Strike Your Golf Chips Shots Better, Tour Alignment Sticks Drill (Video) - by Pete Styles
Strike Your Golf Chips Shots Better, Tour Alignment Sticks Drill (Video) - by Pete Styles

Chipping the golf ball well and chipping the golf ball nicely can be one of the biggest differences between rescuing a good round when it was going into a bad round. So if you can chip the ball well quite often you will be saving par, or saving bogey from a time when you’ve missed the green. If I can pitch your situation where I’ve just missed the green with a seven angle and into the flag but I can hit a nice little pitch shot back on to the green and hold the put, I can rescue my par. Yet if I dwarf my chip shot or thin my chip shot and it goes into the front banker or shoots over the back of the green I’m compounding my error.

So getting a nice strike on your chip shot is absolutely vital to being able to control your distance and your accuracy. And here I’m using my toe stick to help me understand how to get a good contact. I’ve set three golf balls up in a line and I’ve set my toe stick just three inches back behind the balls, and what I would like to be able to achieve here is a downward strike where I do hit the turf but I avoid the stick. Any time you hit the ground early and catch the stick that’s going to cause you a lot of problems with a good contact.

You’ll probably find that you are fatting the golf ball and is going too short. Likewise any times that you try and avoid the stick but you don’t hit the ground at all you’d thin the ball and it would shoot over the back of the green and that would be a thin short that would go too far. So, here as I set up I want to play the golf ball around about the center of my stand so effectively the stick would point to my big toe.

So when I set myself up the stick is pointing to my big toe. Position a lot of body weight forward, almost feel like you are trying to get away from the stick, anything where you are looking back here at the stick you are going to hit the ground too early and that will be a problem. So you need to get a lot more force and then you can go ahead and strike down. So first I’m going to show you the two bad ones and then hopefully I’m going to show you the good one. So the bad one would be leaning back trying to lift the ball into the air and we hit the stick too aggressively.

2013-06-28

Chipping the golf ball well and chipping the golf ball nicely can be one of the biggest differences between rescuing a good round when it was going into a bad round. So if you can chip the ball well quite often you will be saving par, or saving bogey from a time when you’ve missed the green. If I can pitch your situation where I’ve just missed the green with a seven angle and into the flag but I can hit a nice little pitch shot back on to the green and hold the put, I can rescue my par. Yet if I dwarf my chip shot or thin my chip shot and it goes into the front banker or shoots over the back of the green I’m compounding my error.

So getting a nice strike on your chip shot is absolutely vital to being able to control your distance and your accuracy. And here I’m using my toe stick to help me understand how to get a good contact. I’ve set three golf balls up in a line and I’ve set my toe stick just three inches back behind the balls, and what I would like to be able to achieve here is a downward strike where I do hit the turf but I avoid the stick. Any time you hit the ground early and catch the stick that’s going to cause you a lot of problems with a good contact.

You’ll probably find that you are fatting the golf ball and is going too short. Likewise any times that you try and avoid the stick but you don’t hit the ground at all you’d thin the ball and it would shoot over the back of the green and that would be a thin short that would go too far. So, here as I set up I want to play the golf ball around about the center of my stand so effectively the stick would point to my big toe.

So when I set myself up the stick is pointing to my big toe. Position a lot of body weight forward, almost feel like you are trying to get away from the stick, anything where you are looking back here at the stick you are going to hit the ground too early and that will be a problem. So you need to get a lot more force and then you can go ahead and strike down. So first I’m going to show you the two bad ones and then hopefully I’m going to show you the good one. So the bad one would be leaning back trying to lift the ball into the air and we hit the stick too aggressively.