is all about trying to educate you as to what might be best for you in terms of the grind in terms of the bounce angles so you’ve got a club that’s going to be versatile you can use all the releases it’s going to give you more forgiveness as well as well around the green so let’s get stuck into it so tat made have two different types of wedges they have the tailor made high toe wedge which is I’ve used for years these are my current trusty set of wedges you can see the well the well used I carry a 52 Loft 9° gap wedge in here and then have a 56 Sand Wedge with 10° of Bounce and I have a 60 lob wedge with 7° of Bounce okay and I always think that’s that’s a nice spread so you have less bounce in your 60 which is going to allow you to get out some difficult situations okay so I know those work for me they’re pretty versatile I’ll talk about how the grinds work um when I’ve got more more handsfree um but then they also have the mg4 which um there’s a few more options here in terms of the grind so I’m going to give these a go and I’m going to talk about which ones might suit you you can see we have um the standard 52 um standard bounc in a nine I’ve got the 58 in a high bounce in a 13° but very wide s I’ll talk about how that might help some of you and then we have the low bounce 58 which I’m excited about using this has got this nice sort of Ridge at the top here so that’s really versatile I’ll show you about some of the shots you can use um and and get some real kind of Versatility in your shots with that one and then we have the standard 58 ° and then I’ve got a 12° 56 standard as well so a few options to try um so I can compare against the high toes as well well but really it’s about you it’s about understanding what might be best for you so um I’ll start in the few shots now okay so there’s lot to get through in terms of um getting this right in terms of that you know Loft L angles shaft grip there’s a lot to it and um I’m a big believer in field watch my videos I’m more of a field-based coach in terms of getting really super technical um on it all um so we need to keep that in mind so if you look at when when Club Fitters generally fit wedges these days I think they tend to try and work out the perfect Gap and if you’re in a full shot so obviously over recent years the pitching wedge has got much much stronger in Loft so when I was younger the pitching wedge would be say 47 would be the average loft of a of a pitching wedge these days it’s sometimes 41 42 in you know in the pursuit of distance to try and try and um get get everyone hitting the ball further um but what that’s caused is a problem then between the pitch and wedge and and sort of the gap wedge and In The Sand Wedge as well so people are then fitting wedges so you can have a nice gap between all your numbers now I’m much more of a fan of fitting wedges for greenside as in like 40 yards and in I’m not really too fussed about getting Perfect full swing numbers because I very rarely hit a full wedge I’m much more about hitting 3/4 pitch shots and a bit more of the Finesse style and just trying to feel it rather than trying to get the perfect full swing now if you prefer to get wedges that you just want to hit the full swing and just control that then that’s fine absolutely do that I’m a big believer in do what’s right for you personally I prefer to feel it so I like to get my wedges fit for the green so I always have always gone 52 which is the old school gap wedge a 56 which is The Sand Wedge and a 60 which is the lob wedge many of you read my book I always think on the back of a 6 it should say for emergency use own but I do carry one cuz I do get in a lot of emergencies but I want a 52 a 56 and a 60 I’m not a massive fan of 50 54 58 I think the 54 I’m not I just think it just sits it’s a funny it’s a funny number like it’s not really a sand wedge it’s not really a gap wedge as I said it’s really there for full shot gaping rather than round the green so um with that in mind I’ve got a 56 I’ve got some 58s here just sort of demos really with different grinds on which I’m going to try as well but this is a 56 high toe 10° I have all my wedges flattened off by the way in terms of the lle so the L angle is basically the angle that sits on the ground here uh my standard irons in my bag my set of irons for example my seven iron is 2° flat my wedges are 3° flat my so when I say wedges I mean my 52 and 56 my lob wedge my 60 is 4 degrees flat so I really make sure my my 60 is much more tow down than the rest of my irons okay so if you were to up upright in your IRS I’d recommend you go one upright in your in your 52 and 56 or whatever you choose 50 54 whatever you want to do and then you go um standard okay for your for your lob wedge okay that’s if you were two degrees upright in your Rons okay and reason for that the toe of the club is a much friendlier part of the sole this is really designed to slide the heel is it tapers in on almost all wedges so becomes quite sharp and quite Diggy so you’d much rather the toe slide than the heel dig so it’s nice to have it flattened out and with the 60 when you’re trying to play these sort of toe down shots which I’ll play through few later and know you really want that toe to be able to sit low so that’s why I would um flatten out even more okay in terms of sharlex again those Club Fitters will know a lot more than me but personally cuz you know I’m like I said I’m I’m a fairly sort of field-based player and Coach um I just like to get the same shaft as my irons it might just be keeping it Ultra simple but I think the weight of a wedge is really important when I use wedges that are too heavy I feel like I’ve just got no feel I just feel like I can’t release the club I can’t let it fall as I want to so this is a a an NS Pro Tor 105 which is quite light um it’s a stiff it’s a stiff flex and I just have the same throughout the bag and it just it just feels good to me grip wise again nothing wrong with getting different wedges on your grips I’m