Long Chip Shots

March 22, 2015 recgolfer 3 Comments

Chips from twenty yards or so can be the most troublesome shots in golf. They come in four varieties, based on the ratio of distance to the green and distance from there to the pin. I’m going to tell you how to hit each one.

1. Ten yards to the green, ten yards to the pin. Here, the distances are equal, but they are long distances. You need a moderately-lofted club, like a pitching wedge, to get the ball to the edge of the green but not run out way past the hole.

2. Ten yards to the green, five yards to the pin. Use a gap wedge to get the ball to the edge of the green and sitting quickly. The stroke is specialized: hit the shot by sliding the club underneath the ball, keeping the clubhead low at all times, especially on the follow-through, to get maximum spin.

3. Five yards to the green, ten (or more) yards to the pin. Use a 7- or 8-iron to get the ball on the green and running up to the hole.

4. Fifteen yards to the green, five yards to the pin. Use a sand wedge. This another specialized stroke. Power the downswing only with gravity, using your hands to guide the club into the ball. Emphasize hitting the ground directly underneath the ball with the sole of your club. When struck properly, the ball floats up, floats down, and dies right away. This shot takes practice.

If you have a tight lie for any of these shots, odds are you have good ground all the way up to the green. If so, and there are no obstacles to hit over, use a straighter-faced club and run the ball all the way to the pin.

With a tight lie and something you have to hit over, like a bunker or thick grass, play the ball back in your stance. Pinch the ball off the turf with a lofted wedge. Think only of getting the ball on the green so you can start putting.

golf swing

Hit Down With Your Irons — Not

March 15, 2015 recgolfer Leave a comment

Hit down on the ball. You can’t get away from this advice. It’s like bad weeds in your garden that you spray and dig up and think you’ve gotten rid of them and a month later there they are again.

Why do you keep hearing this nonsense? Because it kind of makes sense.

The club is way up there in the backswing and it has to come back down to get to the ball, so in that sense you are hitting down on the ball.

But that is not the sense that too many golfers interpret the words. They think it means to be hitting down steeply. That is the sense that leads to frustration because they end up chopping down.

I’ll admit if you hit down like that, you can get some pretty good shots out of the effort with the short irons.

But with the lesser-lofted irons, it doesn’t work so well. Forget about it with your fairway wood, and don’t even mention your driver.

Instead of hitting down, think about the spot where the club travels level with the ground, because it does that eventually. With an iron, it’s then just a matter of addressing the ball so that it lies a little bit behind that spot, and a ball on a tee is positioned a little ahead of that spot.

That’s all there is to it.

Remember “13 clubs, 1 swing” from a few months ago? Remember about hitting the ball forward?

There’s no “hitting down” in any of that. Don’t hit down. Hit forward.

pitching

Calibrate Your Pitching Game

March 8, 2015 recgolfer Leave a comment

The shots from 50-100 yards are hard to get right. You’re close enough that you’ll get the ball on the green. What’s hard is hitting the ball next to the pin. That means hitting it the right distance.

You can do it if you calibrate your pitching game. You’ll need a laser rangefinder and a notebook. Go to the range when there aren’t a lot of people there, because you will be switching mats all the time.

The idea is to hit your wedges with two basic strokes and find out how far the ball goes with those strokes and each club.

One stroke takes your left arm back to parallel with the ground. That’s your full pitching stroke. The other stroke takes your left arm back halfway that far. That is the short stroke.

Get in front of a marker in the range that is roughly 60 yards away. Take out your sand wedge and pitch to it with the full stroke. Hit four or five balls with that same stroke and the same force.

If they all go too far or not far enough, keep moving to other mats until you find the one from where you pitch exactly to the marker. Then take out your rangefinder and find the distance to the marker. That’s how far you pitch your sand wedge with a full pitching stroke.

Now do the same exercise with the sand wedge and your short pitching swing. When you’re finished, you have two guaranteed pitching distances with your sand wedge. Write them down in your notebook.

Repeat both exercises with each of your other pitching clubs. I have five: 9-iron, PW, 52, 56, and 60.

