Instruction

Game of the Weekend: Chipping Median

Published

9 years ago

Sep 4, 2015

While much has been rightly made of the importance of distance off the tee, you still can’t get through a round of golf without your wedges. It’s inevitable that your short game is going to be put to test when you play. This Game of the Weekend will help you easily see how close you’re hitting your chips from the hole. Give it a go and see how low you can make your Chipping Median.

Game of the Weekend: Chipping Median

Gear needed: 15 golf balls and your chipping clubs.
Time needed: 5-7 minutes.

Rules: The closer you hit your chips to the hole, the greater your odds become of making the putt. That said, this game called Chipping Median will help you do a quick measure of the median distance you hit your chips from the hole.

From within 5 yards of the green, hit 15 shots to three different holes in the following manner: one ball to the closest hole, one ball to the hole in the middle, and one ball to the hole farthest away. Repeating this series a total of five times will give you 15 chip shots.

Once you have hit all 15 shots, walk up to the green and, taking all three holes into consideration, remove the seven closest shots you have hit to your targets. Find the next closest shot (which would have been the eighth), and step off how far away it is from the hole rounded to the nearest foot and record that number into our interactive practice website www.golfscrimmages.com.

The eighth closest shot is your median, and is significant because there are seven shots closer to the hole and seven shots that are farther away. Improving your median is a neat way to monitor your short game progress to help you improve the likelihood of making more putts. See the video below for more.

Benefits: Here’s what this game helps you with.

Even the top players in the world don’t hit every green in regulation, so getting your chips as close to the hole as possible will obviously make for easier up-and-downs. This quick and easy way to measure the effectiveness of your short game shots creates a competitive environment in which you can easily chart your progress.
Remember to take note of your bad shots, too. You can have a fairly low median, say 4 feet, but if you hit several stray shots that roll 20 feet away from the hole they will end up costing you when you’re on the course.
Concentrate on every shot so that all 15 end up close!

Practice well to play well, and enjoy this Labor Day weekend!

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Trent Wearner

Trent Wearner is the No. 1-rated teacher in Colorado by Golf Digest Magazine, as well as a two-time Colorado PGA Teacher of the Year (2004, 2014). Along the way, he has been recognized as a Top 20 Teacher Under Age 40 by Golf Digest, a Top 50 Kids Teacher in America by U.S. Kids Golf and a Top Teacher in the Southwestern U.S. by GOLF Magazine. Trent is also the author of the book Golf Scrimmages and creator of the website GolfScrimmages.com

4 Comments

joshuaplaysgolf

Sep 4, 2015 at 11:15 pm

Agreed, but what I do think is that by progressing to each hole after one ball, you are forcing yourself to think through each shot and not just repeating the same 5 shots consecutively. Yes you would make adjustments after each shot, but it’s similar to having a 10 yard chip on the 2nd hole, and then having another on the 5th…you would take the information from the first chip and make an adjustment as necessary for the next one.

They pretty much laid this out in last weeks, 18 holes of up and down…but to really simulate what you would come across in a round, I like to take 9 balls and put them all around the green. Different lies, different distances, different shots. You get one go at it as you would during your rounds, and adds a little pressure to your practice. After putting those 9 out, repeat and see what your score is. Obviously, you don’t want to be the jerk putting on the chipping green, so either find somewhere with a large chipping green or wait until no one else is chipping…usually in the evening/twilight. Personally, I don’t like chipping more than 10 balls onto the green at a time…I don’t feel that hitting balls into a pile of balls around a hole does anything for you, and is inconsiderate of other people who are practicing. There is value in muscle memory, but standing in one place hitting 100 balls is not very effective (see this ALL the time). You learn a lot more a lot quicker by forcing your brain to adapt to a wide variety of conditions and swings. For example, if you want to work on 20 yarders, hit a handful of balls from that spot, hit a few other types of shots, and come back. It’s the same principle of only hitting 3-5 balls on the range with one club and cycling back to it to keep your brain from going into autopilot.

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- Bo B. Jammin
  
  Sep 5, 2015 at 10:11 am
  
  You’ve got it right Joshua. I know several guys that always practice their chipping by unloading a shag bag and piling up balls around one hole. Half way through the bag of balls their shots are colliding into the previous balls that they have hit so they have absolutely no clue as to the quality of their ball striking and how much the ball checks up when it hits the green, but they just keep chipping away at the same spot like some zombie in a golf trance. What amazes me even more is that almost invariably, they will then collect up all of their balls and repeat the exact same thing from the exact same spot a few times before they finally come out of their clueless trance, collect up their balls and then walk away apparently content that they have somehow miraculously improved their game.
  
  The reason I know that this way of practicing doesn’t work is that I often play a round with several guys who practice like that and on the course, their short game is severely lacking. You can see the fear in their eyes because that have absolutely no idea how hard to even strike the ball much less what loft / backspin they want or can put on the ball based on they lie they are confronted with.
  
  They always give me compliments on my short game but on the practice green they seem to feel sorry for me when they see me practicing with only three balls. . . (Several of them have actually offered to give me one of their old shag bags.)
  
  I firmly believe that if you don’t practice with the intensity and at the tempo, pace and the randomness of lies, slopes and distances that occurs during an actual round of golf, you are, for the most part, wasting your time.
  
  In golf, every shot is a puzzle that must be solved, but nowhere is that more true than around the green. Personally, if I have to get up and down and my chip shot isn’t either in the hole, or within 18 inches of the hole and positioned where the putt will be a no-brainer, I feel as though I have failed the task at hand. I don’t get down on myself, it just makes me want to get better and fortunately I really enjoy practicing the short game. It is a whole lot of fun!
  
