Why You Need This:

Even out your chipping stroke with this simple tip…

Stop over-chipping, chunking, or topping and save strokes…

Get the Pendulum Chipping Stroke method down and make it the foundation for your chip shots…

Watch this video now to improve your technique and get up-and-down more often!

What's Covered: how to make a smooth, pendulum chipping stroke with equal force all the way through the swing

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 3:15

Video Transcription:

Hi, so I hope you guys are doing well with the chipping, you’re working your way through this system.

We’re going to talk about one of the key fundamentals of chipping, and that’s making a pendulum-like stroke.

Every time we hit a chip we always want to be accelerating as we’re contacting the ball.

As we talked about before, we have this ball just behind the low point of our arc, meaning that as I come down, let’s imagine that the ball is here.

I’m going to swing and be contacting the ball while my club is still on the way down. It’s going to reach its low point in front of the ball, and then start back up.

We’re going to be very shallow as we’re coming through here and always contacting that ball as our club is just barely hitting down. So it’s always going to be downward blow as we’re doing this.

If we have a pendulum stroke, you can imagine that the bottom of my arc is always going to be just barely in front of the golf ball.

We’re also going to be very smooth as we’re coming back and through. So a key to this, this has been the number one mistake that I’ve seen with anyone.

If you’re ever really struggling chipping, make a mental note of this, this is probably what’s going on, is that your backswing very, very commonly gets too long, I’m taking this big backswing and now I have to decelerate as I’m coming through.

Maybe I go three or four feet coming back and I only go to about a foot coming through, and I end up kind of popping or trying to slow down the club and it gets very unstable as I’m doing this.

So what happens is a lot of times when you take that big backswing, we’re going here and we try to slow down, we’re tightening up the hands, we’re liable to chunk the ball, or hit it thin, or just be very, very inconsistent.

Another way, mistake I see, is at the other end of this where we’re exaggerating and going too far through, and we don’t have that nice smooth tempo.

This is going to make it very difficult to get your distance control correctly.

So a lot of times people hear, “Well, I want to accelerate through the shot,” and they’ll make a little mini backswing, only taking it back about a foot and then really trying to accelerate through to exaggerate accelerating through the ball.

And then it doesn’t have a nice flow, you can’t get your timing down, and you’re really going to struggle hitting shots too far and too short when you’re doing that.

So if I do this properly, I want to go ahead and swing back and swing through about the same amount.

So for this drill I’m going to go ahead and swing back, and get some little mini swings, and I’m only going to go back maybe three feet or so, and as I come through I’m going to pause and hold it three feet into the finish.

So I’m going to do about 100 repetitions of this, making sure that I’m going back and through, and I’m going to pause, checking to make sure that I’m doing this correctly.

One thing that you’re going to want to do is videotape yourself from face on and make sure that it actually looks on camera like it feels like you do in your swing.

You’ll be surprised, a lot of time one side is a lot longer, or a log shorter, and you don’t even realize you’re doing it. So be sure to videotape this.

We’re going to do 100 reps, checking on camera to make sure we’re doing this correctly.

Once we’ve done 100 repetitions doing that, we’re going to go out to the course, grab a club, hit about 100 chips, pausing in our finish, and making sure that it’s even both back and through, getting that good, consistent contact.

So work on this drill, this is the biggest thing for those of you who are struggling with chipping.

Really focus on getting that even, always slightly accelerating through the ball, and you’re going to be chipping a lot better.