When you’re finished, get a 3X5 card and write down these distances, in descending order by yards, with the club/swing combination alongside that gives you that distance. This card goes into your bag for when you play.

When I’m 78 yards from the hole, for example, I look on my card and see that the shot calls for a PW with the short stroke. And when I hit that shot, the ball stops within 10-12 feet. If it doesn’t, I mishit the shot.

Pitching close shouldn’t be guesswork. It’s easy when you know what you’re doing.

putting

To Sink Putts, Practice Sinking Putts

February 22, 2015 recgolfer Leave a comment

I’ll tell you what got me from being an average recreational putter to a very good recreational putter. I practiced sinking putts. That’s what we’re trying to do, so that’s what I practiced.

To be sure, I changed my grip, my stance, and my stroke in order for my mechanics to allow me to hit the putt where I want it to go. You have to have the technical points down or you’re not going to get anywhere.

I also got better at reading greens, though that is an ongoing project.

But beyond that, I trained my mind to see a putt as a ball going into the hole. I did this by sinking three-foot putts all over the place on the practice green. Dozens and dozens of three-footers, all going into the hole. By now it’s hundreds and hundreds.

You might say, it’s pretty easy to sink three-foot putts one after the other, and I would say, You’re right. But …

Because I’ve done it so often, and continue to do it so often, with such frequent success, my subconscious mind doesn’t know anything else about a putt except that it goes in the hole.

Your subconscious mind is not subtle. It is black and white. All it knows is the putt went in the hole or it stayed out. When the ball goes in all the time, the mind comes to believe that’s what the ball is supposed to do, and does not question it.

My teaching pro said the best putter on his college golf team, hands down, practiced mainly one-foot putts. One foot! Somebody said to him, “You’re making a lot of putts, but they’re only one foot long!” The guy replied, “Yes, but my putter doesn’t know that.”

Believe me, sinking putt after putt changes everything. The body starts executing the stroke on that basis, and Voila! Putts in the hole all over the place.

Oh, I know, you have to read the green and get the pace right for the ball to have a chance. But when it comes time to hit the ball, it all comes down to believing in what you’re doing. Having sunk oceans of putts creates that belief.

Don’t just practice putting. Practice sinking putts.

hands lead the clubhead

Your Hands Lead the Clubhead

February 14, 2015 recgolfer Leave a comment

[August 2019. Let’s get to the point. See The Hands Lead the Clubhead – IV.]

Have I ever said that before? (Only a million times, I hear you cry.)

I got a lesson a few days ago in what happens if you DON’T do this.

I went out to play nine and ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while, so we went off as a twosome.

He has a pretty good-looking swing, but let me tell you. Almost everything he hit was a chunk. Off the tee he was OK, because it’s hard to chunk the ball when it’s two inches off the ground.

But on the ground, forget it. Irons, chunk. Pitches, chunk city. It would take him three shots to get onto the green from 100 yards because they were all chunks.

So I decided to watch. Know what I saw? His hands quit right before impact and the clubhead led the way. EVERY time.

I wanted so much to say to him, just do (this) and you’ll be fine. But you don’t say those things.

I’m saying it to you, though, because I saw a classic example of what the clubhead leading the hands does for you, and it ain’t a pretty sight.

It doesn’t matter who you are. GET THIS RIGHT. Learn to have your hands lead the clubhead. You can read about it in Six Fundamentals (it’s Fundamental Five).

Or you can do the towel drill from a post I wrote almost three years ago. But LEARN IT.

There is no way you will ever hit the ball well, consistently well, otherwise.

golf swing, mental game

Trust Your Golf Swing

January 25, 2015 recgolfer Leave a comment

Trust your swing. You hear that phrase a lot from professional golfers. It means to rely on what you have practiced and play with what you’ve practiced instead of monitoring technical points as you play. That last part is still practice. Practice is over. It’s time to play.

I’ve heard Olympic athletes say that, too. They practice their skill over and over so when it’s time to compete they just do what they practiced. They don’t think about it any more. They just do it.

Recreational golfers, I think, would find this difficult to do. Very few of us (including me) practice enough that our positive habits become so ingrained and that we can rely on them without further reference.

