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.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Golf Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.