The Difference Between Chipping And Pitching

In today's video I want to clear up a common problem of people confusing a chip for pitch shot. Jerry Shulman recently sent me an email in which he questions whether his problem with chipping comes from too fast of a weight shift:

"Been using your swing for over a year and very, very happy with it. My biggest problem now is in chipping. More often than not I hit the ball fat - the club striking the ground about 2 inches before the ball. Is it possible this is due to too quick a weight shift which moves my center of gravity forward? I don't have this problem on my full or half swing."

Since a chip shot is usually one that takes place within 10 feet of the putting surface and is played with almost no weight transfer during the swing, I suspect Jerry is really talking about a pitch shot which is usually played from about 15-50 feet from the green and does have a modest amount of weigh shift in it. In this type of swing we still want to keep the ball trajectory relatively low so we can get the ball on the green and let it run out to the hole like a putt. Kenny Knox, in his Short Game instructional video, says that you should accurately pace off the distance to the hole and then plan your pitch or chip to land about a third of the way to the hole and then run out the last two thirds as this is a much higher percentage shot than a high trajectory flop shot that flies almost the whole way to the pin.

The key to hitting the more delicate chip shots is to never let your wrists break so that your hands get ahead of the club. [A while back I did a daily on Proper Chipping Technique that featured a drill to help you keep from breaking your wrists in a chip shot. It involves placing a tee in the butt end of your putter so that it points straight up the inside of your forward arm all through the swing.] Setup with your weight a bit forward and from there it's straight back and straight forward.

When you get to a longer pitch shot, say 10-15 yards from the green, you still approach the setup and the swing as you did with a chip shot but in this instance you'll need to have a little bit more power in your swing and thus you will have a touch of weight transfer as well. Overdoing this shift can certainly result in a forward movement of the upper body causing the club to hit the ground well behind the ball as Jerry describes in his email. Pre-loading our forward leg before the shot so we keep our head behind the ball until impact can go along way to eliminating this problem.

Keep it vertical!

The Surge

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