Mastering The Mental Side Of Golf Chipping (Video) - by Pete Styles
Mastering The Mental Side Of Golf Chipping (Video) - by Pete Styles

Like a lot of things in golf, when you’ve actually got your technique nailed on with this chipping idea, the next step is to take this good technical thing out on the golf course, and see where you can get your successful results happening in play on the course to help improve your scores. Now that involves the mental process of chipping. Now it should be quite simple, we’ve got a big target out in front of us. It’s not a million miles away; we can quite happily reach it with a relatively gentle swing. But chipping sets up its own different challenges almost because the idea of the shot should be quite simple. If we don’t produce a good result it is so much more detrimental mentally, we get more anxious. There’s nothing worse than ideally trying to chip the ball over the bunker and fatting it straight in the bunker. It can really set the wobbles going a little bit next time you get that shot.

Your knees start going, and you get a little bit nervous, and you dung [Phonetic] [00:01:03] another one straight into the same sort of bunker. So when we’re approaching this shot what can we do to improve the mental aspect of chipping the golf ball? The first thing I would suggest is you pick quite a specific target. So because we’ve got quite a big green and the flag is not a million miles away, the risk is we just get a bit complacent about where we’re actually trying to hit the shot. And the eyes and the brain don’t really like that. We would need to be a bit more specific to help us in terms of how hard we hit it and what line we hit it on. So although your target might specifically not be the flag, I don’t want to land the ball next to the flag because it’ll probably roll on. I need to replace that with something nearer to me but something quite specific, so a blade of grass or a pitch mark or a dark area on the green, something like that that I could see. And then as I’m looking at it I make my practice swings, feeling the ball landing exactly on that same spot. Then when I setup in go ahead and execute that shot. I also want to be quite positive about this. I want to try and get the ball as close to the hole as possible or even if it’s a simpler type of pitch try and make it. When we’re putting we talk about trying to get everything as close as possible, even get it in. But when we’re hitting chip shots very few golfers would ever address the mindset of I’m trying to hole it, and really that’s a bit of a mistake. So next time you set up to the chip look at the way the ground is going to work, look at the way the ball is going to break, and then aim to actually try and actually hole the chip shot. And the last thing to tie both of those areas together is visualization. So try and actually visualize the ball doing exactly that. So we might just spend 10 seconds behind the golf ball looking down the target line thinking “Land it on that spot, roll it down towards the hole, let’s try and see this going in.” And then as we set up we take that practice swing, land it on that spot, roll it down there, try and knock it in. Then as you go ahead and play the shot you visualize the success, you visualize the positives instead of visualizing the negatives of last time I hit this I ended up in the shrub bunker. So change your mind set to improve the mental aspect of your chipping. 2016-10-14

Like a lot of things in golf, when you’ve actually got your technique nailed on with this chipping idea, the next step is to take this good technical thing out on the golf course, and see where you can get your successful results happening in play on the course to help improve your scores. Now that involves the mental process of chipping. Now it should be quite simple, we’ve got a big target out in front of us. It’s not a million miles away; we can quite happily reach it with a relatively gentle swing. But chipping sets up its own different challenges almost because the idea of the shot should be quite simple. If we don’t produce a good result it is so much more detrimental mentally, we get more anxious. There’s nothing worse than ideally trying to chip the ball over the bunker and fatting it straight in the bunker. It can really set the wobbles going a little bit next time you get that shot.

Your knees start going, and you get a little bit nervous, and you dung [Phonetic] [00:01:03] another one straight into the same sort of bunker. So when we’re approaching this shot what can we do to improve the mental aspect of chipping the golf ball? The first thing I would suggest is you pick quite a specific target. So because we’ve got quite a big green and the flag is not a million miles away, the risk is we just get a bit complacent about where we’re actually trying to hit the shot. And the eyes and the brain don’t really like that. We would need to be a bit more specific to help us in terms of how hard we hit it and what line we hit it on. So although your target might specifically not be the flag, I don’t want to land the ball next to the flag because it’ll probably roll on. I need to replace that with something nearer to me but something quite specific, so a blade of grass or a pitch mark or a dark area on the green, something like that that I could see.

And then as I’m looking at it I make my practice swings, feeling the ball landing exactly on that same spot. Then when I setup in go ahead and execute that shot. I also want to be quite positive about this. I want to try and get the ball as close to the hole as possible or even if it’s a simpler type of pitch try and make it. When we’re putting we talk about trying to get everything as close as possible, even get it in. But when we’re hitting chip shots very few golfers would ever address the mindset of I’m trying to hole it, and really that’s a bit of a mistake. So next time you set up to the chip look at the way the ground is going to work, look at the way the ball is going to break, and then aim to actually try and actually hole the chip shot.

And the last thing to tie both of those areas together is visualization. So try and actually visualize the ball doing exactly that. So we might just spend 10 seconds behind the golf ball looking down the target line thinking “Land it on that spot, roll it down towards the hole, let’s try and see this going in.” And then as we set up we take that practice swing, land it on that spot, roll it down there, try and knock it in. Then as you go ahead and play the shot you visualize the success, you visualize the positives instead of visualizing the negatives of last time I hit this I ended up in the shrub bunker. So change your mind set to improve the mental aspect of your chipping.