I’m sometimes a fan of you know if you want to get something that maybe a little bit thicker or a bit spongier to help you feel again play around with that totally personal choice but don’t feel you got to get the same grips all the way through the bag you might want to get something different in your wedges okay your call so um I’ll just hit some down to those pins there this is the uh this is my hio 56 this is what I would call a standard very much the standard grind okay it just slightly kind of tapers off at the back which allows me to to release the club I don’t want a wedge for me that is too high at the back it’s going get a lot of a lot of kicks I’d get a lot of deflections I’d struggle to uh get the club working through the turf I really like this club um and and it’s versatile it’s got 10 degrees of bound so the lies here at Monteray they’re tight and the ground is fairly firm okay just for your reference here so it’s going to place some nice ones in there that’s pretty good isn’t it so that’s um that was a release to lots of lots of release you can see it just worked through the ground really nicely really easily absolutely loaded with spin so I know I can play that okay I’m interested in getting some of these uh these other ones so if I’ll start with the high bounce one here so we got the 58 high bounce 13° it’s also a wide so which for me kind of makes it just so you’re aware the bounce is measured here so that angle there is 13° when you get a wider sole it makes it play effectively a bit more bounce than that because the the back of the so is much further back and so it allows it to sort of kick and bounce more um this club here wouldn’t be suitable for me because um I’m not a draag a dragger of the club so when a drag of the club would be someone who tends to drive the hands forward takes a lot of the Loft and bounce off the club so they’re coming in more this way this is exaggerated obviously but by getting a wider soul and a club with more bounce on it that would offset your fault so if you’re perennial dragger okay you didn’t want to do loads of work on your game to try and improve your short game too much in terms of technique but you wanted a club that was going to make life a little bit friendlier for you this would be this would be a good option so I’m going to try and drag this a little bit and so not do my usual technique and that still came off really quite nicely had a lot of spin barely any diver and I’m not releasing that and that’s coming off nicely now if I was to start releasing a release two here off this tight lie I might struggle a little bit let’s give that a go yeah so that kicked a bit still pretty good but you hear that kicked so I’d be slightly nervous standing over these shots you can see as that standing there you can see how the Leading Edge is proud so a Leading Edge is sitting into the air a bit so it’s going to kick it’s still quite nice though um I think in the sand that would be super if you were playing at a golf course with really deep fluffy sand that would be a good option for you okay I quite like that so that’s the high bounce 58 wide so probably doesn’t give you the range of shots you might want you might struggle on release two and threes off off tight tur great if you are coming in Fairly steep though because like I say you get the Forgiveness at the back of the sole without being so wide so that’s nice um we’ve then got the standard this is a 58 standard bounce 9 9° so it’s very much light the high toe it’s probably got a little bit more um tapering at the back actually in terms of how that’s shaped down the heels down as well the toe is shaved down which I like so this should feel quite nice it looks like for me the lead n just sits a little bit nearer the turf now so I can start adding in some release into that again and you can see how the spin you know really ramps up when I just feel with this sort of wedge with the tapering at the back it’s perfect if you more of a release 2 type player or you you feel like you’ve got the release 2 in your bag because that just felt as a club hit the ground and it just stayed there and it could just slide but when you’ve got that wider part of the sole at the back it doesn’t feel like it can slide as well as that and that felt just really nice through through the turf so even that I hit that a little heavy but it’s still really nice shot because the back of the club has just kept sliding okay so that’s nice that’s the standard one if you’re a if you feel like you’re pretty neutral I really would just stick to standard okay just keep it simple and then we’ve got this low bounce option which is really interesting with this Ridge that runs down the middle so it tapers down at the front quite heavily and then down at the back quite heavily as well so this is your most versatile W you can do so much with this however it is probably the least forgiving so More Bounce it’s more forgiving less bounce it’s less forgiving but you can do a lot more of so this might be for your slightly more advanced player who is looking to be able to play a wider range of shots because this off really tight line and this is how put it down in a little bit of a hole that Leading Edge is sitting so neat so you can lean the Sha forward a little bit and you can get it really sitting neat to the ball you can lean it back a little bit and still show some bounce but not too much okay so this should feel like I can really nip this underneath yeah I mean that just feels so easy to go under the ball so if you’re really looking to hit release twos if your playoff tight if maybe if you’re a lynx player so you’re playing off tight links Turf this sort of wedge would be superb so I’m going to try and do like more of a lob shot now see if we can just release this off the hard pan with a release three now yeah I mean that’s great there we go so that’s that’s really really felt like the back of the wedge just came down I released it to the right hip release three but because there is