How To Choose Your Golf Wedges

Selecting the right wedges at the bottom end of your bag can be the difference between being a short game master or a short game muppet. When your short game is on song, the positive impact that it can have on your score is hard to overstate. Turning bogeys into pars is one thing that the best players in the world excel at, and any improvement in your performance in this area is likely to see a large reduction in your handicap.

The first hurdle to overcome when selecting wedges is choosing the right lofts so that the gapping in your set is consistent. Full shots are much easier to execute properly than half or three-quarter shots, and so we want the lofts of our wedges to be nice and evenly spaced, reducing the amount of half shots that are needed. Most golfers will have a pitching wedge as part of their iron set so the first thing to do is to find out the loft of your pitching wedge. This is easily done by going to the manufacturers' website and looking at the specifications of the clubs you own. If your irons are relatively old, a quick google search should reveal the data you need.

If you have decided to have four wedges in your bag, then you want to be looking at around a five-degree difference in loft between each wedge. Assuming your pitching wedge has 45-degrees of loft on it, the ideal choices would then be a gap wedge at 50-degrees, and sand wedge at 55-degrees and a lob wedge at 60-degrees. If you prefer to have more options at the top end of your bag, you will then only have space for three wedges. In this scenario if your pitching wedge has 45-degrees of loft then you should get either a 52 or 54-degree wedge and either a 58 or 60-degree wedge.

There is also the amount of bounce to consider and this is crucial on the higher lofted wedges as this is where how the wedge interacts with the turf becomes vitally important. I won't discuss that too much here as wedge bounce is explained fully in the next article.

One of the more recent additions to the golf wedge marketplace has been the arrival of the full-face wedge. This was first seen on the Phil Mickelson Grind Callaway wedges, and such was their popularity that all the major manufacturers followed suit and now produce their own. I am a huge fan of full-face wedges and I have a 54 and a 60 degree in my bag. I will admit that the aesthetics can take a little getting used to, but the performance benefits are clear. Any time your ball finds a particularly nasty lie in the rough, you are no longer in control of where the ball impacts the face. Often these kinds of shots will be struck in the high-toe part of the club and on traditional style wedges this part of the club is without grooves. The grooves cover all the surface area of the face on full-face wedges and the high-toe part of the wedge is extended, giving you much greater control and chance of success on this kind of shot. 

The final thing to consider is the finish of the wedge. Wedges from different manufacturers are usually supplied with a choice of finish. There are chrome, black, blue, copper and raw to name just a few,  and they can give the wedges quite a different look. The Raw finish is the only one that makes a difference to the way the club feels as they are not coated and will rust over time. Wedges constructed like this will usually feel a little softer than others.