Players often take golf lessons to add more power to their swings. Adding power helps your game, but to really improve, you also must work on other areas of your game, especially your short game. When you work on your short game, you not only boost confidence in your ability to get up and down, you also chop strokes from your scores and your golf handicap. And that’s what practice is all about.
Below are five proven golf tips to keep in mind when polishing your short game. These golf tips are geared primarily to helping you do one thing: make pure contact whether you’re chipping, pitching, or putting. Many professional golfers, including Luke Donald, the No. 1 ranked golfer in the world, say that making pure contact is their primary goal when chipping, pitching, and putting.
1. Accelerate To The Ball
Many weekend golfers work hard at accelerating through the ball when chipping. Accelerating guards against quitting on the shot, but often leads to a too-short back-swing and a too-long follow-through, creating all sorts of problems, including fat and thin shots. Instead, keep your wrists firm on the downswing and accelerate to the ball, not through it. You want a crisp downward hit, keeping the club head low in the finish.
2. Hinge The Club Upward
Some golfers let their bodies take command when pitching. That can cost you. If you let your body take over when hitting pitching, you’ll drag your arms and the club through impact, delofting the club face. Instead, get the club moving and let that move your body. To do this, hinge your wrists up and then down. This points the club’s toe skyward, as it should be in that position. Your goal is to avoid going around your body like we see many players do in our golf instructions sessions.
3. Preset Loft At Address
Generating loft is a thorny problem for many golfers in our golf instruction sessions, especially on pitches. These golfers fall back when hitting pitches, as if they were trying to scoop the ball in the air. Scooping drops the low point of the swing behind the ball, instead of in front of it where it belongs. This leads to poor contact. Instead, pre-set more loft with the right adjustments at address: open the club face more, move the ball up off the left foot, set the shaft vertical (or even slightly behind the ball a little), and weaken your grip slightly.
4. Hit Ball Then Turf
We’ve seen players in our golf lessons move the ball back from the middle when trying to put more spin on the shot. This doesn’t work. It takes too much loft off the club face and drops the leading edge down so the club digs instead of skids at impact. To increase spin, play the ball up and think ball then turf. In other words you should feel the club hit the ball first then the ground. Adding spin comes from a crisp downward strike, not the long lazy swing we see so much of at golf instruction sessions.
5. Swing The Putter head
Some golfers use a shoulder-driven, pendulum-like putting stroke, as taught in many golf lessons. This type of stroke works in theory but not in fact. For one thing, the stroke gets too long on lag putts, making it harder to hit the ball flush. For another, when the shoulders dominate the stroke, the head tilts first to the right on the backstroke, and then to the left on the forward stroke. This changes the loft on the club face. So don’t let your shoulders dominate when putting.
Instead, make a little bit more of an arm stroke when putting to achieve solid contact and consistency. Also, maintain the loft on the putterface by keeping your head still and the stroke a tad shorter and punchier. Hearing a little pop at impact isn’t necessarily bad. It means the clubface is accelerating through the hit.
Focus on executing these proven golf tips when practicing your short game. They encourage pure contact when chipping, putting, and pitching. A sharper short game cuts more strokes off your golf handicap than grooving a more powerful swing.
