I used to hate chipping. Fat shots, thinned shots, the short game ruined my score. I learned that great chipping isn’t about power; it’s about making small, fixed movements. The moment I fixed my wrists and setup, the chunks disappeared. These are the simple, physical tips I used to save strokes around the green.
1. How I Fixed My Wrist Flips and Stopped Hitting “Fats.”
The most common and most frustrating mistake in chipping is the “fat shot”, when the club hits the ground before it hits the ball. This is almost always caused by one thing: wrist breakdown, or what golfers call “scooping.”
When I missed a chip, I realized I was trying to lift the ball into the air with my wrists right at the moment of impact. It felt like I was helping the ball, but what I was actually doing was changing the bottom of my swing arc, causing the club head to hit the ground too early. It ruined my score and my confidence.
The entire secret to solid chipping is keeping the lead wrist (the left wrist for right-handed golfers) firm and flat through the impact zone. I learned a simple visual trick to fix this forever: the Clock Face Grip.
The Problem: Scooping and the Wrist Flip:
When you scoop, your wrist flips up, adding loft and speed to the club head too early. This causes two bad things:
- Fat Shots (The Chunk): The club head passes the hands too soon, hitting the ground inches behind the ball and sending a painful chunk of turf flying instead of the ball.
- Thin Shots (The Skull): If you manage to avoid the ground, the upward flipping motion hits the middle or top of the ball, sending it skimming low across the green, often into a hazard on the other side.
The Fix: The Clock Face Grip:
This drill helped me understand that the wrist should stay flat and firm throughout the entire chip.
- The Starting Position (10 O’clock): When you set up, look at the back of your lead hand (your left hand). Imagine it’s a clock face. Because your hands are slightly ahead of the ball (more on that in Section 2), the back of your hand should be facing around 10 o’clock.
- The Impact (12 O’clock): As you swing down and through the ball, the back of that lead hand should feel like it is moving toward 12 o’clock, flat, firm, and pointing straight down the line toward the target. It should never flip up to 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock.
- The Finish (2 O’clock): When you finish the chip, the back of your lead hand should still feel flat, even as the club naturally moves up, facing roughly 2 o’clock.
The core feeling is that your wrist stays firm, flat, and quiet. It should feel like the club is an extension of your forearm, not something hinged at the wrist.
The Money Check: Hands Lead the Club:
To ensure you maintain the 12 o’clock feeling at impact, you must always feel like your hands are leading the club head.
- Imagine your hands and the club head racing to the ball. Your hands should cross the ball first.
- If your wrists break down, the club head passes your hands before impact, ruining the angle and causing the dreaded scoop.
By focusing on keeping that “clock face” flat and firm, you guarantee the club descends at the proper angle and keeps the low point of the swing after the ball, which is the only way to hit clean, crisp chips every time. This simple fix eliminates 80% of fat and thin shots instantly.
2. Why Ball Position and Weight Forward Are Non-Negotiable:
Fixing the wrist flip (Section 1) is crucial, but it won’t work if your body isn’t set up correctly to support that flat, leading wrist. I used to set up for a chip like I was hitting a full 7-iron, a wide stance, weight centered, and that invited disaster.
I learned that the chipping setup is deliberately unbalanced and aggressive. It forces your body into a position where it is almost impossible to hit the ground behind the ball (the “fat” shot). This is the Setup Secret that locks in solid contact.
The Narrow Stance and Weight Distribution:
The first thing I changed was my feet. You are only trying to move the ball 10 to 30 yards, so you don’t need a wide, powerful base.
- The Narrow Stance: Your feet should be very close together, almost touching, maybe only four to six inches apart. This eliminates unnecessary lower-body movement and makes the swing all about the shoulders (more on this in Section 3).
- The Aggressive Weight Forward: This is the non-negotiable step. Lean 70 to 80 percent of your weight onto your front foot (the left foot for right-handed players). You should feel pressure primarily under the ball of your front foot.
- Why? When your weight is forward, the bottom of your swing arc is pre-set to be in front of the ball. This guarantees the club hits the ball first, then the turf. If your weight drifts back, the club hits the turf first, and you get a fat shot. Keep it forward and glued there.
The Back Ball Position: Exposing the Ball:
Where you place the ball in your narrow stance is just as important as your weight.
- The Ball Position: Place the ball slightly back of center in your narrow stance. Some instructors say to put it on the back of your heel.
- Why? Placing the ball back exposes the ball to the club’s descending path. When you swing down, your club naturally hits the ball on the way down, trapping it cleanly against the turf. If the ball is too far forward, you have to try and lift it, which encourages that wrist flip we just worked so hard to eliminate.
The Hands-Ahead Check: Pre-setting the Impact:
With your weight forward and the ball back, your hands should naturally be positioned slightly ahead of the ball (closer to the target).
