Why You Need This: We all want to have "Chipping Made Simple."

But we have to make sure we don't follow a few misconceptions that can lock you up, make you guide the ball, and heaven forbid, get the yips.

I go over 3 simple ways to make chipping easy.

Let's get started ......

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:09

Video Transcription:

Chipping can be extremely easy. If we can take a ball and toss it up toward this hole and get it pretty close to the hole consistently, then you can chip pretty well.

I mean, it’s really just not that hard. The hard thing, or we can make it as hard as we want to if we follow a few pieces of advice that I think can lock us up, to get us to be really tight.

We’ll start chunking, we’ll start thinning, we’ll start guiding it, we’ll start trying to use our hands way too much in the chipping stroke, and really it’s just not going to be very consistent.

Let’s make chipping easy. I’m going to give you the real secrets, the keys so that you feel like you can just get up and down all the time.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so let’s make chipping easy. Now you notice if I asked you to toss this golf ball to the hole, what you would do is you’d naturally start to take a step, you’d open up, you’d let your arm kind of have this free-flowing feel to it. You really wouldn’t try to guide it.

The last thing that you would do is kind of lock in all your angles, get everything perfectly straight, get your body to stop moving, only hinge from one angle, and then try to guide the ball up there.

At least if you’re going to be any good, you wouldn’t do that. If you try to do that, you probably end up throwing the golf ball 10 feet in front of you, or hitting yourself in the shoulder with it or something like that.

So whenever we try to control things, we actually lose control. When you look at something very natural, like a tossing motion, you’re going to be free-flowing.

Again, those legs are going to move, your body’s going to move, you’re not trying to guide it up there. Same thing happens when you’re chipping.

When I’m chipping, what I want to do here, is I want to get my knees to move. I want my knees to rock back and forth. That’s going to allow me to feel like I have a free-flowing motion here and I can really chip very easily.

The last thing I want to do is to lock my knees in, keep everything very still, lock my arms in, and I’m liable when I do this, if I set up to a golf ball and try to lock everything in, and go  back and through, I’m liable just to chunk it and not have any feel at all.

My hands are tight, I feel very anxious over top of the golf ball when I’m trying to limit all my rotation.

So if you imagine your right knee and your left knee, I want to have these pivot back and through, and that’s going to make it a little bit more natural, a little bit more like a tossing motion.

You give up a little bit of control of your body, or you give up a little bit of trying to control your body, and you actually gain a lot of control while you’re doing this.

So you’ll notice as I do these, I’m going to let my hips or my knees, my hips, my arms, my shoulders, all that kind of be free-flowing, and then you’ll see that that’s naturally going to get that ball to pop right up there.

Almost made that one, but you’re not going to feel like you try to tighten this up. That’s the very first key there.

Keep those knees moving, let those rock back and forth, and that’s going to help you to have a lot more feel and touch when you’re hitting these chip shots.

Piece number two is probably one of the most common things I see people get wrong. That’s trying to figure out where you’re going to hit the ground.

In order to be a great chipper, we’re going to want to hit the ground and the ball roughly at the same time.

Now I could try to place the ball, a lot of times you’ll here people say oh, put the ball way back in your stance.

Well that’s going to cause some problems. If I put the ball way back in my stance, now in order to hit this golf ball I’m going to have to be hitting down into the ball.

If I do that a little bit too much, now all of a sudden, I’m chopping down in the ground, very easy to chunk the golf ball.

If I place the ball too far forward in my stance, well now it’s going to be tough for me to really flight that down and get some forward shaft lean.

Here’s a great way to just make it as easy as possible. I want you to go set up to an imaginary golf ball here. Close your eyes, and then swing back and forth 10-15 times.

So I’m going to close my eyes here, I’m going to start by not even hardly touching the ground at all, and then I’m going to get to where I’m brushing the ground consistently in the same spot.

So I really don’t know where I’m hitting the ground at all right now, I’m just making my natural motion and seeing what’s happened. Now when I open my eyes and look down, I can see there’s a divot there.

If I take this golf ball, and I put that just right where the divot starts, or just in front of where the divot starts.

So I can see the divot, the very first piece of grass that I’m roughing up is here, and then my divot comes up there.

I want to place that just in front of the first piece of grass that I touched. That way when my club comes down and touches the grass, that’s going to be right where I’m hitting the golf ball.

So here I haven’t moved my stance, I haven’t done anything different, I’ve just let my natural swing take over.

Instead of trying to force something into your swing, just close your eyes, make some swings, figure out where you’re hitting the ground, and then put the ball there, and that’s going to make it really easy to make ball-first contact every single time.

Again, hit a pretty good chip shot there, made some good contact just using my natural stroke.

When you find out where that is, kind of notice where that is in relationship to your feet, and then go up to the next golf ball, pull it in, use the same placement in relationship to your feet.

Then you’re going to go ahead hit the next one, and you’ll notice you’re making a lot more ball-first contact, a lot more clean contact when you do it this way.

Now the last piece is, I need to keep my eyes pretty centered to be able to hit this ball consistently. What’s happening is, if my eyes stay centered, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put a little more weight on my left side.

I’m going to feel like my left hip is over my left ankle, my left shoulder’s over my left ankle. My chest is a little forward and now my eyes are just kind of on the inside of my left foot.

Now as I rotate back and through, let those knees pivot, you’ll notice how my eyes don’t move around a lot.

If I was to draw a line down from my eyes to the golf ball, I don’t want that line to move. I don’t want to go like this and come back and through.

I don’t want to lift up and see where the ball’s going too early, that’s going to make it really inconsistent when I’m hitting this golf ball.

The reason is, my eyes are what’s determining, you heard the idea of hand to eye coordination. If my eyes are really stable, I have them locked in on where I’m going to hit this golf ball.

If my eyes start moving around, essentially what’s happening is somebody’s grabbing this golf ball, and they’re moving the golf ball around.

Because I’m trying to figure out where I am in relationship to the golf ball. I have to keep my eyes as stable as possible when I’m doing this.

Imagine that I had a line coming up from the center of my left ankle, that’s going to go through the center of my hip and then to my shoulder, kind of inside of my shoulder.

I’m going to let that rock back and through and stay stable on that line the entire way. I don’t want that line to be moving around a lot, or I’m going to be inconsistent.

Same thing with my eyes. I’m locked in to the golf ball, until I come through contact, I don’t want my eyes moving around a lot. I’m going to pivot back and through, but my eyes aren’t going to move.

That’s the only part that you want to keep stable. The rest of it is free-flowing and natural. You notice I can move my body here back and forth, but my eyes are locked in.

They’re not really moving around very much. Same thing you want to happen in your chipping stroke, that’s going to make it a lot easier to make solid contact.

Now I don’t want you to stop here. We can watch this video and we’re going to get some good contact, we’re going to get more comfortable over top of the golf ball, we’re going to stop trying to guide the golf ball up there, and let our natural athleticism take over.

But if we really want to engrain this motion, if we want to become a great chipper, we need to go to the short game section of the top speed golf system.

Start working through that from level 1 video 1, do all those drills and then it’s going become completely natural.

The more reps you get in, the more those drills that you do, the better you’re going to get, the better your golf game’s going to get, you’re not even going to worry if you miss the green.

Because you’re going to feel confident that you can walk right up there, chip it close to the hole, knock it in, save a par, and move to the next one.

So let’s go ahead and get started, and I’ll see you in the Short Game section.