If you have a high golf handicap, chances are good you probably need to work on your game. Sloppy short game play costs you big time—no matter what course you play. Sloppy short game play adds unnecessary strokes to your scores and boosts your golf handicap. It also makes the game slightly less enjoyable. If you want take your game to the next level—and lower your golf handicap simultaneously—improve your short game.

One difference between players who have good short games and players who don’t is confidence. Players with confidence in their short games know they can make the shot when they must. They usually do. Players lacking confidence in their short game hope they can make the shot when they must. They usually don’t. Lack of confidence in one’s short game is among the biggest problems we see in our golf instruction session.

So how do you build confidence in your pitching? One way is by improving your pitching. A good pitch saves you strokes by dropping the ball on the green in good position for putting. A bad pitch misses the green altogether or hits the green and runs off, often in to trouble. What follows are four golf tips and a couple of drills that will hone your pitching.

Start With the Set-up
Good pitching (and chipping) starts at address. Good short-game players tend to have a mistake-proof, pre-shot routine that to guarantees they set up correctly for a pitch. Below is a four-step process that you can use when pitching:

- Hold the club straight up in front of you. Make sure the ball is slightly forward of your hips and your shoulder level.
- Bend at the hips into your stance. Keep your shoulders level.
- Move the top of your spine two inches toward the hole. Don’t shift your lower body to do it.
- Drop your arms and club.

If you follow this routine at address, you’ll be in a perfect position to hit a good pitch (or good chip).

Releasing The Clubhead
One pitching problem we see a often in our golf lessons is not releasing the clubhead through the shot. We see more students fail to release the clubhead properly through the shot than almost anything else. On pitches (and chips), your elbows should move back and around close to your sides. This keeps the butt end of the club close to your sides. By doing that , you minimize the amount of the grip end swings compared to the club head. You’ll stop dragging and shoving it forward, instead of releasing the way you should be doing.

Sling The Head Into The Ball
Moving into the ball correctly during the downswing is another problem area we see in our golf lessons. Teachers often tell golfers to pull the grip end of the club down hard during the downswing. That’s good advice for a full swing but not for chipping. Instead of pulling hard on the grip when you swing down, sling the clubhead into the ball with your wrists and hands.

To feel this action, have a friend hold the clubhead in his palm before you start your downswing. You start the clubhead down from the 9 o’clock position in your backswing by pressing it firmly into your friend’s hand with your wrist. If you pull on the grip end at all, you’ll pull the club head off your friend’s hand.

Use The Correct Body Movement
A third problem area we see in our golf instruction sessions is poor body movement. Try this drill to understand the correct body movement in a pitch:

Set up in your golf posture and toss a ball underhanded as high as you can. As you do this, you’ll see that your belt buckle faces the target, your front leg straightens out, and your back knee touches your front knee. That’s a full release. To help ingrain this technique, practice tossing a ball and holding the pose first. Then try to copy the feel in a real shot.

You can work on this drill almost anywhere, at the range, ,your backyard or your home. Once you’ve ingrained the correct body movement in your chipping you’re half way home to pitching the ball correctly every time.

If you want to take your game to the next level, hone your good short game, especially your pitching. Good pitching boosts your ability to recover when in difficult positions. The tour-level techniques we discuss above can help you improve your pitching. They’ll also you save a ton of strokes. Together, these things can help you boost your confidence in your short game and shave strokes off your golf handicap.

Many golfers track only one stat during a round: their score. Even golfers with low golf handicaps don’t regularly track shot statistics. That’s too bad. Keeping accurate statistics is the key to improving. Good statistics underpin most successful improvement plans. As we often tell students in our golf lessons, if you’re serious about improving, track your stats closely. And the one stat you need to track closer than any other—even closer than the number of putts you take—is greens in regulation (GIR).

Lucius Riccio, PH.D, who teaches at Columbia University and is on the USGA’s Handicap research team, thinks “the most significant determinate of score by far is greens in regulation.” He’s probably right. Think of players you know whose golf handicaps are really low. Chances are they hit greens with regularity. Hitting greens separates the great golfers from not-so-great golfers. If you look closely at your scores, chances are GIRs were the difference between your low rounds and your high ones. Riccio even provides a system for tracking GIRs, which we discuss below:

Tracking GIRs
You’ve probably read golf tips on tracking GIRs. Some tracking systems are complicated. They may tell you a lot of information. But if they’re too complicated, you’ll probably abandon them. What you want is a system that’s easy to remember and record. Riccio’s system is both. With his system, you circle the hole’s number (or your hole score) when you hit a green in regulation. At the end of the round, you count the circles. This tells you in general how you did. But going a step or two further can tell you have to improve that number.

How do you improve greens in regulation? The studies are clear. Improved iron play is the to key hitting more greens in regulation, as we tell students in our golf instruction sessions. To get a read on your iron game, track your GIRs on par 3s. You have a clear shot on the hole and a good lie. Tracking par 3 GIRs tells you how good your iron play is. Mark on your scorecard par 3s hit. The pros hit par-3 greens 70 to 80 percent of the time. Your shots won’t hit that often. But if you hit 20 percent of these greens, chances are good you’ll break 100.

Taking It One Step Further
Tracking par-3 GIRs tells gives you a good “high view” of your iron play. Digging a little deeper unearths more valuable information. Record every time you hit a green from the fairway with an iron. Put a mark in any empty row on your scorecard. If you hit the green, circle the mark. Count the circles when you finish. Do this over 5 rounds, 10 rounds, the whole season. This information is helpful. It tells you how good you are with your irons from the fairway.

But are you better with your short or your long irons? You can tell that by using the first nine holes on a separate scorecard. Check off the holes that correspond with the iron you hit into the green. If you hit an 8, put a check by the 8th hole. If you hit the green, circle the check. Review this info after a while, maybe 10 rounds. It’ll tell you how well you’re hitting each iron type—long, middle, and short. (For comparisons, the pros hit the green with a 3-iron about half the time. They hit the green with a 9-iron about 90 percent of the time.)

Also Track Tee Shots
Also, track your tee shots. Everyone wants to hit it long and straight. People favor golf instruction sessions on driving more than any other type of golf lesson. But tee shots that land in the rough don’t hurt you anywhere near as badly as shots that go out of bounds. Those kill you. So you want to count the tee shots that leave you in a position where you can’t hit the green. Mark these with an “X” over the hole number. Total these up after the round. Are you missing greens because of bad tee shots or bad iron shots?

Hitting greens in regulation impacts scores and handicaps more than most golfers realize. If you record three GIRs, you’ll probably break 100. If you hit six, chances are good you’ll break 90. Hit 9 and you’ll probably break 80. Once you determine what’s preventing you from hitting greens in regulation—iron play or driving—you can develop a plan to address the problem—take golf lessons, read up on golf tips, go to the range, and so on. Improve GIRs and you’ll whittle strokes off your golf handicap.

Jack

PS: I don't know why Eric is doing this, but he's also GIVING AWAY a free copy of his upcoming book "Strategic Golf" just for watching the video. This is an absolute gold mine! But you have to act now. The freebies and the videos go away soon.