There is a right way to teach yourself how to hit a new short game shot. Go through this sequence and the shot will work for you.

1. Learn to make consistent contact. The shot will behave the way you want it to only if you hit it the same way every time. It might take hundreds of tries before you become consistent with how you strike the ball. It’s worth the effort.

2. Learn to hit the shot where you’re aiming it. To get the ball close to the hole, you have to hit it straight and the right distance. Straight is easier, so start there. Again, hundreds of balls won’t be to many.

3. Learn to hit the shot the right distance. This one takes time and thought. One way to start is to get a standard-length stroke and play that stroke with different clubs, seeing what distance you get with each one. Another way is to use just a few clubs and learn how to finesse each one to the right distance. A combination of the two isn’t a bad idea, either.

You might want to start with your bread and butter short shots, the greenside chip and the standard pitch (from 50-100 yards). You can always hit them better than you’re doing now.

When you pick up a new specialty shot, go through this sequence to master it. Hitting it sort of well isn’t what I want you to do. Get good!

I once heard that Lorena Ochoa would practice a new shot for about six months before she used it in a tournament. That’s good advice for all of us.

—–

This tip was extracted from my first book, Better Recreational Golf. There’s lots more stuff just like this in there. Believe me, I won’t be disappointed if you buy your own copy. Neither will you.

We don’t hit a lot of greens. If we want to try for our par, or preserve our bogey, we need a reliable short game. This is what I mean by “reliable” in terms of recreational golf: you make good contact every time, control the ball every time, and get the ball on the green every time so you can start putting.

Every recreational golfer can attain that standard. If you do, you will prevent yourself from ringing up strokes needlessly.

There are two ways of improving. One of them is to get good. The other is to stop being bad. Those two are different. This article is about the second one.

I want you to try something and see what happens. Spend some time on the practice tee learning it, then go out the the course and try it out.

Remember that article I posted a few weeks ago on hitting the ball in a flat trajectory and letting the club get the ball in the air?

That’s what I want you to do with every short shot you hit. EVERY short shot.

Whether it’s an 80-yard pitch or a 20-foot chip, hit the ball with a flat trajectory. Let the club get the ball in the air.

I’m not saying to skull it so the ball gets six inches off the ground and runs three miles.

I’m saying to keep the club low to the ground and level with it as you hit through the ball, allowing the clubface to do ALL the work of getting the ball in the air.

What you get from this solves two short game problems. First, you get much cleaner contact. No chunking. A clean, on-the-clubface strike.

Second, you get spin. You’ll have to learn how to work with this, but once you get spin, you can make the ball do anything.

Those two things add up to reliable short game shots. From there, you can start refining your shot-making to zero in on the pin, which is the getting good part.

Bonus: if you get this down in your short game, it will feed over into your long game and you’ll hit better long shots and more greens.

So try it!

If you pay attention to the way you play, no matter how good you are, you’re aware that the place where your score gets leaky is around the green.

I often say, and I’m not backing away from it here, that good scores are only made possible by good play up to the green. But once you get to the green, you have to put it away. Too often that takes one stroke too many.

The reason is chipping requires the precision of an approach putt, because, after all, that’s what the shot represents if you missed the green.

Let me give you a few suggestions to guide your chipping practice. With less work than you think you can get really good at this shot.

First, get a lesson on how to chip. While it’s an easy shot, there is a right way to do it that you will likely never figure out by yourself.

Now designate three clubs to chip with. I would suggest a pitching wedge, an 8-iron, and a 6-iron. Go the the practice green and pick a spot. Drop three balls and chip from that one spot to the same pin, with each club.

Repeat this from a variety of places around the green, different spots to different pins, to find out which club you like for which chips.

For a month, do no short game practice except this. It will be scary how good you get.

Next, it’s one thing to be good at the “up,” but you have to be good at the “down,” too, or you might as well have left your chip ten feet from the hole.

How do you practice that? Well, all those practice chips you made? Don’t pick up the balls. Leave them where they ended up and putt each one out. Every time. Three chips, three putts. Learn to deal with the putts your chipping leaves you.

