Doesn’t really matter what standard of golfer you are, chipping and pitching the golf ball is always going to be fundamentally important to your success. No golfer ever hits every green in regulation. So at some point you’re going to have to chip that ball on, and the better you are at chipping the easier it’s going to be to hole the putt and improve your score on the green. So when we are chipping the ball on we want to make sure we’re getting good accurate contact, hitting the ball the right distance, at the right height, and in the right direction. Now some of those bits are easy, but the hardest bit is actually getting a good contact on the ball. And I think a lot of golfers struggle with the contact on the ball, either hitting it fat or sometimes hitting it thin, because it almost goes against the instinct of what the golfer has previously learnt either though human nature or through other sports.

So we want this ball to go from the floor quite high up into the air and land quite softly. And if I asked you to pick the ball up and throw the ball in the air you would get your hand underneath the ball, and you would lift it upwards. And that throwing action is quite detrimental to what we’re actually trying to achieve in golf. The throwing action of having the hand underneath and throwing it high in the air is quite instinctive if I gave you a tennis racket, table tennis, squash, badminton, anything like that, you would have the racket underneath and you would hit the ball from the underneath, and hit it high and soft on to the green. So when it comes to golf when we get a ball on the floor, a golfer can instinctively think about those actions and think how do I get underneath it and lift it on to the green. But actually we can see the ball is on the floor, so it’s impossible to come from underneath and hit it or throw it from the underneath side.

And this is where a lot of golfers are guilty of scooping the ball or hitting the ball fat; they try and lift the ball from the underneath, and then hit the ground before the ball, and run the ball in across the floor because they’re trying desperately to scoop it. It’s instinct; it’s what we’ve learnt from other sports. So in this next little series of videos we’re going to look at how we can replace that instinctive scooping action and actually work a lot more in terms of hitting down on the golf ball. So the ball here, club in the air, club comes down, wedges underneath the ball to chip the ball up on to the putting surface. If we can focus on hitting down we can hit better chip shots and avoid scooping.