Better Chipping With Bill Abbott

To carry on with our short game series, I would like to turn your attention to chipping, an area of the game that is much overlooked, but still vitally important.

The majority of amateurs spend very little time practising their chipping, most struggling to realise that the shots from around the green are equally as important as that booming 300 yard drive.

As with most short game shots, the problems occur by the player becoming too reliant on the hands in the actual execution, therefore relying on that tried and trusted saying “it’s all about feel!!”.  When players comment that “my feel wasn’t good today”, what they are really saying is their technique is poor, but you only get good feel when you’ve got good technique.

So what is basic chipping technique?  Well to start with we need to keep our hands more passive or quiet during the stroke, trying to stop them flipping at the ball, therefore letting the club and the body do the important work.

We need to adopt a slightly narrower stance for this shorter type of shot, with the ball back of centre, to encourage a descending type action, with our hands forward of the clubhead towards our target thigh.  We would then be looking to control the stroke with our arms and shoulders, turning through the shot.  This would allow us through practise, to trust the loft on the club, rather than what most amateurs do, which is try to help the ball in the air, resulting in duffs and thins.

Once your students have a consistent technique, you should encourage them to use different clubs for chipping around the green, from a lofted wooden club through all irons, from 4 iron to sand wedge.  Too many people reach for their most lofted club when it comes to chipping, causing distance control and consistency problems.  If we can get them to experiment with different clubs, visualising different trajectories, we can hopefully stimulate their imagination when it comes to playing shots around the green.

So, we must ensure that before we begin to work on other aspects of chipping, ie accuracy and distance control, that the technique is correct first.  Without this, the game becomes more difficult.