Rookie on the Green

From the three rounds of golf I’ve played so far this season, one thing is evident:  I have no idea what the heck I’m doing when I chip.  I went to a Golftec lesson last week and asked to work on chipping to try to remedy this situation.   It turns out that my fundamental problem was the set-up — it’s very different from just a normal golf shot, and is a little counter-intuitive. It’s counter-intuitive because you’re getting lift on the ball by squeezing it between the club head and the ground, not by scooping it into the air.

Basically, my instructor got me on the right path with setting up to chip:  stance a little closer than usual (toes pointing maybe even a little bit left, towards the hole), ball farther back in the stance, not much of a back swing.  Your hands need to stay ahead of the club head, with the shaft of the club slanting with the grip towards the front of the swing and the head lagging behind (you can see this in the “after” photo, below right).  This is all for a short chip, say, just off the green.

This is a before-and-after of what’s going on with my chipping.  In the “before” on the left, you can see that my weight somehow ended up on my back foot when I hit the ball and the club head got ahead of my hands.  In the after, you can see that my hands led the club head through contact and my weight moved through to my front leg.

Another thing my instructor pointed out that seemed to help with my weight-shift issue was that my right shoulder should come up on the back swing and then go down noticeably as I move through to contact, as illustrated above.

I also learned that for the short little chips we were working on, the backswing should only go back to about waist high, with the club parallel to the ground, with wrists hinged back.  So the motion should be hinge back the wrists and then turn through to contact.  My instructor kept saying “hinge and turn, hinge and turn.”

One helpful Golftec drill I’ll be doing is a straight-arm chipping drill.  You keep your arms extended, totally straight, and don’t allow your hands or wrists to move during the chip shot.  The motion to impact should occur because of the rotation of your body, not wrist action.  This should be done with chips in the 15-yard range.

I have a long way to go before I can chip well consistently, but I’m going to set aside some time just for chipping practice because this is costing me so many strokes right now.

I went in for my first lesson in about a month and was pleased to find out I could move on from a total focus on the backswing.  This time, we focused on getting my swing properly loaded up on my right heel on the backswing and then shifting weight to the left foot and ending facing the target after hitting the ball.

I told my instructor that if I picked a spot on the ground to aim at for my practice swing, the club head would consistently come through inside that mark.  I’ve had problems with lifting my upper body as I swing, so I thought that might be the cause.

Instead of upper body, my instructor had me work on this weight shifting issue because I was coming up artificially high on the backswing with my arms, not really putting my weight on my back (right) foot.  This caused my swing to kind chop down too far inside, on too vertical a plane.  What I should have been doing was shifting my weight straight down into my right heel, creating more of a wind up, so that my swing followed the natural arc through where the ball was with a weight shift to the left through the ball.

My instructor gave me a few drills to work on this:

•    Do the whole swing with feet completely together. To maintain your balance, you’ll have to do the weight shift and this will give you a feel for how it should be in your regular swing.

•    Do the backswing standing on only your right foot, and switch to only your left as you transfer your weight through the swing.

•    Use a chair to mark how far back to go on the backswing and how far forward to go on the follow-through.  Your body should be perpendicular to the ground on both the back swing and the finish, not leaning too far in either direction.

Working on this has noticeably improved my swing, particularly with irons.  The next time I went out to play, I hit the ball much more solidly and consistently with the irons.  That’s about all that improved, but I’ll take it.