Why You Need This:

When it comes to chipping weight distribution, we find that both motion and weight helps us — or can hurt us.

This is common across many sports we play…

Discovering and understanding these shifts allows us to use them to our advantage…

A little move here, a starting point there…

It all comes and works together impacting other aspects of your game…

Watch this Chipping Weight Distribution video today to find out how to set up for clean contact every time!

What's Covered: What can happen if you do not distribute your weight properly and the outcomes.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 4:42

Video Transcription:

What the things that’s going to give you the most consistency when you’re chipping is keeping the weight on the left side the entire time.

There’s two things we’re going to go over that I want you to be aware of that can really through this off, though.

But I want to make sure as I set up to my chip shot, I have about 60 to 70 percent of my weight on my left side.

So I’m going to go ahead and set up here. You can see that my weight is favoring my left side a little bit, and if I kind of lift up each foot and feel when I’m perfectly balanced, I’m just going to bump a little bit more to the left here.

So if I do this properly, I’ve set up correctly, my left shoulder you’re going to see is just outside my left hip socket and my left ankle.

So there’s my ankle and my hip, you’re going to see my left shoulder slightly in front of that because my weight is on my left side, it’s just a little bit bumped out there in front.

One of the mistakes that I see, there are two mistakes I see is when people are trying to get the weight to the left, oftentimes what they’ll do they’ll keep the weight over here, I’ve even seen drills people do where they tell you to pick up the right foot and just barely have the toe on the ground.

That’s OK, it gets your weight to the left which is good, which we want to do, but now we’re really starting to exaggerate and you can see my left shoulder is way out here in front.

Now with this ball so much farther behind my left shoulder, that’s going to make the bottom of my arc naturally want to be way up here.

Now I’m going to be chopping down into this ball, because my weight is so far left, and naturally the bottom of my arc wants to be way up here in front.

So it’s going to be very easy to chunk and hit down too steeply because my weight is so far left I’m going to be chopping down into the ball, obviously something that we don’t want to do.

So we’re going to put our weight on the left side, but we want it to be just barely on the left side.

I’m going to do that again for you, and now we can see that a little bit of weight on the left, my shoulder’s just leading a little bit in front of my left hip and my left ankle.

And now I’m going to be able to have that weight left so I can come down and through the ball, and get my divot in front of the ball, it’s not going to be chopping down steep.

I’m going to be coming in nice, and soft, and easy. It’s going to be very easy to get crisp contact as I’m doing that.

Another mistake that I see, very common, is to get the weight left but to really bump the hip in front of your ankle and in front of your shoulders.

So now you can see from my ankle to my hip it’s leaning forward, I’m going to exaggerate here a little bit.

My upper body’s leaning back and it creates this angle between ankle, hip, and shoulder. What this does is this kind of lowers the right side of my body really close to the ground.

So if I’m going to exaggerate this one, I’ll see this a lot of times, weight’s on the right side here, my upper body’s kind of tilted back, and now everything’s really close to the ground behind my ball.

Again, the bottom of my arc is going too far behind the ball and now I’m going to start to scoop up into the ball, maybe complete miss the ball like that, or brush the ground, and come up and top the ball.

It’s going to go shooting across the green which is going to be very, very difficult to chip consistently again.

So we want to eliminate those things, get into a nice set up with the little weight favoring on our left side.

But check your left ankle, your left hip, your left shoulder, make sure those are lined up with the shoulder just a little bit in front.

Now to really engrain this we’re going to get into this perfect set up, and we can do this in our living room, we’ll actually remove the ball for now.

I’m going to get into this great setup, I’m going to set up a camera directly face-on toward my body.

I’m going to check to make sure these alignments are nice, and then I’m going to do a little mini stroke, a little shadow stroke practicing this.

You’ll notice my hips and my knees are free, I’m getting a little bit of rotation here, that’s completely fine, your body can move.

So it’s not exactly like a putting stroke where we’re going to lock in our lower body and not do a lot of movement. We can get a little bit of knee action as we’re coming back and through.

It’s OK to feel free, we’re just making sure that we’re keeping our weight on the left side the entire time.

So as I go back, I still feel like I’m 65 percent on my left side, and as I come to the finish, I feel like I’m 65 percent on the left side.

That’s actually what I want you to do as you’re doing these shadow strokes. Hold your finish, and we’re going to check to make sure that might weight is still right around that 65 percent.

If my weight is too far forward, I’m sliding forward, I’m going to get inconsistent. Definitely if I’m falling back at all, now I’m going to be coming up into the ball, and I’m going to hit a lot of poor contact chips.

Do about 100 repetitions, again checking on camera, make sure your alignments are right, hold your finish, check to make sure you’re 65 percent on the left as you’re doing each one of those.

Then we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to go out to the course and we’re going to chip about 100 more, doing those same things but now we’re going to actually use a ball, and we’re going to hold our finish again, really check our weight distribution.

If you can do that, get the body set up right, chipping becomes very, very easy. So work hard on that, good luck on your chipping, I’ll see you guys soon.