Why You Need This: Today you'll discover the "Biggest Mistakes When Chipping and Pitching"

If it's all too common for you to hit chunky chips or thinned pitches around the green (especially when there's any pressure on you)...

...then there's a good chance you're making one or more of these 3 mistakes I see all the time.

Chips and pitches around the greens don't have to be difficult if you understand a couple basic principles...

...so today I'm going to show you 3 big no-no's when you're hitting shots from around the green that are making things much tougher on you than they need to be.

Now you can finally have that sharp short game you've always wanted...

...and start getting up and down on a regular basis.

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:54

Video Transcription:

It’s so common to see players chunk and thin shots around the green, but what if I told you it is really simple to hit clean chip shots day in and day out, really close to the hole if you know the right technique?

I’m going to go over some of the biggest mistake that you can make, and if you’re making these, man, you’re making chipping hard.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so mistake number one, putting the ball too far back in your stance. Usually this comes also with putting your feet too far apart.

So you do want to hit down on this golf ball, I do want to be hitting down, hitting the ball first and then the ground in front.

I may clip a little bit of the grass before the ball, it’s completely fine. I’ll also want to have forward shaft lean, so I want my hands leading in front of the club head when I hit this shot.

Now to do that, it’s really easy to think well I can just put the ball back in  my stance, that’s going to basically make it where I have to hit down, because there’s really no way to scoop up when I’m back here in the back of my stance.

My hands are definitely going to be in front when they’re like this. But if my feet are this far apart, and my weight is also on my left side like we’ve heard basically everybody says, this ball is way far back of where my low point is.

So if my weight’s on my left side, I’m going to be kind of grounding out, a low point of my swing arc would be kind of under the inside of my left shoulder here.

So that would be somewhere around here. When I put this ball this far back in my stance, really the only way to reach to it, is to start to chop down too far, very much descending into the golf ball.

It’s very easy to do that, and just cold stub it. If we do a couple of those then what ends up happening is our brain says I sure as heck don’t want to do that anymore, that’s super embarrassing.

Let me try to not hit the ground now, and I start to get a little bit of this chicken wing type action, where I try to pull the club up from slamming into the ground and I end up getting one of these, where you just kind of top it across or skull it across the green.

Your arms fold up, basically the most embarrassing things that can happen, because now you’re deathly afraid of just slamming the club in the ground, or skulling it across the green.

Yeah, that’s no fun. Not a good way to play golf. If we get the right ball position, things get a lot easier.

So I like to put the feet much closer together. It allows me to rotate more easily through the shot, which I’ll get to here in a second, but it also allows me to play this ball kind of on my left heel here.

Depending on where the camera’s lined up this may not be perfectly lined up, but I want the ball to be on the left heel. That way when my weight is on my left side, now my ball is there, too.

The left inside of my left shoulder is kind of directly just barely in front of the golf ball so my low spot is really good in relationship to where the golf ball is.

Now I can have those hands forward, I can hit just a basic bump and run chip here, and that’s going to be pretty solid results time and time and out.

Even if I get a little too down in it, I hit a little too much ground, it’s going to be fine, because my low point is going to be just in front of that golf ball.

With that ball back in my stance, not going to be good. I’m going to feel really jerky over top of this ball.

Number two, would be decelerating. One of the worst things that you can do is making too big of a backswing.

A lot of times I’ll see players make a big backswing, and all of a sudden, they’re slowing down. Man, that makes me nervous just even thinking about it. That’s going to be very inconsistent.

I’d like to see roughly the same length backswing as you have follow through. That makes it really easy to make sure I’m accelerating through the shot, and I’m going to make that good, clean contact and it’s not really going to feel like I have to do that much work to make it happen.

So there, I even chunked that one just a hair, but because my low point was good, because I accelerated through it, it rolled out and it ended up just as good as if I had hit it perfectly clean.

The next one is locking up your legs. This is a really, really tough one. The reason this one is so prevalent, is because it makes sense at a surface level.