This is how I got real good at chipping. I got fed up with leaving myself with putts too far from the hole. Made me get very serious about getting those chips close. Now, even three-footers I don’t like.

In other words, don’t practice chipping only. Practice getting up and down. Keep score, too. Getting down to an average of 2.1 (up and down nine out of ten times) is realistic for anybody.

I still practice like this. It’s the only way.

Don’t neglect your putter, either. If you have a lie on good grass and there isn’t too much of it between your ball and the green, just putt. But practice that, too.

I see recreational golfers use up strokes unnecessarily in several ways, but the big one is from 50-100 yards. Few I play with can put the ball on the green consistently from that range. What I’m going to talk about today is really simple. Anyone can do it. It’s solving this problem by acquiring pre-defined wedge shots that go to known distances.

Take out your pitching wedge, and practice making two swings of defined length. The first swing is taking the club back to where your hands are level with your hips. The second swing is taking the club back to where your left arm is parallel to the ground.

Check yourself in a mirror as you’re learning what these swings feel like. Often, where it feels your hands and arms are, and where they really are, are different.

Now you have two swings. At the range, hit pitches with the shorter swing to flags that are close in, such as the 75-yard flag and 100-yard flag. You might not land the ball exactly on those spots, but you should be able to estimate the distance the ball is carrying. Repeat with the longer swing. When you’re finished, you will know how to hit the ball to each of two specific distances.

I hope you have more than one wedge. Your pitching wedge comes with the set of irons, and you should have a sand wedge, in the 54-56 degree range. If so, repeat the exercise with this wedge. Now you have four distances. And if you have a third or a fourth wedge, calibrate those, too.

Now you have four to eight distances, using two swings that are easy to repeat. There will be distance gaps, but you can fill those in easily when you play. The best way to do that is to use a club/swing combination that is short of the distance you face, and hit the ball a little bit harder. Easing off instead can turn into quitting on the shot.

It might also be the case that two club/swing combinations give you distances that are very close to each other. That’s all right. The combination with the more-lofted club will stop quicker, and the shot with the less-lofted club will run out a bit after landing. It’s good to have both choices at your disposal.

A short game skill every golfer should have is to hit two distinct shots with the same wedge — one shot in which the ball runs after it lands, and another in which the ball stops quickly.

The reason this is important to know is that the wedge you choose will be primarily determined by the distance to the pin. But, in one instance you might have clear ground all the way, in which case landing short and running the ball to the pin is the best choice.

In another instance, you might have to hit over something and not have a lot of green to work with. Now you have to throw the ball over the trouble and have it land there and stay there.

Here’s how.

1. The Running Shot. This is a shot from my book, Better Recreational Golf, called the Air Chip. Play the ball in the middle of your stance with the clubface square to the target. Take the club back and let your wrists hinge naturally. On the downswing, let the wrists unhinge, but when they get to the ball arrest that movement and follow through with firm, but not rigid wrists.

In the follow-through, keep the clubhead as low to the ground as possible, and keep the clubface pointing at the target. The ball will take off lower than normal, check a little, then run to the hole. Experiment with your wedges to see what the air-to-ground ratio is for each one.

2. The Checking Shot. Align your stance about five degrees to the left of the pin. Open the clubface so it points to the pin. Put the ball in the middle of your stance. Swing back and through, letting the club arc upwards on each side of the ball. Swing along your body line, not at the target.

The key to this shot is club speed. The prime rule of the short game is speed = spin. Hit through the ball faster to get more spin on the ball. This, of course, is what will make the ball stop when it lands. I said faster, not harder. There’s a difference.

Since the clubface is open, the ball will go higher and thus shorter. You have to take a longer backswing than you think you need to so the ball will carry the trouble. Practice this part well, because it will seem at first like the right swing will send the ball way past the pin.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

The right pre-shot routine in the short game maximizes the effectiveness of your shot. Here is a routine proposed by Paul Runyan, who is in the top five all-time of short game players. It’s taken from this book, The Short Way to Lower Scoring.

