When you go to the range, one that lets you chip onto the practice green, to practice your short game, practice shots from 10-30 yards (30-90 feet, if that’s more helpful).

The ones from closer are easy to get up and down from. Ones from farther away you don’t have that often to warrant your time.

The biggest bang for your short game buck is that 10- to 30-yard range. If you get up and down from there more often than not, you will shoot a lower score, and drive the people you play with nuts.

There is one thing you can do in your short game that will make every shot easier and better. That thing is to hold the club lightly. Maybe hold it softly.

What do I mean by “softly?” Hold the club so the handle barely compresses the soft pads of your palm and fingers, but not so softly that the club flops around when you swing it.

Stop reading, get a club and try that before you go on.

In addition, relax your arms and shoulders completely.

If you get all this right, I promise you will make good contact with the ball much more often than you do. You will be in a position where you can learn to control your short shots to an amazing degree.

You can get away with less-than-perfect contact from the tee and the fairway. But the short game requires, (demands?), precision when the club meets the ball.

When you set up for a short shot, the perfect address position of the clubhead is also its perfect impact position. The problem to be solved is how to return the clubhead to that exact spot.

If you grip the club tightly, the tension in your hands puts tension in your arms and shoulders, which shortens your arms. When you swing back, you subconsciously know something is wrong and the forward stroke is a desperate attempt to get the clubhead back where it belongs. Every so often, you get it right.

But if your hands, arms, and shoulders are completely relaxed, the length of the arm-club lever does not change.

All you need to do from there is swing back and through gracefully with an unhurried rhythm and tempo, and ideal contact is yours. It’s that simple.

We had freezing rain yesterday, for 10 hours, non-stop. The ground today is covered with an two-inch layer of what looks like snow but is solid ice. It’s as hard as a rock, and so slippery. Going outside is not a smart thing to do.

Not to mention, it’s 23 degrees.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t practice my golf.

My back room has a big rug over wall-to-wall carpet. I swing my wedge, maybe a 40-yard swing, and try, so every time when the sole of the club brushes the rug going through “impact”, to make the same sound.

About a dozen years ago I had a playing lesson and set up with a ball about 75 yards from the green.

I took three practice swings, the same length of swing each time, but with one hitting the ground firmly, one brushing the top of the grass, and the third one diggining into the ground a little bit.

The pro said, those were three different swings and they will each hit the ball three different distances. The club needs to hit the ground the same way every time.

So I started practicing the depth of my swing, and have ever since.

It’s one thing to have calibrated your wedges for distance, but you don’t have to wait until it’s 23 degrees and icy to start putting that calibration into practice.

These are the drills I used to get good at chipping and I still use to stay good at chipping.

Practice greens have a number of holes to putt and and chip to.

Drill 1: Drop four balls at one spot and chip each one to a different hole. Then putt them out.

When you get all four up and down, go to Drill 2.

Drill 2: Chip balls, from four widely-spaced locations, to the same hole. Then putt them out.

Select your targets in the first drill and your locations in the second drill to give you the greatest challenge.

You might think these drills would be hard to do because of the amount of room on the practice green that is required for them and what do you do when the green is filled with people practicing their putting?

Not to worry. Practice greens are among the most under-utilized real estate in the world.

I promise you that everybody else is at the range to pound their driver and maybe ten percent of them will come on to the practice green and knock a few balls around and leave after five minutes because that’s enough of that.

You’ll have the green all to yourself.

Chipping from beside the green and pitching from long distances are shots we are all familiar with. They are both easy shots to get good at, too.

Short shots we don’t hit very often, and ones that confuse us, are the ones from close to the green but not that close. Here is some advice from Manuel de la Torre on what to do, from his book, Understanding the Golf Swing.

“If the flagstick is located close to the front edge of the green, the best option is to play a low running shot and use the grass on the fairway to slow the ball down and have it trickle slowly to the hole. Playing a high shot to land on the green would not result in a shot that would be able to stop near the hole—there is too short a distance between the edge of the green and the hole to be able to handle that type of shot.

“If the flagstick is located at the back of the green, you have a great number of options. Almost any iron will produce shots that can end close to the hole. Under these conditions pitch shots or pitch and run shots can be used and be equally successful. In many cases the pitch and run will produce better results than high pitch shots.”

This is good advice in my experience. With the advent of the four-wedge bag, you don’t see golfers hitting pitch and run shots too often even though it is a more effective shot that is hit with a lower-lofted club.

Practice this shot with your 6- to 8-irons to add a potent shot to your short game bag of tricks.

I have a real problem with bunkers. I work hard to make ball-first, ground-second contact from the fairway. But in the bunker, that’s just what you’re not supposed to do. They all tell us to hit one, two inches behind the ball. In other words, hit it fat.

And I just can’t bring myself to do that. Consequently, I’m lousy out of bunkers. Terry Koehler to the rescue.

Terry is a club designer who also writes a periodic column for GolfWRX. In one of his recent posts, he advises us to hit the ball and the sand at the same time.

This is exactly what I do when I hit out of a fairway bunker, a shot I am as good at as I am bad in a greenside bunker. Which in both cases is “really.”

My problem is there isn’t a practice bunker within miles of my house, so I can’t try it out. The only practice I get in a bunker is when my first attempt doesn’t work and the ball is still in it, so I get to try again. But maybe there is one near where you live and you can see if it improves matters.

You know, the touring pros say the bunker shot is the easiest one there is. If that’s so, why do we have so much of a problem with it?

If you’re a hopeless case in a bunker like I am, maybe Terry’s new approach will turn things around for you.

Short game swings are not abbreviated versions of the full swing. The pitching and chipping strokes are each their own animal.

Two things are common to both of them, though.

Light grip pressure. Slower tempo.

These are finesse shots. You are not banging the ball. You are caressing it.

This is where the short game begins:

Light grip pressure. Slower tempo.