Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "The Easiest Way to Pitch"

In today's lesson...

You'll discover the natural tendency about pitching that's been "taught" out of you...

...but you actually want it (if you want to be good around the greens).

If you've ever yipped or bladed a pitch before...

...you're going to love the simple adjustment I have for you today!

Pitching isn't difficult if you know this easy technique.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 8:03

Video Transcription:

I usually see two types of players that hit pit shots. Number one is what I call the yer, and this one fears so badly they're gonna hit the ground that they kind of yip. All of a sudden you get the chicken wing, there's a lot of stuff happening down here at the bottom. You don't want that to be you. Now, to fix that, a lot of players will go what I call the dragger, which means that they're gonna kind of do more of a putting type motion and try to just drag everything through to the target like that.

And you don't wanna do that one either. So first, let me go over what's going on with those and then give you the right way to do it, which is the absolute easiest way to hit pitch shots. It's actually the natural way that you probably would already do it if you hadn't gotten all kinds of instruction that that screwed you up, basically.

So let's go ahead and go over the yer. Well, what's going on here? You've been told to play the ball in the back of your stance, and that's what I would do too. So if I have my feet close together like this, I almost don't even want a whole clubhead width between my heels. They're almost touching there.

The ball is technically on my back foot. It's also on my front heel, and it's also kind of in the center of my body here. So it's not way back in my stance cuz my feet are so close together. Well, well, most people, when I see them that struggle chipping, they have their feet a lot farther apart like this, which essentially moves my entire body up here, way farther in front, which means the ball has been moved a lot farther back.

If I had my feet close together, that would be a ball position about like this. Now that gets the hands way in front, which gets the leading edge of the sharp edge, the slicing part of the club, really down to where it can start to dig into the ground. And that gets my angle of attacker, the direction the club is moving.

Much more of a chopping type motion. So if I'm doing this with this wider stance ball on the back, I know I'm gonna dig and I chunk one and it's the worst feeling that I've ever had. So to combat that, I kind of last second stand up, try to flip the club, and that's all. Just to keep this club from slamming into the ground.

It's kind of rerouting it. That's that chicken wing. And I'm exaggerating there a little bit, but that's the motion that's happened. I guarantee you've seen it. I'm hoping that that's not you. Now, the second most common one there, I'm gonna solve that here in a second. The second most common solution to that is to make the chipping stroke like a putting stroke.

And that just basically says, take your putting stance, square toes, lock your lower body. You know, in a putting stroke, I don't want my lower body moving at all. I'm trying to remove all the variables cuz the putting stroke is very slow. I'm just gonna rock my shoulders. And that's about the speed of a putting stroke, or at least most of them.

That you're gonna have really don't have to make anything too much bigger than say this, unless I have a putt over 30 or 40 feet, which most of the time you're not gonna have that. You'd be off the green. So what happens is, I don't wanna do this chicken wing, I don't wanna have all this stuff going on.

So keep our head down, our lower still. We feel like we're doing this kind of putting type motion and we just drag the club on through. So it's kind of a short back swing and then really drag it through and my entire body stays down to the ground. That one's a disaster too. It's actually okay if you do it that way as long as you don't have to hit it very far.

So if I'm just doing a little non-iron pitching wedge kind of bump and run, I can kind of make that work. But anything farther than that, definitely if I have the up in the air at all that that technique just doesn't work at all. So here's the solution. What's going on there is that everybody naturally, if they were asked to toss a golf ball, would do a couple things.

One of these things I promise you'd never heard of when you toss a golf ball, if I was just gonna grab a golf ball in my hand, toss it toward the target like that, I would naturally let my body pivot. And if you look at all great chippers and pitchers, unless they're just hitting a little tiny bump and run, like I said, you could use that putting stroke then.

But if it gets any farther than, say a 15 foot chip, Or pitch, you're gonna have to rotate the body. Look at my belt buckle. It starts to move toward the target. Look at my chest, starts to open up, and that's the way that everybody would basically toss a ball toward the target. That's the natural motion. I wouldn't pick this golf ball up, lock everything down, lock my head down and toss it like that.

That wouldn't make any sense. I also wouldn't open up my body and stay down like this. So keep my head down. Here's the secret, here's, it's so counterintuitive, but it really works like a charm. You see what's happening when you pitch is your club is doing this. And what I mean by that is you have some lag.

And what keeps this club from digging into the ground or having to kind of jump up at the last second is the, but end of the club is actually gonna work up. So if you look at my hand, look at the height of my hand here. The butt end of this club is gonna work up. As the club works down, and it was, has what I call impact glide.

So if I exaggerate that a little bit, let's imagine I had the club head on the ground and the, my hands were here about knee height as the button of the club works up. I could keep this club on the ground all the way until here, so my hands have raised up five, six inches, but the clubs say the exact same level.

Now, if you could do that in a golf swing, which that's really exaggerated, I, I wouldn't recommend doing that. But your club, you could never chunk your thin one. You could put the ball way back here or way up here. And because the club is moving so level with the turf, you'd hit all of them clean. Now it's not quite that good.

It's not quite that foolproof, but here's what we want to do. It's very, very simple. You'll notice when I did that first tossing motion, I said, you, you know, went ahead and pivoted. Watch my head on this one. I'm starting with it down, but as I pivot, look how my head actually comes up as it turns. So if you put a line on the top of my head there, or imagine a line here, I'm actually breaking through that line as I toss.

That's doing the same thing. If I grab this club as my upper body raises up, listen to the sound of my club hitting the turf. You can probably barely even hear it. It's just barely bruising it. It's just barely brushing it. So when I make this little pit shot, feet close together, ball off my back, foot, knees, hips and body are gonna rotate and my head is gonna go ahead and raise up so that I can get that impact glider, that flat spot, that club's gonna be on the ground for as long as possible, which is gonna get me to hit it really nice and clean.

So go ahead. As you rotate, let your head lift up and it's that simple. I mean, you just, if you got a tight, tight lie, It's foolproof. Really, really easy. All right, so once you start to dial in these really crisp, clean pitch shots and they seem easy to you, you're gonna wanna know how do you get the distance right?

So when you see the pros 30 yards out, 50 yards out, how in the heck do they know exactly how to far to hit it so it stops by the hole? Well, the easiest way to do this is by using a clock system, and it's something that most people get the wrong way because it's not about how far I take the club back, which we will learn there.

But it's about applying something else on top of that that's gonna allow you to dial in the speed. So if I take this club back to a certain length, I could do that and hit it really far. I could go here and hit it really soft, even though my hands went back the same spot each time. It's about a couple tricks that I'm gonna share with you there.

And if you wanna learn those, if you remember top speed golf, go to the instruction tab, go to the top speed golf system, and then the short game section. And pay particular attention to that clock drill that I talk about. Cause that's gonna be a real game changer for you. And I can't wait to share it with you once you pair it with what we talked about here today.

And let that head go ahead and come up instead of trying to lock it down and drag it or you know, try to flip at it. It's just the short game's gonna be fun cuz you're gonna hit these clean shots that have spin on them. All your buddies are gonna be jealous and they're gonna ask you, how in the heck are you doing these shots that we've never seen before?

So best of luck. I can't wait to see you in the short game section. Let's go over there and get started right now.