This simple drill will quickly help to improve your ball striking, especially if, like many golfers, you have a tendency to overuse your lower body in the pitching & chipping stroke.
In order to strike the ball solidly and consistently, you need to swing the club back and through on-plane. If you don’t keep your lower body very quiet in the backswing, you are likely to take the club back too far inside, causing all manner of mishits, including hitting behind the ball (“chunking” the shot or hitting it “fat”) or catching it thin (“skulling” it).
In the pitching & chipping stroke, striking the ball cleanly and solidly is your top priority. You don’t need to use your lower body for power with these delicate finesse shots, so you need to maximise consistency by using it for stability instead – to avoid moving the bottom of your swing arc at all costs.
This can be very difficult for amateur golfers, because they work so hard to use the ground properly in their full swing, they subconsciously use their lower body to drive and sequence every swing.
What these golfers need is a way to learn and ingrain the correct movement pattern, a drill that will confirm and reinforce the correct feelings when they are moving properly, and quickly highlight when there is a problem by providing great feedback. That’s what this drill is for…
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…Once you can make great shots this way, continue to regularly include this drill at the start of your short game practice sessions, as part of your technical practice, to confirm that you are moving correctly and to avoid slipping into bad habits.After a little work, you won’t ever have to think about your lower body movement when you’re out on the course.
This drill will quickly help you to feel the correct lower body movement in the pitching & chipping stroke, enabling you to quickly develop and maintain great fundamentals. Your ball striking, consistency and touch around the greens will improve rapidly.
The aim of the drills in the Pitch & Chip like a Champion series is to practise smart, so that you quickly get to that “natural”, non-mechanical, stage, where the correct movement just feels right. You can then forget about internal factors and just play shots with imagination, with finesse.
For more information on the kinematic sequence for the pitching and chipping stroke, see Golf Swing Sequence and Timing – Pitching & Chipping.
This drill forms part of the Golf Loopy Pitch & Chip like a Champion series, the sensational new pitching and chipping game improvement system that will help you to improve every aspect of your performance around the greens. The improvements will be dramatic, and they will be permanent.
