The One Short Game Drill You Must Do – by PGA Pros Pete Styles & Matt Fryer
The One Short Game Drill You Must Do – by PGA Pros Pete Styles & Matt Fryer

In this video tip PGA golf professionals Pete Styles and Matt Fryer understand that practising your short game is often not the most glamorous or enjoyable part of your golf practice. However, they also understand that it can be one of the most valuable. Therefore, they recommend this fantastic short game practice drill, whereby using a ladder approach to your distance control should massively improve the yardage of each of your chip shots. Done regularly, this will have a tremendous benefit to the short game control that you display on the golf course, and will set up many more birdies and pars.

So a shot that we don't see practiced a lot Pete the short game shot tending to see a lot of those driver shots the iron shots as far as we can hit it being the main practiced focus for a lot of people and not so much what you just started this video with there. I think a lot of golfers if you took them to the driving range and explain to them to hit that shot they would see that as a waste of golf balls definitely a waste of money throwing a ten piece out because it's not going far enough. I want to see the big long drive shots that is a very very common shot on the golf course.

Excellent and we've got this drill setup here that Pete's going to explain there and you just demonstrated something very well there before we turned the camera on it was this box one was selected and you just hit it into that. So talk us through this drill and what it's going to help us achieve in our short game practice. This much is a classic ladder drill it's a ladder of different distances that I want to try and hit and I've taken 5 paces and laid a club down then 2 paces then another 2 pace another and another and depends how big the driving range or the practice round or even your back garden is you could maybe get 6 or 7 boxes in a line here. The more the better, but the principle be done judging my landing zone by distance and I want to choose a step and I want to land in that step of the ladder. So for that 1st one it was a very delicate little short shot now if you want to go a little bit further I make a slightly bigger swing trying to land in the step too don't know where it rolls to it's more about where it lands, and the 3rd one a longer swing landed up their a little bit further.

Excellent there you demonstrated a lot of control it's a very natural skill throwing a ball with while throwing a ball throwing an object is something that we're learning from you know knee high we're doing it all the time and like you say if we can get into landing zones. I think is a big word that I took from that if we can learn to control the wedges through this drill and get them landing in specific zones very much like a throw we're going to see more control over the the wedges. Would you agree? It's important we don't get overly technical we discover what you've got a fundamentally sound chipping technique. It is just using your instinctive your hand eye coordination bit different businesses if I threw a ball different distances it felt quite easy. If I rolled a piece of paper instead throw it at the waste paper basket you get it quite close within your 1st throw it might not go in exactly but you get it in around the zone, and if you didn't your 2nd shot would be better to 2nd throw would be back the same principle. Here throw it into 1, 2, 3, 4 and then actually go back down the ladder again. So this swing is getting longer or getting shorter to aid distance control. Fantastic is a great way to practice that and if we were trying to put a little bit of pressure on our selves emulate what we feel on the golf course when we are practicing and playing what would you suggest we could do. Matt I think it is quite nice to see if your on your own do a series of 4 or 5 shots in a row and if you miss when you start again.

Right I have to build a bit of a test I have to build my steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and if I miss one I go again, and if I can get 1, 2, 3, 4 maybe can I come back down to call for ball 3 to one back again, but if that better still would be if there were 2 of us. Right when I could go to the range together and it was who can get in box one 1st to get a box to 1st who can get the and of the ladder but on match play race situations there puts a lot more pressure on you. I think you have valid points there about on course pressure, and I think if you were good at this exercise and then you went on the golf course you would get a long shot position in front of you where the relevance of the exercise comes off because you look at a shot and you go, well it's a short one, but if you've got one practiced up 10 minutes ago or an hour ago and you get to a longer shot. Well thats just box 4 I've practiced that one and the feeling and the feed back would come straight back to you would understand how to hit the shot the right distance and exactly the feeling as well. You know these are going to be a yardage going to be at that yardage as you get used to those yardage and you'd figure points in your so. Going in feel that length of swing to hit it to your desired zone and the landing zone more importantly like we see on tour these guys are putting it into a position and then watching it feed out towards the flag so if we can start to practice drills like this one on your own or be with a friend put a little bit of pressure on it to see that you're getting this drill. Practice quite a bit instead of or your time spent hitting a long shots on the range we should see we develop a better short game and start to see that our scores are lowering from there.

