Tips on Chipping -- Golf Tip Page 1

by Steve Fontaine
Valley Golf
Saginaw, MI
copyright 2003
All rights reserved
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Developing golfing skills through training: Tips onChipping

Working on your swing, your chipping or putting are much the same. Only the core skills are different. Chipping has one of the simplest training formats.

The first chipping skill I ask for is the ability to chip the ball ten yards in the air. I require a smooth, one-speed stroke. Set-up with a middle ball position and find a club that produces a ball flight that peaks around waist high on a ten yard carry. Experiment with the length of your stroke. We want it just long enough that we can reach our distance with a smooth stroke.

Start with a 2-foot long target at 10 yards from where you'll be chipping. Chip balls at the target until you get the distance down. Take a small break and start again. While its great to see how many times in a row we can hit the target, our true goal is to be able to hit it the first time. You only get one chance on the golf course. How you do immediately after a break will give you a truer sense of your progress.

Each new day, you will see your ability to chip at or near 10 yards improve. The improvement will be very noticeable. It does not take very many sessions before you can hit your target 7 or 8 times out of ten. This is the first step to becoming a great chipper. The second skill to develop is a good sense of half and double.

Using your ten yard stroke as a reference, double it. Do not change your effort level, just lengthen the stroke until you can see and feel the speed of the club head double. Test it and adjust it until you have a pretty good sense of what double is. Starting again, from the 10-yard stroke, cut it in half. Shorten your stroke until you see and feel the club head traveling at half the speed. Over time this sense of half and double becomes very well refined. The more accurate your ten yard stroke, the more accurate a sense of double and half that you will be able to achieve.

Now its time to put this training into practice. Call off random distances, 12 yards for example. You know 10 yards, your sense of double will allow you to easily figure out what stroke will produce 12 yards. This is easy. There are only two things you need to know to accurately cover a full range of distances.

Working on carry distance is a very reliable way to train. Ten yards in the air is always 10 yards. How far it goes after it lands will depend on grass type, length, uphill, downhill, soft, hard, wet or dry to name a few. The knowledge you get from playing experience will help you pick the proper landing area for each shot.

We can expand our chipping skills to include a large variety of shots with little effort. We can take the same stroke and try it with different clubs, ball positions and face angles. These shots do not have to be practiced often to be done well. At this point, its more in the knowledge of what will happen, than the actual practice. Your knowledge, along with the 2 main chipping skills, will allow you to perform all of these shots on the first attempt. When your 10-yard shot is well tuned, your entire chipping game becomes more well tuned. Chipping this way takes little maintenance. You don't have to play a lot of golf to stay sharp. To apply this to your swing training, think of the turn as your 10-yard chip. The better your turn, the better your entire swing will be able to become. Putting can also take the same approach.

Left-handed version of "The Best in Golf" -- Golf tips for training