so much shaving at the back here it just slid on the ground and popped it up so even for some lies where you look at it and it and if some of you read the book I talk about sort of having amber light and red light and green light lies and you’ve got to look at the lie to tell you what shot you can play well you’ve got a tight lie ordinary I say say well you can’t play that because it’s tight because you’re releasing the bounce well if you’ve got this wedge you can play this off any lie absolutely any lie because I’m going to release so much there and it’s not kicking there you go in the hole so you can see how that’s going this way it kicked before didn’t kick and uh and bounce it just slid underneath it I really like that I really do like that club in terms of the versatility I might look at putting one of those in my bag I love that rid through the middle there so that would be a really good option 8 or 60 I think would be would be a good option there in terms of playing that now just to go back onto that lob shot if I triy that with the high bounce now 13° wide so if I try that from a hard pan lie well I don’t know let’s see let’s see how this uh comes off I’m not going to try and deliberately do anything wrong just try and do it exactly as I just did but already I’m feeling nervous cuz I can see that Leading Edge up in the air that actually gets under it a little bit more than I thought that’s actually not as un unforgiving from on release threes as I thought let me try and just really put it on a hard pan I there we go it still gets under it nice but it’s just it it feels doesn’t feel as easy as a low bounce for sure I mean that came up pretty pretty didn’t really feel like it slid under the ball it kind of kind of just stopped at impact really so um there there’s the wide sole there so uh let’s go a little bit more green side and uh just test it a little bit more on on the on the on the sort of the Finesse ones around the green Okay so we’ve moved to Green side and um we’re going to start with playing out of some fluffy grass okay so like softest condition it’s actually a Bima grass so it’s quite sticky grass as well so you got to wear what sort of grass type you typically play out of okay so very different from a links player to a player that plays on more Parkland courses or even you know more exotic grass is like the beuda grass but just to indicate this is the low bounce wedge and if I was playing from this type of lie you can use this wedge but you have to be pretty perfect because when you’re playing out of this rough here you or softer conditions you really need to be using a little bit more of the bounce um so with it being a low bounce it’d be very easy for that to dig in as it did there okay so I wouldn’t really want to be using low bounce too much out of this sort of light I’d want to be using a standard bounce this is my standard one this would be very similar to my hi toe and out of these lies here this is going to be able to work through see how much easier that was through the turf okay it just fed through really really easily um even with these little clumps of grass behind it with low bounce that’s going to tend to dig so I like I like this club this bounce to be able to work through the turf so if you’re there we go in the hole if if you were um playing from these conditions more often I wouldn’t go too much in terms of the low bounce okay or you could even look at going low bounc in a 60 maybe and then you could go higher bounce in the 56 you’ve got options that way of course which I’ll I’ll talk about a little bit later so that’s an option if you were a bit of a dragger you took a lot of bounce off and you played out of this grass a lot i’ definitely get in a high bounce option because this is just so much more forgiving you know you can work through that that felt so easy to work through the grass okay with such a wide sole working through soft conditions fluffy grass is very very easy to work it through so really if you’re you’re playing from these conditions a lot think about using a little bit more bounce for sure higher bounce maybe even the The Wider so like like this um high bounce model has but standard bounce will be absolutely fine just a little bit wary of low bounce from these conditions however if you’ve got this sort of lie which you can see it’s much tighter this is more your links condition or you know golf course that’s really kept down fairly tight tight I’ve got the high bounce model still in my hand I’m going to struggle with this high bounce to this to this uh front pin that kick so I’ve hit that there an inch behind the ball and and it really bounced okay it just bounced straight away because there’s so much uh so showing there okay in terms of that angle so if this was my average condition and this is what I tended to play off and I felt like my was fairly neutral I wouldn’t be getting one of the one of these in the bag okay standard be absolutely fine because we know we’ve got that tapering at the back so we can still have a little bit of release the lead Edge looks like it’s sitting a little bit lower now okay and I can work that through let’s not thin it you can see how that works really nicely it just spins up okay so I just feel like this club here is certainly more versatile in terms of being able to get that strike and that spin see that spin on that down slope that’s really quick down there don’t know if it comes across on video but that’s straight downhill um but the uh with this club I felt like I could still release it get some spin which I needed um however the low bounce now might be the one that would be better because that is really sitting close to the ground now I don’t have to worry too much about releasing it I could do release one and that then really starts to spin the right Edge this feels quite easy to nip under but that’s that’s that’s interesting there I mean that actually dug in I mean I’ve got a wave it it’s gone in the hole or right lip but that lead Edge was