How To Make Chipping/Pitching Easy

TEE TO GREEN How To Make Chipping/Pitching Easy

DEAN SKLAR, PGA PROFESSIONAL

What I’m about to share with you could make golf so much easier and less stressful for you. Especially if you struggle with chipping and pitching.

Contact!

If you contact the ball thin or fat then you get bad shots. And bad short game shots lead to higher scores.

Now using the old way of hitting chips and pitches with a lot of weight on the left side and using a sharp descending blow is very, very hard to time perfectly. Because if you play chips and pitches like that your contact has to be perfect (just ask Tiger).

So to try to solve that problem instructors started teaching a new way to play chips and pitch shots, which requires the following… ▸ New “High Margin For

Error” Pitching And

Chipping Setup ▸ Have the ball positioned in the middle to forward in your stance. ▸ Have your weight evenly distributed at setup. ▸ Have your feet quite close together. ▸ Square stance (or even closed) NOT open. ▸ Have the shaft positioned so it’s vertical NOT leaning forward. ▸ Here is a picture of Luke Donald showing a setup like this…

Compare this to the OLD way of chipping/pitching ▸ Ball positioned back in your stance. ▸ Most of your weight on your left side. ▸ Feet open. ▸ Shaft leaning forward.

There’s a lot of talk about using the bounce on wedges to make chips and pitch shots easier. But even with that high margin of error setup above, if you use the bounce on a wedge wrong you will get the club bouncing off the ground and smacking into the back of the ball, creating big skulls over the green – which naturally is horrible.

So how should you swing to use the bounce on your wedge?

Well, I think you should forget about the term “use the bounce” altogether, because the word “bounce” conjures up images of your club bouncing off the ground, and you most certainly don’t want that on your short game shots UNLESS your contact is perfect.

New “High Margin For Error” Pitching And Chipping Swing

With this new way of chipping/pitching the idea is to have a very shallow angle of attack.

But how shallow?

The club contacts the ground at least 2 ball spaces back from where the ball is.

Do you get what this means?

Let me spell it out for you because this is life changing for your short game…

It means you don’t have to contact the ball perfectly to hit great short game shots. Instead your club can come into contact with the ground anywhere up to 2 balls behind where your golf ball actually is AND still hit good short game shots The shots I’m talking about are the chip and pitch shots around the green that should be relatively easy. And the PGA Tour Pros make them look easy, but most amateurs mess them up.

Because getting the ball up is dependent on you hitting your shots a lot closer to the hole. And although I’ve given you some super helpful advice today that will help you to contact the ball better, it won’t guarantee that you get the golf ball consistently closer to the hole. Because there is one crucial element needed for a great short game that is not so much technical or mental…. and a few years ago I discovered this when I was trying to sort out my own short game issues. Always seek the advice of your local PGA Golf Professional and take Golf lessons with them to further improve all aspects of your game!

n PGA Professional Dean Sklar is a member of the Quarter Century Club of the PGA of America, an elite group of members who have served the PGA with honor and pride for 25 years. If you would like to talk to Dean about your golf game, contact him at Dean.Sklar@FloridaMoves.com or the Rose