2019-01-04

In this video tip PGA golf professionals Pete Styles and Matt Fryer understand that practising your short game is often not the most glamorous or enjoyable part of your golf practice. However, they also understand that it can be one of the most valuable. Therefore, they recommend this fantastic short game practice drill, whereby using a ladder approach to your distance control should massively improve the yardage of each of your chip shots. Done regularly, this will have a tremendous benefit to the short game control that you display on the golf course, and will set up many more birdies and pars.

So a shot that we don't see practiced a lot Pete the short game shot tending to see a lot of those driver shots the iron shots as far as we can hit it being the main practiced focus for a lot of people and not so much what you just started this video with there. I think a lot of golfers if you took them to the driving range and explain to them to hit that shot they would see that as a waste of golf balls definitely a waste of money throwing a ten piece out because it's not going far enough. I want to see the big long drive shots that is a very very common shot on the golf course.

Excellent and we've got this drill setup here that Pete's going to explain there and you just demonstrated something very well there before we turned the camera on it was this box one was selected and you just hit it into that. So talk us through this drill and what it's going to help us achieve in our short game practice. This much is a classic ladder drill it's a ladder of different distances that I want to try and hit and I've taken 5 paces and laid a club down then 2 paces then another 2 pace another and another and depends how big the driving range or the practice round or even your back garden is you could maybe get 6 or 7 boxes in a line here. The more the better, but the principle be done judging my landing zone by distance and I want to choose a step and I want to land in that step of the ladder. So for that 1st one it was a very delicate little short shot now if you want to go a little bit further I make a slightly bigger swing trying to land in the step too don't know where it rolls to it's more about where it lands, and the 3rd one a longer swing landed up their a little bit further.

Excellent there you demonstrated a lot of control it's a very natural skill throwing a ball with while throwing a ball throwing an object is something that we're learning from you know knee high we're doing it all the time and like you say if we can get into landing zones. I think is a big word that I took from that if we can learn to control the wedges through this drill and get them landing in specific zones very much like a throw we're going to see more control over the the wedges. Would you agree? It's important we don't get overly technical we discover what you've got a fundamentally sound chipping technique. It is just using your instinctive your hand eye coordination bit different businesses if I threw a ball different distances it felt quite easy. If I rolled a piece of paper instead throw it at the waste paper basket you get it quite close within your 1st throw it might not go in exactly but you get it in around the zone, and if you didn't your 2nd shot would be better to 2nd throw would be back the same principle. Here throw it into 1, 2, 3, 4 and then actually go back down the ladder again. So this swing is getting longer or getting shorter to aid distance control. Fantastic is a great way to practice that and if we were trying to put a little bit of pressure on our selves emulate what we feel on the golf course when we are practicing and playing what would you suggest we could do. Matt I think it is quite nice to see if your on your own do a series of 4 or 5 shots in a row and if you miss when you start again.

Right I have to build a bit of a test I have to build my steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and if I miss one I go again, and if I can get 1, 2, 3, 4 maybe can I come back down to call for ball 3 to one back again, but if that better still would be if there were 2 of us. Right when I could go to the range together and it was who can get in box one 1st to get a box to 1st who can get the and of the ladder but on match play race situations there puts a lot more pressure on you. I think you have valid points there about on course pressure, and I think if you were good at this exercise and then you went on the golf course you would get a long shot position in front of you where the relevance of the exercise comes off because you look at a shot and you go, well it's a short one, but if you've got one practiced up 10 minutes ago or an hour ago and you get to a longer shot. Well thats just box 4 I've practiced that one and the feeling and the feed back would come straight back to you would understand how to hit the shot the right distance and exactly the feeling as well. You know these are going to be a yardage going to be at that yardage as you get used to those yardage and you'd figure points in your so. Going in feel that length of swing to hit it to your desired zone and the landing zone more importantly like we see on tour these guys are putting it into a position and then watching it feed out towards the flag so if we can start to practice drills like this one on your own or be with a friend put a little bit of pressure on it to see that you're getting this drill. Practice quite a bit instead of or your time spent hitting a long shots on the range we should see we develop a better short game and start to see that our scores are lowering from there.