Golf Tips, Lessons and Strategies | How to improve your chipping

One of the pithy golf sayings is “You drive for show, and putt for dough.” That is, while your driving may look pretty, it’s the short game that makes all the difference. A professional golfer, playing a standard par-72 course will only hit 18 shots off the tee, or 25% of his shots. The remaining 75% are approach shots, chips and putts. Your average weekend duffer who shoots 100 will be even more, with over 80% of their shots taken from somewhere other than the tee. So, in order to improve your score, you must focus on the shots you hit most often.

There are lots of errors you can make while chipping, but they basically break down into two kinds, hitting the ball “fat” and hitting it “thin.” Both involve hitting the ball with in the wrong place – or not hitting the ball solidly. When you hit the ball fat, it tends not to go very far, if it goes anywhere at all. This is caused by hitting the ground before the ball, which virtually eliminates any club speed you generated in your swing, and causes you to get so far under the ball that you lose whatever aim you had. When you hit the ball thin, also known as skulling the ball, you take too much care in attempting to strike the ball cleanly, and you hit the top of the ball, causing it to lose whatever loft you intended to put on it, and go much further than you wanted.

The primary cause of these mis-hits is swinging the club you are chipping with at an uneven speed. Often, players, aware of the importance and difficulty of chipping, will take a normal backswing, and then slow down as they approach the ball in order to better guide the club. Ironically, by doing this, the shooter is actually losing the ability to better control his club, as the slowing of the velocity of the swing will throw the shot off balance. In reality, you want to do the opposite. Take a slow, shorter than normal backswing, and accelerate through the ball, just like a normal shot.

Unless you are trying to clear a hazard, like a trap or water, you want the ball to travel less than half the way to the hole in the air, and roll the rest. Your mind is telling you that you have a shot of 100 feet, but in truth, you want to focus on hitting it less than 50, and allowing the ball to do the rest of the work. Taking a normal backswing, or even a swing back to your waist, may be too far. There is little need to hit the ball hard, you just need to get it going.

Watch some of the best in the game, like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and Justin Leonard, and see how far back they swing. Watch how the ball comes off their club and approaches the hole, you’ll see that most of it is roll. So shorten your backswing, take a normal stroke, and watch the ball run.

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