If I think about I’m going to keep my legs dead still, I’m not going to move my legs, I’m just going to go upper body, well that eliminates one of your degrees of freedom.

If I eliminate the legs, I should be more consistent, there’s less things that can go wrong. Unfortunately, when you do this, when you lock up those legs, now I have to do everything with my upper body and my arms.

I tend to get way too handsy, my wrist is going to tend to break down like this, might get a little bit of a chicken wing there. That’s all coming from not rotating the lower body and the knees.

If I do this properly, I want to go ahead and have my knees pivot as I’m coming back and through. One thing that really helps with this, is getting your feet a little bit more open toward the target.

I don’t like to have my feet square like this, because I feel like I’m having to use my hands to go across my body.

When you look at really good chippers and pitchers of the golf ball, they’re almost all going to set up with their feet slightly open to where the target is lined up.

So I like to have this front foot open and the back foot kind of facing forward to the target too, and that’s going to help me get my knees rotating. From there, I’m not worried about keeping my knees still at all.

I’m going to go ahead let my knees rotate back and through, and that’s going to give me a good feeling of rhythm, and it’s going to give me a good fluidness through the golf ball to hit it really clean.

If I point my feet forward, if I lock up my lower body, I’m all hands and arms, it’s going to be a disaster. You’re just going to hit so many thin ones and chunks, it’s going to be really miserable doing it that way.

You may be able to do that if you’re using a super low-lofted club and you’re not very far from the hole. Here I’m a little bit farther.

If I was only 10 or 15 feet from the hole and I was using a 7 iron, maybe I could use more of a bump and run type putting stroke, and just have my arms go back and through.

The problem with that is, once I get any farther than that, this simple putting stroke is not going to fast enough.

I couldn’t use a putting stroke to get the ball from here to that hole, so I have to start breaking everything down, that’s where it goes out of whack.

It’s not that you can’t use a putting stroke to chip, it’s just you can only do that when it’s really close. Once it gets a little farther, it just makes it impossible to make that happen.

Lastly here, I want to have my weight on my front foot, but again, I want to make sure that it’s not my feet way far apart like this.

I’m going to have my feet close together so my feet are fairly balanced, they don’t feel like it’s way out of whack, like I don’t feel like I’m like this when I’m over it and I’m way to the left. I’m just favoring my left side a little bit.

My heels are only going to be not even a golf club head-width apart, and then from there, with my weight staying a little bit left, I feel like I can just pivot around that left leg and my knees and my body are going to rotate on through.

You see if I do that, I can get really consistent results. I just need to learn to aim a little bit more to the left. But those are all hit pretty clean. Follow those tips, and you’ll hit clean shots, too.

Now if you really want to be fantastic around the greens, you have to follow a system that’s used for all of your short game shots.

That’s using the correct technique for chipping, for pitching, for bunker shots or for distance wedges. Now, the only way you’re really going to ingrain that, is by working through the Top Speed Golf System.

I give you the fundamentals there, all you have to do is just grab a club, do what I say, and you’re going to get way better around the greens. Follow it step by step, and it makes things really easy.

Now I talked about a lot of the mistakes that you want to avoid in this video, but I didn’t get into the details of exactly how you want to hit all the different shots.

So go to the Top Speed Golf System, click on the Instruction tab. Go to the Top Speed Golf System from there, then go to the Short Game areas.

Once you work through those courses, it’s going to get really fun around the greens, because you may find yourself 20 or 30 feet away from the flag in 2 on a par 5, and you can’t wait to possibly make your eagle chip go in, or have a tap-in for birdie.

Maybe you find yourself in a bunker to where normally you struggle, but you’re actually excited because you know you’re going to blast out of the bunker and pretty close to the hole.

That’s the kind of things you can get when you work through this system. I challenge you to get started right now, just do the first video of each one of the sections, and you’re going to see some great results.

I’ll see you there.