Green Grass Golf Shop

Hello friends, it’s Chippin’ Chewsday, innit?! Here with the answer to the most all-fast question that I get with students really struggling around the green, how to hit those high, soft pitch shots that these pros are hitting on TV. With the Masters now behind us, it’s a great time to get onto the course and find our own games for the season, but most importantly, if we’re going to do that, we need to practice the right moves. Far too often I see players swinging like this around the greens, really trying to lift the ball up in the air when that’s actually the opposite of what we want to do to lift the ball in the air. You see, when you strike a golf ball with an upward blow, trying to lift it in the air through impact, all that really does is cuts down on the spin that you can produce. And in addition to that, once that wedge starts to lift up off the ground, that leading edge exposes, those thin shots become much, much easier to hit, send that ball screaming across the green with no spin whatsoever. If we want to hit higher, softer shots around the green. There are two things that we need to do with our club and our swing. First off, we need an open face. Not just to twist the face open, that doesn’t actually do anything. We need to lay the face wide open, then take our normal grip with that face pointed towards the sky. That will help put the ball in the air and it will produce a ton more spin than you can with a square face. In addition to those things, an added benefit, it makes the club much more forgiving. You can swing it much steeper down towards the ball and run much less risk of it digging down into the turf. Exposing that bounce on the bottom of the club by opening the face gives the club a much more tendency to slide through the turf, taking very little dirt with it as it passes through the area where it strikes the golf ball. Then we’re going to open up our stance and shoulders to match how much we opened up our club, just until that clubface and those grooves are pointed where we want the ball to go. And the second most important thing that we have to do is hit the golf ball first. And I hear the term hitting down on a lot, but I prefer to say you just need to catch the ball first. You don’t need to actively try to come down vertically or steep onto the golf ball.
Doing so too much can actually take a lot of that high launch that we want away. If we want to make sure we’re hitting the ball first. We just need to make sure that we have most of our weight forward at setup, a little towards our target, then we need to keep it there throughout that short swing. Then we can adjust how the ball launches with the position in our stance. We want a lower spinner. I can put that ball back in my stance off of my back foot, away from my target. The ball will come off much lower and skip a little before it checks. If you want a nice high one that stops super quick, just take that ball and move it up in your stance. Your club should be even more open when it strikes that golf ball, sending it flying nice and high with enough spin to get it to stop really quick, especially combined with that high launch. Be sure to like and subscribe for the next tip next Chewsday. We’ll see you on the course!