If you’ve decided to use your putting technique for your chips, there are certain things you need to be aware of. Now, first of all, the loft that you’re using for you chip shot won’t alter drastically when you are using your putting technique. That’s because we are not going to start altering stance. We are not going to start altering wrist hinge or anything like that.
We have purely made the adaptions to try and ensure that this is a slightly descending angle of attack into the ball. Now, the pros of this is it will give you a very consistent ball flight when using a club. The cons of this is you can’t alter the trajectory too much with using that club. The only way that you can do that is by switching the club that you are using.
So, what I’ve got here is I’ve got a sand wedge and I’ve also got my 6-iron. And what I’m going to do here is I’m just going to demonstrate the differences between these two clubs while also using the same technique. So, first of all, I’m going to use my sand wedge, that ball position just slightly further back to normal, now weigh that little bit further forward. The hands are a little bit further ahead because of that and I’m just going to use that putting motion back and through, chipping it forward, decent strike, and it just landed just beyond the stance here.
Now, if I switch over to my 6-iron and I use exactly that same technique, exactly the same ball position, exactly the same stance and exactly the same swing length, just back and through, you will notice here how the overall trajectory of the shot has changed quite drastically. This took off a lot lower. This took off faster. And when that landed, that was going to run on for much, much further. Now, you should be able to see here that using your putting stroke for a chipping shot is not a problem, but you have to adapt the loft for the type of shot you want to play.
So, using that sand wedge, that could be good if there is a little bit rough in between and its lift the ball high and go rounding while our second shot with the 6-iron would have been fantastic if I just wanted to play a long chip and round to get over a bit of fringe glass. So, if you are going to use your putting technique, make sure you alter your loft to suit the situation. Don’t try and mess around anymore. Keep it nice and simple, because that is what you want to be doing, want adapting a putting stroke to a chipping technique.