Golf club bounce is one of those concepts that virtually everyone is confused about, and also that virtually no one knows how it affects your swing. Golf club bounce, however, is not that difficult to understand.

Pull one of your irons out of your bag and really look at the bottom of it. (The bottom is called the sole.) Now, according to how old the club is, the sole is either flat or rounded. They made flat soled irons even in the 1990s. After that, manufacturers started rounding the soles.

A complete discussion of the geometry of golf club bounce is beyond this little article. Also, it would take a few diagrams, which I can't publish along with this. But you don't have to understand all the ins and outs of bounce to be able to understand it in general, and especially to use golf club bounce to improve your game. (Which is probably your real goal, after all.)

As far as older, flat soled clubs, golf club bounce is the angle that the sole of the club makes with the horizontal, when the shaft of the club is held straight up and down. With rounded soles, this is a slightly more difficult idea to envision, but it's still the basic idea of what angle with the horizontal a line drawn from the trailing edge to the leading edge of the sole would make.

So, now that you know more about golf club geometry that 0.1% of all golfers, what does bounce do for you?

There are three main ways that golf club bound helps you out. One is with your sand wedge.

Sand wedges have extra bounce. The reason is this. Since bounce makes the leading edge of the wedge be higher off of the horizontal than the trailing edge, this means when the wedge actually strikes the ball (in the sand), the leading edge will be less likely to dig into the sand. It's higher up, so it will skirt over the sand! One thing to try is to take a sand wedge and a high numbered iron and get in the sand and see if you can see the difference the extra bounce makes.

There are a couple of other things to know about golf club bounce and how it affects your clubs.

Now that manufacturers are rounding the soles of clubs, this effectively makes your club heavier for a given length. More weight means more momentum for the same shaft speed. This is great for sand and heavier rough.

One way that club bounce doesn't help is with hitting the ball on firmer surfaces. If your club has more bounce, that will make the leading edge rise up higher than it needs to. This will make you tend to hit the ball with the leading edge somewhere around the middle. Of course, this totally screws up your shot! So, bottom line is that you need to be aware of golf club bounce.