Short Game Practice Drills
By Jamie Faidley under Practice, Short Game
Shooting lower scores out on the golf course takes practice, but who has time to spend hours of time every week out at the range or on the practice green? My goal is to get you to practice the shots that matter the most so you can spend less time working on your game and still see major jumps in performance. Yesterday we went over putting practice and with today’s article our focus is going to be on the short game. By spending just a little bit of time on these drills you will should start to see improvement in your scores immediately.
Distance Wedges
When you get inside the distance of a full lob wedge you have entered the short game. It would take you hours of practice over weeks or months of time to get the feel for how to hit a single lob or sand wedge each different distance from inside of 100 yards. Instead what I recommend is to keep four wedges in your bag: a 60 degree lob wedge, sand wedges of 56 & 52 degrees, and a pitching wedge.
Now practice four different swings, a quarter swing, a half swing, a 3/4 swing, and your full swing. You will have 16 different options for hitting the ball different distances, ranging from around 25 yards to 130 yards (more or less depending on how far you hit the ball).
To practice your different swings and to get accurate measurements on the distances you hit each swing with the different clubs you are going to need a partner. Tour pros will have someone stand around the distance they expect the ball to fly to who will stand in the location after the ball hits the ground. The pro can then “laser” the person to get an accurate yardage. If you can get a somewhat accurate measurement of 25, 50, 75, 100, 125 yards then you can have your partner watch where the ball lands and give you and estimate of the distance. Of course you can estimate the distances yourself, but you need to be able to clearly see how far each shot is carrying, bad information here can be worse for your game than no information.
Chipping
The difference between a pitch and a chip is that a pitch flies farther than it rolls, and a chip shot is one that rolls farther than it carries.
Practicing chip shots will help you prepare for those times when you just miss hitting the green and have a lot of green to work with on your next shot. You want to use a seven or an eight iron and place three balls just off of the side of the green. Then from distances of 30 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet, and 60 feet try to get all three balls within three feet.
Even if your first ball doesn’t get within three feet, chip the other two out so you can start to get a feel for how hard you need to hit the ball to get it close. Don’t practice from the same location each time. Try to give yourself a different angle so you are comfortable with uphill, downhill, right-to-left, and left-t0-right breaking chip shots. Get all three chips within three-feet before you move back to the next distance.
Pitching
The shot you are going to have most often when you miss a green and need to hit a pitch shot is around 15 yards. For this shot you will carry the ball 10-12 yards and watch it roll out only three-to-five. It’s a great shot to master to shave shots off of your score in the long run.
Practice the 15-yard pitch shot with three balls, but change your position for each shot. You want to vary the grass length you are hitting out of, lies, and slopes.
You want to learn how to “read” these types of shots, meaning you want to know where you are going to have to land the shot in order for it to roll up close to the pin. I recommend using a handkerchief and laying it on the green to mark where you think you are going to have to land your pitches. After hitting each shot you can see if you landed the ball short, on the mark, or past the handkerchief and compare it to where the ball ended up relative to the cup.
Lob Shots
The higher arc of the lob shot makes it a tougher shot to execute than the pitch shot, but you are going to have to be able to hit a lob in situation when you do not want the ball to roll very far. I practice lob shots in a similar way to pitch shots varying the grass I hit out of, lies, and slopes with a focus on where the ball lands and how far it rolls out.
It helps to practice hitting these shots over bunkers if possible. The repetition of seeing yourself have success in this situation will calm the nerves when you have to lob over a hazard and stop the ball next to a tight pin out on the course.
Bunker Play
Playing out of the sand is difficult for beginning players, but a little bit of practice can go a long ways. A problem faced by a lot of us is that the practice greens at most courses do not have greenside bunkers to practice out of. If that is the case at your course then try to go out to a hole with a sand trap by the green and hit some practice shots. This is best done in the off hours when there are not very many players out on the course, so you can get some shots in without holding up play.
You want to try to practice two different shots. The first is the short shot of around 10 yards. These are relatively easy shots to play since even if you hit the ball fat you can get it relatively close. The second type of shot is between 15-20 yards. Don’t worry if there isn’t a pin to use as a target. You can put a group of tees down or use a handkerchief for your target.
By practicing these four types of short game shots you are going to improve your scores. Each type of shot is faced multiple times in the course of a round, whether it’s on short par four’s and par five’s or you miss the green on an approach shot.
Additional Tips on Practicing:
More Resources:
- The Birdie Hunt – An article about how he made an effort to work on his short game, mainly the chip shot.
