Why You Need This: Today, you get "The #1 Golf Chipping Method"

There's only 2 things you need to know to have an excellent short game...

...and today's video is going to show you the perfect drill for getting them into your game.

You'll also discover the reason you should play the ball off your lead foot rather than your trail foot when chipping...

...and why your setup for chips is almost the complete opposite from when you're hitting a full shot.

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 10:26

Video Transcription:

Clay Ballard: Now there’s only a couple things you need to do to be a phenomenal chipper, to really just make this easy.

Number one, you need to keep your body and your arms working together. If I do that correctly, you can see that this green band stays under my arm.

Now if my arms get separated from my body, you can see that flies out. I’m going to show you this drill here in a second.

Number two, we have to make sure that we don’t get stuck underneath. If my club starts to tip underneath the right side of my body starts to fall down.

I’m going to get those chunks, or I’m going to get those drop kicks that just kind of fly across the green. So once I show you this method, its going to be really easy.

You’re going to feel super confident, and you’re going to feel like any chip or pitch that you have, you’re really just going to be able to knock it close and make clean, solid contact.

All right, so that almost never happens. I promise that was on the first take. Usually, it doesn’t work out that good. But let me show you a couple things here with this rubber band.

This is a great drill, Chris Hunsucker, one of our Top Speed Golf Certified Instructors showed me this. I didn’t have one of these bands, and I put it off for almost a year.

I never tried this drill out because I never ordered one of these. Don’t do what I did. If you don’t already have one of these little TheraBands, use any kind of band that you have.

If you don’t have one, just order one, because this is the best chipping drill. It is phenomenal at how good it helps you to not only stay connected, but also to keep that club from dropping underneath.

Now the real goal with this, is to make sure that you make clean contact with the ground. That’s what chipping really is.

Anything else we do is just to come down, make contact with the ground at the right spot, and be very consistent with that.

So what I’ve done is I’ve wrapped this around the club face. I’m going to stick the other end under my armpit.

What I’ll do is I’ll grab the club with my left hand, I’ll stick it with my right hand under my armpit, I get that question all the time from people I’ve showed this drill to.

What I’m working on here, is I’m making sure my body keeps on rotating and turns in to my left arm. You can imagine here, the upper part of my left arm, this bone here, the bicep of my arm, my humerus bone here, is really attached across my body.

It’s cinched again against my left pec, and that cinched in feeling there is going to pinch this rubber band.

Now, if I rotate my body and I keep my knees moving – so notice how my legs and my knees are going to move through this shot – I can turn into this left arm and I’m very connected.

You hear all great chippers and pitchers talk about how connected they are. This is what they mean. This is the part that’s connected.

That allows them to keep that face very, very square and very consistent so that you can hit the ground in the same spot over and over again.

You don’t have to worry about chunking and thinning if you’re doing this. Grab this rubber band, stick it underneath your arm.

If you don’t have a rubber band, you can use a glove, but I don’t like that nearly as much because it doesn’t give you that feedback of the connection.

You can hit some easy chips, and I’ll just go ahead and knock one 10 feet here or so, just showing you how you can actually hit them with the rubber band.

It’s not the best, because it’s going to kind of mess up the contact there, but you get the idea. The main thing is that I want to keep a decent amount of tension here, that way if my body stops, if my legs stop moving, if my hips stop moving, and I just arm it, it flies out.

That’s what I see dag-gone near every player. I would say pretty much 100 percent of players that are struggling to get that consistent contact are doing that motion.

Let me give you a couple of keys that make you want to do this motion. Sometimes players will put the ball too far back in their stance, they’ll have too much forward shaft lean and that will get them into this kind of very descending blow.

Now when that happens, the body stops, it stands up, a lot of times you’ll lose your posture, and then you’re going throw the hands and arms to keep from burying this club in the ground.

If you did that, you’ll see how you get this chicken wing action. That chicken wing is actually good for that movement, because if I didn’t do the chicken wing, I would go ahead and stay connected here, I would chop down into it, and I’d just cold chunk it.

Now when you use that rubber band, you’re automatically going to feel where you need to play the ball position, how you need to come into contact to keep that rubber band, and brush the turf and come to that finish.

There’s really no way to cheat it. You put that rubber band under your arm, it gets your ball position better, it gets your angle of attack better, it keeps your connection, it keeps you brushing the ground the same spot. It’s really just a dag-gone good drill.

If you’re curious, I’m going to go ahead and show you a couple other pieces with that, that I’d recommend. Just to save you a little bit of time.

I like to think of my ball position in relationship to my left foot. So if my stance is very narrow like this, I’m going to open my stance slightly.