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  - Joshuaplaysgolf
    
    Sep 5, 2015 at 12:14 pm
    
    Hahaha, zombie golfers is a wonderful analogy. I’m glad I’m not the only one who practices that way. I had to stop using the chopping green at my home course because they put 200 range balls out for people to use. Most people seem to like to hit as many as possible onto the green and just walk away as if they were the only one who wanted to practice there. I play golf, not billiards. And why in the world would you practice using range balls? Do you play with the anime practice ball? I also love the guys who stand literally 5 feet off the green to hit their 10 million identical shots. Really? How often do you miss the green by 5 feet, and in the fringe? It just isn’t practical, and I don’t understand where the perception that this is effective comes from. Fortunately I have found a close by course with easily the best short game facility I’ve ever seen…and they don’t put range balls out. I agree that the short game is a ton of fun to practice. There’s so much room for creativity and mental stimulus to figure out how to get yourself up and down…but you actually have to utilize that opportunity.
    
    Reply Report comment
btv

Sep 4, 2015 at 8:54 pm

I still don’t think this accurately represents your “median” ability when it comes to the course. Even with hitting 5 shots to 3 targets… once you hit one you will naturally compensate with the next one. I think this may be a viable activity for skills training but not measuring your ability to get up and down.

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Instruction

Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?

Published

16 hours ago

Apr 24, 2024

Shawn Clement

Some call the image on the left laid off, but if you are hitting a fade, this could be a perfect backswing for it! Same for across the line for a draw! Stop racking your brain with perceived mistakes and simply match backswing to shot shape!

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Instruction

The Wedge Guy: The easiest-to-learn golf basic

Published

4 weeks ago

Mar 29, 2024

Terry Koehler

My golf learning began with this simple fact – if you don’t have a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, it is practically impossible for your body to execute a fundamentally sound golf swing. I’m still a big believer that the golf swing is much easier to execute if you begin with the proper hold on the club.

As you might imagine, I come into contact with hundreds of golfers of all skill levels. And it is very rare to see a good player with a bad hold on the golf club. There are some exceptions, for sure, but they are very few and very far between, and they typically have beat so many balls with their poor grip that they’ve found a way to work around it.

The reality of biophysics is that the body moves only in certain ways – and the particulars of the way you hold the golf club can totally prevent a sound swing motion that allows the club to release properly through the impact zone. The wonderful thing is that anyone can learn how to put a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, and you can practice it anywhere your hands are not otherwise engaged, like watching TV or just sitting and relaxing.

Whether you prefer an overlap, interlock or full-finger (not baseball!) grip on the club, the same fundamentals apply. Here are the major grip faults I see most often, in the order of the frequency:

Mis-aligned hands

By this I mean that the palms of the two hands are not parallel to each other. Too many golfers have a weak left hand and strong right, or vice versa. The easiest way to learn how to hold the club with your palms aligned properly is to grip a plain wooden ruler or yardstick. It forces the hands to align properly and shows you how that feels. If you grip and re-grip a yardstick several times, then grip a club, you’ll see that the learning curve is almost immediate.

The position of the grip in the upper/left hand

I also observe many golfers who have the butt of the grip too far into the heel pad of the upper hand (the left hand for right-handed players). It’s amazing how much easier it is to release the club through the ball if even 1/4-1/2″ of the butt is beyond the left heel pad. Try this yourself to see what I mean. Swing the club freely with just your left hand and notice the difference in its release from when you hold it at the end of the grip, versus gripping down even a half inch.

To help you really understand how this works, go to the range and hit shots with your five-iron gripped down a full inch to make the club the same length as your seven-iron. You will probably see an amazing shot shape difference, and likely not see as much distance loss as you would expect.

Too much lower (right) hand on the club

It seems like almost all golfers of 8-10 handicap or higher have the club too far into the palm of the lower hand, because that feels “good” if you are trying to control the path of the clubhead to the ball. But the golf swing is not an effort to hit at the ball – it is a swing of the club. The proper hold on the club has the grip underneath the pad at the base of the fingers. This will likely feel “weak” to you — like you cannot control the club like that. EXACTLY. You should not be trying to control the club with your lower/master hand.

Gripping too tightly

Nearly all golfers hold the club too tightly, which tenses up the forearms and prevents a proper release of the club through impact. In order for the club to move back and through properly, you must feel that the club is controlled by the last three fingers of the upper hand, and the middle two fingers of the lower hand. If you engage your thumbs and forefingers in “holding” the club, the result will almost always be a grip that is too tight. Try this for yourself. Hold the club in your upper hand only, and squeeze firmly with just the last three fingers, with the forefinger and thumb off the club entirely. You have good control, but your forearms are not tense. Then begin to squeeze down with your thumb and forefinger and observe the tensing of the entire forearm. This is the way we are made, so the key to preventing tenseness in the arms is to hold the club very lightly with the “pinchers” — the thumbs and forefingers.

So, those are what I believe are the four fundamentals of a good grip. Anyone can learn them in their home or office very quickly. There is no easier way to improve your ball striking consistency and add distance than giving more attention to the way you hold the golf club.

Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!

Published

2 months ago

Mar 4, 2024

Shawn Clement

Not the dreaded headcover under the armpit drill! As if your body is defective and can’t function by itself! Have you seen how incredible the human machine is with all the incredible feats of agility all kinds of athletes are accomplishing? You think your body is so defective (the good Lord is laughing his head off at you) that it needs a headcover tucked under the armpit so you can swing like T-Rex?

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