Living Room Chipping Drill for Crisp Contact
Dial in your short game with these drills for contact, consistency, control and fundamentals
Crisp contact, consistency, distance control and fundamentals. They're all important elements of being a good chipper, and these chipping drills will help you improve each of them.
Indoor Drill to Improve Contact on Chip Shots
Here’s a drill from George Connor, 3-time Connecticut PGA Teacher of the Year, that you can do in your living room anytime of year to keep your ball-striking on chip and pitch shots is always crisp.
To set up this drill, place three golf balls on the ground a grip-length behind where the ball would be in your chipping stance. In this demonstration, Connor places a nickel where the ball would be. By using a coin, you must be precise with where you land the club on the ground in order to execute the drill successfully.
Once you’re set up, start the drill by making your chipping stroke at the coin, ensuring not to make contact with the balls you set up behind the coin.
In order to avoid the balls, you must execute proper wrist hinge in the backswing, and hold your wrist angle through the downswing.
By working on this drill and learning how to hit the coin without hitting the balls, you’ll build the important skill of landing the club in the right spot on the ground through the stroke. The result will be cleaner, more consistent strikes in your short game.
Chipping Drills
Check out three more great chipping drills to improve your short game and save strokes around the green.
Five Ball Chipping Drill That Will Lower Scores
In this Five Ball Chipping Drill, you take five golf balls and pick out a target to hit to on a practice green. The objective in Level 1 is to get three out of the five balls within a club length of your target before you move on to the next hole. If you make a chip, it counts as two.
There are three levels to this game:
- Level 1: 3 out of 5 within one club length of the target
- Level 2: 4 out of 5 within one club length of the target
- Level 3: 5 out of 5 within one club length of the target
Ladder Chipping Drill to Develop Distance Control
This ladder drill is great for distance control and developing feel. You need feel to be a good chipper.
The idea here is that we are going to chip our first ball to a certain distance, the second ball has to go past that, the third ball has to go past the second, the fourth one and then the fifth one, and so on. The object is the drill is to see how many balls you can chip past the previous ball, then always work to improve your personal best.
It is great for developing touch and feel, we are not really concerned with exactly where the ball goes but rather how far the ball goes. Develop more touch, sensory perception and you become a very, very dangerous chipper.
One-Arm Chipping Drill
If you want to go from being a good chipper to being a great chipper, here is a drills that will help you get there.
As the name suggests, practice chipping balls with one arm, just your lead hand, keeping your trail hand on your hip. Start hitting chip shots with solid contact, and you’ll gain a whole new feel for how that lead arm works in a good chipping stroke.
After you’ve hit several well-struck one-armed chip shots, put both hands on the club and chip a few balls. By hitting good chip shots with one arm, then adding the trail arm back in, you’ll feel a whole new level of control with your short game shots.