I like to have my toes slightly ahead, that helps you to pivot in front and again, keep that connection here.

I want to play the ball position coming off my left heel. If I had a little wider stance, again, that ball position would still be somewhere kind of toward my left heel. If I have a narrow stance, it’s toward my left heel.

Some people will do it but in relationship to the right foot. I don’t think that’s right, because if your stance is narrow, yes, this ball position is on my right foot.

But if I get my stance a little wider and I play it on my right foot, now I’m chopping down into it. That’s because our weight is left.

Since our weight is left, our weight is over our left foot, we should play our ball position in relationship to our left foot.

So that’s piece number one. Stick that rubber band, stick whatever kind of band you have under your armpit, make some swings, I could go into a ton of detail about every little tiny thing that’s happening there, but I’ll be honest with you.

You wrap that rubber band around, you practice for a couple days like that for just 15, 20 shots, you’re going to get the feeling right away of what the best chippers in the world are feeling and how they’re moving the body, how they’re staying connected.

I’m going to wrap this rubber band around the club head again, and now we’re going to talk about getting stuck under.

This is another really big one that a lot of players struggle with. This is the second piece to this chipping method that’s going to make it really easy to hit it solid.

When I get stuck under, what’s happening there is when I take my backswing, my club goes a little too much to the inside, and my downswing, my right side of my body drops.

You can see how this gets the club closer to the ground and it gets it wanting to ground out back here. Now that’s an exaggeration, but if I do too much of that club to the inside, ground out, boom, that’s a chunk.

Now if I’m lucky enough to miss the ground and not chunk it, now the club’s working back up into the ball and you thin it across the green.

So really, the chunk shot and the thin shot are the same thing. Everything’s falling right, falling underneath.

This rubber band is also awesome for that. Because what it does is when I make my backswing, because there’s a little bit of tension here, I’m typically going to keep this club head outside of my hands and arms.

As I make this backswing when I’m looking from down the line, you’re going to see how this club head is not in here, it’s staying a little bit out.

Then from there, all I need to do is keep my body left and rotate through to the finish. Now when I get to the finish, I want to make sure my chest is over my hips and everything is rotated on through.

What I don’t want to do is go here, fall this way and not finish, so fall to the right. A great little tip for that is when you set up, go ahead and set up with your spine a little bit farther forward, or almost the opposite of what you would do in your full swing.

We know from the Top Speed Golf System, that we have to have a little spine tilt away in the full swing. In the short game, it’s actually the opposite of that.

I want to have my spine basically straight up and down, so that I can keep that low point very consistent. The most common question I get there is why do I have to have it different for the full swing and the short game?

Well, in the short game, it’s all about consistency and hitting one point. You don’t have to create any power. If we would do it the same way in the full swing, if we never had to hit it over 150 yards.

This is the most consistent way of doing it. But unfortunately, golf requires some power. You have to get behind the golf ball to really create a lot of power. When we’re close to the green, we don’t power.

We just need it to be consistent. I’m going to set up with my upper body a little bit more to the left. I’m going to visualize this rubber band, staying connected. Club head’s outside, and then I’m just going to rotate on through.

Now if I do that, things just get super, super easy here. Let’s go ahead and try another one out. There we go, two in a row. Both within a foot and a half of the hole. Not going to do much better than that.

Now what about shots that are a little bit farther away? Maybe you have a 40, a 60, an 80-yard shot? How in the heck do the pros get it right on the money every single time?

How do they know if they’re 40 yards, or 50 yards, or 60 yards, how do you feel that? There’s actually a system that you can follow.

You’ll hear most people refer to this as a clock system. It’s actually not the clock system itself, not taking it back a certain distant that makes all the difference in the world.

It’s the rhythm, the tempo, and the timing that allows this to happen and be very, very consistent with it. Well that’s just one example of something that I’m going to teach you in The Short Game System of the Top Speed Golf System -- Short Game section of the Top Speed Golf System.

We talked about here today how to hit these really clean pitches and chips. Hey, when you use this method it gets really easy, but that’s not the complete short game.

Let me show you how to control your distance wedges. Let me show you how to play those easy bump and runs.

Let me make you really a complete short game player, so that you never have to worry about getting up and down again.

I can’t wait to share with you some of the real secrets that I’ve learned over the years, and help you out. Go ahead and go on over to the Top Speed Golf, go to the Instruction tab, Top Speed Golf System.

Go to The Short Game section, and I’m going to show you a lot of these secrets there. Check it out next after you do this drill. I can’t wait to see you there.