In our game, when we address the ball, we’re often still not sure if this thing is going to work. So we decide to help it along.

There, my friend, is the worst mistake we can make on the golf course. That extra little thing, which is no more than a last-second guess, almost always makes things worse.

You might find instead that your best shots came when, by some lucky accident, your internal voice turned off for a moment and you just swung the club. What you had practiced is what came out and you got a great shot out of it.

When got to the ball for the shot after that one, you started to wonder what you did last time that made that shot so great so you began sorting through technical points, when all that really happened is you just SHUT UP for a change and played golf.

Leave all the technical stuff on the practice tee. On the course, concentrate on getting the ball into the hole.

short game

Transform Your Short Game

January 11, 2015 recgolfer 1 Comment

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!

rhythm and tempo

Ernie Els, You’re Not

January 5, 2015 recgolfer Leave a comment

Every golf instructor in the world wants you to swing like Ernie Els. They show you videos of him so you can see what you are aiming for. Watch out, though. His swing is not what it seems.

The main thing you get from watching Els’s swing is his marvelous rhythm. Go ahead and copy that. His swing speed is another matter entirely.

You know, it looks like he has a languid, flowing swing that any of us can imitate. But we also wonder why he hits the ball so far with such a slow swing. News flash: his swing is FAST. It only looks slow because of its efficiency.

Here’s a video from andrewrice.com that puts a clock on his swing. From takeaway to impact, it’s only 1.033 seconds. Let’s call it one second. That’s fast.

If you can get a metronome, set at mm=60 and get it going. Now when you hear a tick, start your swing, and swing the way you normally do. By the time you hear the next tick, the club should have returned to the impact point.

I’ll bet dollars to donuts you were maybe halfway into your downswing when you heard that second tick.

My Legal Department advised me to warn you against trying a one-second swing right now just to see if you can do it. You could hurt yourself. Seriously. So don’t do it!

If you want to hit the ball farther, one of the things you have to do is swing faster. But if you want to pick up your swing speed, you need to do it gradually. This is not a one-week project. More like six months, at least.

When you start swinging faster, it throws your timing off. You have to do the same things, in the same order, in less time. That takes getting used to.

Not to mention, there is a practical limit to your swing speed based on your strength, flexibility, and athleticism.

And finally, you don’t want to swing at your maximum speed anyway. You want to swing at your optimum speed, which is a bit slower.

How do you know what that speed is? It’s the fastest speed at which you can reliably hit the ball on the center of the clubface.

So let Ernie be Ernie. Let you be you. Admire his swing, but remember it’s his swing, not yours.

equipment

What’s In My Bag Update

January 3, 2015 recgolfer 2 Comments

I played nine holes this morning with five clubs: driver, 4i, 7i, 54 wedge, putter.

The only thing that went wrong was on the first hole. I thought I had taken along a 56 wedge. It was a 54 and my pitch on to the green was way overcooked.

Other than that, I shot the same score I usually do and had to hit a few creative shots I don’t otherwise get to hit.

Great fun.

distance, driver

How Far Do You Hit It, Really?

December 22, 2014 recgolfer Leave a comment

We all think we hit it farther than we do. You hear that a lot. Actually, I think each of us has a very good idea of how far we hit it. It’s just not as far as we would like.

This chart tells the approximate truth. If you have a swing speed with your driver of 95 mph, which is high for the majority of recreational golfers, you will carry the ball 210 yards. With adequate roll, you can get about 225 yards out of that shot.

Now roll is highly variable. Have you ever seen an aerial shot of a Tour event and there’s a shot of a drive that falls straight out of the sky and maybe gets two yards of roll?

But, it was hit in the air a ton. Recreational golfers don’t hit those kinds of shots. Ours go lower and roll more.

So don’t kid yourself. If you are an average recreational golfer and you hit your driver 200 yards in the air, that’s a good shot. Add on maybe 15-20 yards of roll and you can play with that length.

Want to hit it farther? Assuming you hit the ball on the center of the clubface regularly (and that’s a big assumption) you’ll hit it farther by swinging faster AND maintaining good tempo.

A more lofted driver might help, too, but that’s another post.

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