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How to Get Your Chip Shots to Drop and Stop

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Every serious golfer knows that while it’s fun to hit long drives down the middle of the fairway, the real scoring in your game is done on and around the greens. If you can polish up your short game to where it is reliable hole after hole and round after round, everything else on the links will seem easier.

In this article, we are going to talk about one key skill you may wish to add to your short game – the ability to stop your chip shots quickly after they land.

How Does the Golf Ball Stop?

To get started, we need to look at this topic from a big-picture perspective to determine what is it that makes the ball stop. To stop your chip shots, you really have two options available – spin and loft.

You can get your shots to come to rest quickly by loading the ball up with as much backspin as you can muster, or you can stop the shot by tossing up high up into the air and bringing it down softly. It’s best to have both options at your disposal so you can choose the right one for the situation at hand.

It’s important to remember that the lie of the ball is going to go a long way toward determining what type of chip shot you can play, and how quickly you can stop that shot. For instance, if you have a clean lie on the short grass, there will be very little stopping you from producing significant spin. On the other hand, when the ball is down in the rough, spinning it to a stop is almost impossible.

The story is similar with regard to using loft, although the details are different. In this case, it’s a tight lie that will make it tough to get the ball way up into the air, especially if the ball is resting on a downslope. A shot played from the rough might be easier to get airborne, but only if the ball is resting on top of some of the grass, suspended above the ground by an inch or two.

Stopping the Ball with Spin

If you’d like to learn how to spin your chip shots to stop them quickly, there are a few points you’ll want to master.

#1 Clean Contact

Simply put, you aren’t going to spin the ball at a high rate without making great contact at impact. You need to pinch the ball cleanly between the face of the club and the top of the turf.

It is this clean contact that is going to allow the face of your wedge to ‘bite’ on the ball and impart plenty of backspin. If you happen to miss-hit a chip shot where you are hoping for a high rate of spin, you’ll lack the necessary spin to stop the shot and it will likely scurry well past the hole.

#2 Downward Strike

Along with making clean contact, this is the other big point with regard to generating spin. You need to hit down through impact slightly to let the ball roll up the face and spin hard as it heads toward the target. This is a tough lesson for many golfers to learn, as they think it’s necessary to hit up in order to get the ball off the ground.

To make it easier to hit down through impact, do your best to keep your left wrist flat (for righties) and firm as the club swings through impact.

#3 Use Some Speed

Adding backspin to your chip shots requires some speed through the hitting area. This is not a conservative type of shot – you’ll need to be committed to it if you are going to make it work. The idea is to fly the ball most of the way up to the hole, giving it just enough room to bounce once or twice before the spin takes hold.

Learning how to control spinning chip shots is not something that will happen in a single practice session. You’ll need to work on this skill consistently if you are going to add this shot to your short game arsenal.

Stopping it with Loft

Using loft to stop your chip shots will be the only viable option in some cases, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. In fact, this type of shot can be just as difficult as the spinning chip, even though the techniques are completely different.

Again, we’ve got some points for you to consider while trying to learn this shot.

#1 Open Up the Face

Even if you are using a highly-lofted club, like a 58* or 60* wedge, you’ll still need to open the face up even further at address to get the kind of loft required for this shot. To open the face effectively, turn the club head as you are building your stance and then finalize your grip.

#2 Move it Forward in Your Stance

Unlike the previous type of shot, you don’t want to hit down on this one – you want to swing the club parallel with the top of the ground, or maybe even hit up slightly if you have room to do so.

Placing the ball forward in your stance will make it easier to swing through at the proper angle.

#3 Again, Speed is Key

This last point is where your spinning chips will have a lot in common with your lofted chip shots. You need speed on both of these shots if you are going to be successful. In this case, you need speed to send the ball high enough up into the air to carry it all the way to the target before it drops down and hopefully stops cold.

Now Get Out and Practice!

We hope this article has given you the motivation you need to get out and put in some focused practice time on your short game. Knowing how to stop your chip shots quickly will help you get up and down more frequently, and improving your up and down percentage will do wonders for your overall scores.

Play well out there!


 

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