a little bit sharp so again just an indication where you might think well I’ll play on tight conditions I have a low bounce but you are you are losing forgiveness with this club that was better that was nice okay but for me I’d probably go standard bounce there just to keep it keep it nice and versatile there so hope that helps you know whether it’s soft grass out the you know the soft the rough sort of conditions versus a tight lie you can think about having different grinds to suit the conditions you typically play on so the typee of sandin also has a bearing on what Loft and bounce and grind you’re going to go with okay so I’ve got a 58 standard bounce 9° here because the the sand here was just like it’s perfect depth okay and it’s perfect sort of um texture so I can just use my standard bounce standard sort of release two bunker shot and it should work through the sand quite nicely you see just splashes out really easy doesn’t get too Diggy doesn’t get too um too deep either so it just skips feels very easy through through the sand okay now if I was playing on a golf course where there was lots of sand okay so you know some some courses there’s lots it’s really piled like this and obviously you know a lot of courses change from from bunker to Bunker what type of sand you’ve got um but if this is what you had all the time you might want to consider a higher bound where so the wider sole here is going to work through this sand easier got less chance of digging in you still need to put some release into it um but even if you weren’t the best at releasing the club okay this would help you but I’d still recommend you put some release in and uh when there’s more sand you got to just hit it a little bit quicker but the the bounce here is going to help the club work through the increased depth of sand lots of sand there and it splashed out absolutely fine so you know if you were a player who struggle when there’s lots of sand and it’s a golf course you play a lot which has lots of sand in you might want to consider a high bounce wedge also if you’re a player who plays and bunkers where there isn’t a lot of sand which I hear a lot from a lot of you saying that’s where my course is like where it’s maybe a little bit beer or you’re playing a wet climate and the sunand gets compacted with the rain you go to the low bounce this works really well because you can do more of a release one but that Leading Edge we know is shaved down on this wedge here so this is this is the low bounce and it’s got 7° okay and it’s shaved down at the front so this is going to help me go steeper after the ball so I can dig that in and still get a quality strike okay so if you were playing with with with very little sand or compact condition lot of the time you might want to consider a low a low bounce okay but really I am a believer in versatility in making sure you’re able to change your Technique so the standard bounce you should be able to add Bounce by coming back here take bounce off by coming here and really become versatile in terms of the grind okay but I’m just trying to give you as many options so you can make your own mind but I would go for a standard bounce here okay and uh but if you were playing off really thick sand might considered a high bounce at the same time okay so lot to consider so hope that’s giving you a better understanding of all the different types of Lofts and bounces and grinds involved okay there’s a lot to it um I totally appreciate that um so main things I want you to think about are if you’re going to put say a 50 or 52 in there I would just get an 8 degree bounce okay a standard bounce with a standard grind they all they’re all pretty standard on on the on the gap wedge anyway they 5052 so standard there you’re then going to put a a sand wedge in and you’re going to go probably 54 56 I prefer 56 but I’m not saying that’s what you have to do um and you’re going to go for around about a 9 or 10 degree bounce um and then that’s something that you going to to play out the sand mainly you’re then going to put a lob wedge in that might be a 58 or a 60 depending on your configuration how you’re going to do things and that’s the one that maybe you can start to look at in terms of getting a little bit more specific you can perhaps go low bounce if you want a player who thinks you know you want a bit more versatility if you want a bit more forgiveness and you’re playing a course with lots of sand or um lots of sort of rough or quite a soft condition you might want to look at the high bounds okay but really if you stick to a standard bounce and you and you follow my coaching you read my book and you get the versity to be able to do a one a two and a three a standard bounce is perfect you’ve then got to just we up your personal conditions about where you play whether it’s links or or Parkland or whatever okay but generally standard bounces will do the job very nicely make sure you get fitted for the shaft okay make sure you consider that and try it and I really do recommend if you can try these wedges from grass conditions so if you can find somewhere where a pro can take you out of a bag of wedges and hit them there is no substitute for just hitting shots around the green and out the sand and just feeding what works because that there’s so much I’ve gone through some technical stuff there but really it comes down to what what gives you the best results what feels best to you and you only really get that by going out there and trying it um Wen golf cor UN based we’ve got a fantastic short game area with Tav short game area you can you can take wedges out the protein will be able to do that with you take take them out there and try them okay but if you can’t get to wen there’s places all around the world fantastic PJ Pros will be able to help you with that decision- making process so hopefully it’s helped hopefully it’s cleared up a little bit of the mystery of it all and um it’s going to help you wedge game and uh and help you shoot low scores