Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

If you are looking to become more consistent with your shots around the green then really start to work on having an effective chip-and-run shot. A chip-and-run is where the ball initially starts from the club phase and it goes in to the air but it spends most of its time rolling or running along the green. So chip and run is very short amount of time in the air for the shot but lots of run on the green. I’m going to play this with my seven iron and I think that’s one of the most effective clubs to use to play a chip-and-run and its quite easy to control the seven iron if you remember that a quarter of the shot will be played in the air with the seven iron and it will run three quarters of the journey. So if you are looking at the flag and you know the distance between the ball and the flag all you’ve got to do is work out where a quarter of the way is between the ball and the flag and get the ball to land on that spot. The ball is then gone a quarter in to the air and then it will roll out three quarters and you’ll finally get a really accurate shot and just remember we are sort of taking that rule of thumb of a quarter in the air, three quarters roll when the green is really flat and also we are in good weather conditions. So if it’s just rained obviously it’s going to slow that down a bit you’d adjust, if you are going up hill or down hill again you are going to adjust the bat. But as a general rule of thumb a quarter in the air and three quarters of run.

Okay so to play the shot what we need to do is set up the ball in the middle of our feet, our feet slightly narrower than normal just to weigh it with our stability and then pull the left foot directly back by about four inches. We are going to lean on to the left and that’s going to help us rotate the hips through the shot because we do want to turn, you don’t want to be static with your body when you are playing a chip shot. We are going to set the club so that the club face is aiming at the target and then we are going to hold lower down on the handle so that our arms are nice and straight. Holding lower down is going to give us much more consistency when we play with the shot, it’s going to help us be a lot more controlled with the club head. I’m going to set a straight line from the left shoulder down the left arm to the hands and down the shaft in to the club head and then we are just going to keep that straight line as we swing back and we are going to keep that straight line as we swing through so looking for this finish position where the hips have turned towards the target, the body has turned towards the target, the wrist remained very passive, we’ve really kept that straight line and we’ve got a low club head position.

However far we swing the club back to the right of the ball, we are going to come back to the ball and we are going to go an equal distance through and we are just going to make sure we maintain a nice smooth tempo as we do that and just catch the ground under the ball as you play the shot. So we’ve set up the left foot’s back the weight’s on the left we’ve got the straight line, we are going to swing back, we are going to push the grass as we go through the shot, just turn the body and work on holding that position where we are still in that straight line but the club head nice and low compared to the hands. That’s going to get you hitting a really nice chip and run and then as I said if you remember that your seven iron generally will go a quarter of its journey in the air and then roll out three quarters, you can just start to work on you distance control of getting accurate with where you want to land the ball.