The Golf Pro Blog

Follow these simple steps to making your chip shots roll a more more reliable distance more consistently.

Do you suffer from a sick feeling in you stomach when your ball settles down in the deep rough either greenside or within 100 yards?

A chip shot is necessary when you are a few yards from the putting green or surface. This shot is usually played with a low-lofted club in order to get the ball rolling on the green as quickly as possible.

Proper Golf Setup and Posture for this Shot, Follow this Procedure:

1. Select a club with low loft (usually anything from a 6 iron to a pitching wedge. The idea is to allow the ball to just carry onto the putting surface and roll the proper distance to the hole.

2. Select a target on the green to aim for ( this is usually a slight discoloration of the grass or some mark on the green ) and estimate where you would like the ball to stop.

3. Grip the club down towards the shaft, close to the end of the grip or wherever you feel comfortable choking down to. Typically the more you choke down the more control you will have but the shorter the distance the ball will roll.

4. Step close to the golf ball so that it is no more than a few inches from your feet.

5. Place most of your weight to your left side or left hip socket (your right side if you are left-handed).

6. Use a putting stroke to swing the club back and forth placing a descending blow on the back of the ball.

7. Rock the shoulders up and down by swinging the arms, while keeping the lower body steady and the wrists quiet. Tempo is most important. Do not rush the stroke, same distance back as through, just like putting.

Other Chipping Golf Setup Tips:

You should try to keep your hands in front of the ball so that the hands lead the ball into impact. Keep your wrists firm, especially the left one for right handers.

If you are in deep rough make this adjustment.

The deep grass can make the golf ball behave unpredictably because the grass gets caught between the club face and the ball. This will call the ball to either jump out of the grass with no backspin or loft so expect the flight of the ball to be lower than normal. Grip the club firmly so that the rough doesn’t twist the club on the swing. Tip the club angle up so the toe is the only part touching the ground. This will minimize contact with the grass as much as possible. The best way to handle this shot is to place the ball as far back in your stance as possible and make a steeper angle of attack with the ball by hinging your wrists slightly but very quickly. The timing of this shot requires some practice.

Select the club that will the ball rolling on the green as quickly as possible.

When it is windy or you are faced with a downhill shot, or on fast greens, you should chip the ball instead of pitching it to better control the distance.

Easy Golf Tips and Techniques

Ben Hogan did have a secret, but it wasn’t in his golf swing….at least not the swing itself. It’s not possible to gain Hogan’s accuracy from just a single golf tip because Hogan’s secret was in the process he used to control his golf swing to become one of the most accurate golfers of all time. This is also the very reason his secret has been an enigma for over 40 years.

Ben Hogan’s secret was his extraordinary ability to focus. This was not a gift from heaven. No, Hogan spent long hours perfecting his focus technique.

Hogan would take hours to hit just forty balls. He would hit a ball and spend a few minutes to rewind the shot in his mind and go over every aspect of it. Before he hit the next ball he knew everything he did right and wrong with that shot and was ready to hit the next one even better.

Hogan fine tuned every swing until it was perfect. He didn’t want any bad swings to creep into his system and create any bad habits. His swing is not one to emulate unless you are built like him, but his methods will make any golfer strike the ball well.

If you read very carefully, you can see in Hogan’s books just what he did. The problem is that you must understand the swing and his process before you can properly interpret what he wrote. It was only after discovering and perfecting Hogan’s system that I re-read his books for probably the tenth time, and realized that he did share his secret, but that he was looking at it from a stand point of someone who already understood.

Hogan’s swing secret was not just the balance and setup…it’s about how he achieved and controlled balance during his swing and how you can get similar results using his control methods.

The key phrase is how he controlled his swing movement. Anyone can make a great swing once in a while, but Hogan was known for doing it almost every time.

Hogan said that the game is played keeping the weight on the inside halves of the feet, but that is as far as he went. It’s too bad because this statement is the key and the starting point for understanding Hogan’s secret of control. His secret? The swing is controlled from the feet.

I have taken pros and blindfolded them, leaving them to monitor their swing completely by feel and been able to get them to not only to strike the ball purely, but to shape their shots accurately using only feedback from their feet.

Most of the pros on tour use his methods, except they use them subconsciously. Hogan took the process to the conscious level so he could monitor and correct his swing in motion.

Today’s pros have been convinced that they shouldn’t think about anything during the swing, but it has been proven that the mind will not think about nothing. Like it or not, your mind works all of the time, as shown in your dreams. The trick with the golf swing is to focus in such a way so that those thoughts are completely visual, thereby never bothering the brain with any distracting conscious thoughts.

Do you wonder why Tiger no longer uses a guru? It’s because he is working on the same process. When he perfects it, and he is close, he’ll be unstoppable.

Anyone who wants to give Tiger a game in the future will have to know this information or fall by the wayside.

How fast does it work? I have shown high handicap golfers the very first balance routine right on the golf course and watched as most of them immediately started hitting their shots more accurately.

Learn How You Can Break 80

Every golfer would like to have a golf training tip to increase their drives by 10, 20, 30 or even 40 yards. But what do you need to focus on to accomplish that?

Have you ever received a golf training tip that didn’t work? I think we all have. That can be very frustrating to say the least. But the key to implementing a golf training tip that’s effective is to look at your swing.

Do you lack a full, 90 degree shoulder turn on your backswing? Do you breakdown at impact where it really counts?  Do you have a hard time staying in your golf posture through out your swing?

You’ve got to take a deeper look at your swing faults and physical limitations to determine what golf training tip will be the most effective in improving your driving distance.

Don’t just try any golf training tip your golfing buddies tell you. Give it some serious thought before you do one of the golf training tips in the magazines. There are hundreds golf training tips you can read about, but won’t work for you.

Have you ever heard of the .62 point check-list?.

If you haven’t, it means instead of having one golf training tip you think about during your swing, you think of 62 of them. Maybe not that many, but you think of enough to accomplish what they term .paralysis by analysis..

When this happens, your swing will go south real quick. This happened to the Number One ranked golfer in the world back in the 90′s. His name? Nick Faldo. He became so mechanical he couldn’t even hit a ball. He would enter a tournament and take so many practice swings, and not have one golf training tip on his mind, but many.

It took him right out of the world rankings and ultimately off the tour. He is now commentating and doing a great job.

Here’s a golf training tip that will help your backswing range of motion, enabling you to have a much higher clubhead speed and quickly improve your driving distance.

I call it the Backswing Shoulder Stretch:

• Extend left arm out in front of you (if you are a right handed golfer), in a handshake position, thumb pointing skyward.
• Take right hand and put under left wrist, so the back of the hands are touching each other.
• Pull with right hand against left wrist and make as big a turn on back swing as possible.
• Hold for at least 15 seconds, repeat two more times.
• Reverse the stretch to work the follow through.

As you can see this is a simple golf training tip, but one that is very effective if you do it consistently. This is a great stretch to do throughout your round to maintain a full backswing.

This is just one golf training tip that can have a big impact on your performance; and is well worth trying

Improve Your Golf Swing