Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

Unless you are going to do that very rare feet of hitting all 18 greens on the golf course in regulation, you are some point of course going to need to chip or pitch the ball to get the ball on the putting surface. Now chipping and pitching should be a relatively simple and easy to execute action, but we also need to execute it with really, really fine control and accuracy of direction, of strike and of power.

Now the lead arm for a right armed golfer it’s going to be the left arm plays a crucial role in all of those areas, it controls the power that you hit the ball, it can control direction and it also has a big influence over the strike of the shot as well. So we talk about having a good crisp, clean left arm chipping action to make sure we get really good clean strikes on the golf ball.

So a good chipping action would have this narrow stance, this slight lean to the left hand side in this good setup but then we want this really good strong left arm position here, to encourage a really good accurate strike. If we were to be bending the left arm in the backswing, we are going to cause all sorts of problems over the direction, how hard we hit the ball and quite impulsively the quality of that strike.

So this next little series of videos is going to be all about controlling your left arm position or your lead arm position in your chipping and your pitching technique to make sure that you can be as accurate when you are chipping and pitching the golf ball as you possible can be.