1. Check the lie. A successful shot depends on making solid contact with the ball. That is determined to a great extent by the lie. When the ball sits up on a lush cushion of grass, you can play with a level stroke. But lies with little grass under the ball, or a ball sitting down in lush grass, require you to pinch the ball — play it back of center and hit down more than level.

2. Visualize your shot. Consider where you want the ball to land and thus how much it will run out to the hole. The safest shots have minimum air time and maximum ground time. Under the right conditions, the ball does not have to land on the green before it starts its run-out. Runyan prefers maximum time on the ground, and so do I.

3. Choose the right club. From your chipping practice, you know how much the ball will run out relative to its flight when hit with every club from your 6-iron to your lob wedge. As for pitches, you know, again from your practice, how far your pitching clubs, 8-iron through lob wedge, will travel with the same stroke. When you have to pinch the ball, take out a more lofted club to make sure you get the club under the ball.

4. Rehearse the stroke. Make at least two rehearsal strokes. We can get away with less-than-perfect contact in our full shots, but in short shots, only perfection will do. Your practice swings both remind you of how you want to hit the ball, and set you up for the next step.

5. Duplicate your rehearsal stroke. When you hit the shot, you should have only this thought in your mind, to do the same thing that you just did. Trust your preparation and execute the shot with confidence.

To Runyan’s five points I would add:

3a. Line up the shot. Especially for chipping, where the ball will be running to the hole, regard the shot as an approach putt that might go in. Line up the shot to give it a chance, and if it doesn’t go in, you have only a short putt left. For longer pitches, there is no reason to leave the ball more than a few yards right or left of the hole.

4a. Believe in your stroke. If there is uncertainty of any flavor in your mind as you’re about to take the club away, stop and walk away. Choose another shot, one you can believe in, even though it might not leave the ball as close to the hole as you would like.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

When you have a 6-iron from the fairway, there isn’t much else to do but hit the ball straight at your target. Once in a while you might fade or draw it in, hit it a little higher or lower, but nine times out of ten a straight shot will do.

Around the green, it’s different. You’re trying to get the ball as close to the hole as you can, with obstacles along the ground that get in the way.

Right off, you can see what the two problems are, and they are different: (1) get the ball close, and (2) overcome obstacles.

Solving the first problem is a matter of technique. Solving the second involves imagination. You need them both to have a functioning short game. This article is about solving the first problem.

There is nothing about the shots of the short game that cannot be reduced to a science. Take greenside chipping, for example. It is quite possible to develop a chipping stroke, apply it to a number of clubs, and wind up with a shot that leaves the ball kick-in close more than half the time from a given distance. See my previous post on how I did this.

You can do the same for pitches from 45 to 100 yards. If you have three wedges or four, hit them all with the same swing length, but with three different swing speeds, and now you have nine or twelve different distances you can pitch the ball, guaranteed.

For the shots in between, do the same. Find a stroke for that shorter distance, then insert clubs and swing parameters that give you a variety of guaranteed distances.

All you need to do then is decide which shot you’re going to play, and determine the distance it needs to cover. That tells you immediately which club and which swing to use. You don’t even have to think about it, and you’ll lay the ball close to the hole just like the pros do.

By following a routine like this, you do your thinking in advance. The less thinking and deciding you need to do when you play, the easier it is to play good golf.

Creativity and imagination are overused in the short game. You don’t have to figure out every shot from the ground up.

There’s no need to go through an intuitive process if you know that when the ball is just off the green, 23 yards from the hole, you can use your standard chipping stroke with your gap wedge to park the ball next to the hole, all things being equal.

Things are not always equal, though. There are those obstacles I mentioned, such as little changes in elevation on the green. Mounds to hit over and downslopes the ball will land on. Less than ideal lies, and so on.

You solve these problems by starting with a standard technique and modifying it as necessary for the shot at hand. You imagination will tell you how to do this, but starting from a know technique. That’s the important part.

Deviating from a known solution works out much better than making up the whole thing at once.

But going back to the original point, the more short shots you have that you know exactly how they will turn out, the better your short game will be because it will be predictable.

Spend a few hours around the practice green to get this all worked out and you won’t believe how easy golf just got.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.