How to Chip a Golf Ball

By John Zeravica

20 Mar 2023

Skills

Getting Started

Are you tired of chunking or blades golf balls around the green? Then not to fear since I’m here; this blog will cover golf chipping tips. We will review posture, stance setup, ball and turf interaction, chipping stroke, feeling and imagining your chip, ball position, and distance control. I know it sounds like a lot and might feel more time-consuming than doing a report for your boss, but it’s easy when I break it down. After reading this and practicing this for a little bit, you can be a master around the green.

Get Your Posture Right

For posture, we need to have our back straight, and our body bends forward like we are in an athletic position. Our arms should be hanging below our shoulders. This keeps us from slouching and creating lazy chip shots that cause inconsistency in contact and how far we hit the ball.

Tweak Your Stance and Setup

Our stance and setup are critical in creating a solid chipping technique. We should have our feet just narrower than shoulder width. This is because we are taking a minor swing, so having a more prominent stance is unnecessary, making it easier to control those smaller movements. We should also grip down on the club to have better control of the club we are chipping with. Most of our weight should be on our lead foot; between 70 to 60 percent of our weight shoulder be there. This makes it easier to contact the ball first rather than the ground. Besides having our feet open to our target, everything should be aligned, like putting where our shoulders and hips aligned to parallel view the target.

Understand Ball and Turf Interaction

Understanding ball and turf interaction are important for improving our game. When we are in the Fairway is important to hit down on the ball, to make the ball go in the air. It is just like with irons. This interaction is only valid with being in short rough and Fairway. This interaction does not apply to being in the rough when the ball is sitting up. If we try to hit down on the ball when we have a fluffy line in the rough, we usually hit under the ball, and the ball doesn’t go far, or in some cases, it doesn’t even move. When we are in a fluffy lie, hitting up on the ball is important.

Understand Your Chipping Stroke

To be consistently better around the greens; we must have a consistent chipping technique. We need something that is going to be easy to replicate. First, we could start with how we take the club back; we take it back by having a wrist locked in the same place we had them addressed and moving our arms and shoulders all at once. Once we get to the top of our stroke, we want to bring the club back down the same way and through toward the target. I know this sounds too good to be true, like one of those emails saying you won the jackpot, but if we want to be consistent, we must make it easy for ourselves.

Develop Your Feel

Feel is crucial to chipping. Chipping is like art. If you don’t feel what you’re going to draw or paint, then you are lost; the same applies to chipping with judging distances and strokes. For example, in the previous section, we talked about creating an easy and straightforward stroke that’s easy to replicate. Still, if you are struggling to lock your wrist, I recommend doing a stroke that feels more like we are using more of our wrist.

I’m not saying we should change our stroke or how we view the game because it feels better. How we feel about chipping or how our chipping looks isn’t as crucial as it feels blading or chunking another chip or chipping in. So I recommend finding a feeling that works best for you. Still, it’s easy to replicate for yourself, and you can copy and produce the same shot repeatedly.

Adjust Your ball Position

Changing our ball position can change much in the golf shot we produce. This can both help or hurt us. We just need to know where to place the ball and why we should place the ball there so we can benefit from having different ball positions when we chip. When we want to hit the ball high like Phil the Thrill, we should put the ball up in our stance because that will help generate more height in our shots. If we want to hit a low or shot or a bump and run, then we put the ball back in our stance to deloft the club. If we want to hit a standard chip shot which would be something in the middle of those two, then we will put the ball in the middle of our stance.

And finally...Calibrate Your Distance Control

Controlling our distances for chipping is essential to get the ball closer to the hole, giving us an easy putt. We can do this by holding how far we carry the golf ball. If we use the same club, then the rollout of the golf ball won’t drastically change from shot to shot. We can work on this by doing the ladder drill. It is where we set alignments sticks or clubs 5 feet from each other like ladder steps. Then from about 5 to 10 yards away, we could chip into the first section, go to the next session past it, and so forth. After doing this for a little bit, we will find out how far we need to take the club back for each chip and then when we are on the course. We find a shot that’s to a similar or identical distance; we can get it back to how far back we took it in the ladder drill.

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