- The Look: Look down. Your hands should be slightly ahead of the club head and the ball. This creates a slight forward shaft lean.
- The Result: This hand position pre-sets the flat-wristed, “hands-leading” impact position we established in Section 1. It lowers the club’s loft slightly, meaning you use the club’s design (the bounce) to lift the ball, not a desperate flip of your wrists.
The whole setup is designed to create a “descending blow”, a slight downward hit that traps the ball cleanly against the turf before taking a tiny divot (or simply brushing the grass) after the ball. By adopting this aggressive, weight-forward, ball-back setup, you take almost all the risk out of the chip shot.
3. Using Your Shoulders, Not Your Arms, for Consistency:
Now that we have the perfect setup (weight forward, hands ahead, Section 2) and the firm wrist (Section 1), we need to execute the swing. When I was struggling, I generated the chipping power with my arms and hands, trying to “hit” the ball, which made my contact totally inconsistent.
The most important concept in chipping is that the swing should be powered by a simple shoulder rock, creating a smooth, repetitive motion like a grandfather clock. I call this the Pendulum Swing.
The Quiet Arms and the Locked Triangle:
For a good chip, your arms, chest, and the club should feel like one single, solid unit, a locked triangle pointing down at the ball.
- The Setup: Lock your arms gently. The hands are only holding the club; they are not active.
- The Swing: The motion is initiated by your shoulders rocking back and forth like a pendulum. Your chest rotates slightly. Your hands and arms simply move along with the rotation of your shoulders and torso.
This quiet, arm-free swing is crucial because it keeps the bottom of your swing arc (the place where the club hits the ground) totally consistent. If you introduce arm speed or wrist flips, that low point becomes chaotic, leading to those random fat or thin shots.
Controlling Distance by Swing Length:
The beauty of the pendulum swing is that you don’t need to try and hit the ball harder to make it go farther. You control the distance purely by how far back you swing the pendulum.
I learned to use a simple Clock Face Analogy for the backswing:
- 10-Yard Chip (Short): Swing back so your hands reach the 7 o’clock position. The swing is short, like a putt.
- 20-Yard Chip (Medium): Swing back so your hands reach the 9 o’clock position. This gives a bit more momentum.
- 30-Yard Chip (Long): Swing back up to the 10 o’clock position.
Crucially, the follow-through should match the backswing (or be slightly longer). If you swing back to 9 o’clock, you follow through to 3 o’clock. This matching motion keeps the tempo smooth and the rhythm consistent, which is the key to distance control.
The goal is to let the club do the work. The setup gives the club the right angle, and the pendulum swing ensures that angle is delivered consistently. You are simply rocking the club back and forth with your shoulders, no hitting, no lifting, and no sudden wrist movements.
4. Using the Bounce of the Club to Avoid “Thins” and “Duffs.”
You can do the Clock Face Grip (Section 1) and the Pendulum Swing (Section 3) perfectly, but if you don’t understand how your club hits the turf, you’ll still struggle. This secret is about the club’s design, specifically, the difference between the leading edge and the bounce.
When I hit a fat shot, I learned I was hitting the ground with the leading edge, the clubface’s sharp, lowest part, first. That sharp edge digs into the grass like a shovel, stopping the club head dead and sending the ball nowhere.
The trick is to use the bounce of the club.
Understanding the Bounce:
If you flip your wedge upside down, you’ll see the bounce, it’s the thick, rounded back edge on the bottom of the club. That rounded edge is designed to hit the turf, slide, and bounce the club forward, preventing it from digging.
The best chippers use the bounce, not the leading edge, to interact with the ground. It feels like the club is gliding across the grass, not cutting into it.
The “Duff” Prevention Hack:
How do you guarantee you use the bounce and not the leading edge?
- Keep the Shaft Leaning Forward: This goes back to our setup (Section 2). Because your hands are ahead of the ball, the club shaft is slightly tilted toward the target. This forward lean actually exposes the bounce to the turf.
- Maintain the Lead Wrist: The firm, flat left wrist (the Clock Face Grip) ensures that the shaft lean is maintained through impact. If you flip your wrist, the club head passes your hands, and the sharp leading edge becomes exposed, causing the club to dig and resulting in a duff (fat shot) or a thin (skulled shot).
The feeling should be that the club hits the ball, and then the bounce gently brushes or grazes the turf right after, propelling the club forward toward the target. There’s almost no resistance.
The Shallow Angle:
By combining the hands-ahead setup with the shoulder-rock swing, you create a shallow angle of attack. This means the club descends into the ball gently, rather than steeply.
If you swing steeply, you increase the chance of the leading edge digging. If you swing shallowly, like a pendulum, you ensure the club’s bounce interacts smoothly with the turf, even if you miss the exact center of the ball by a hair. This simple understanding of how the club interacts with the ground gave me tremendous confidence to hit down and through the ball without fear of chunking it.
5. Why I Chip Everything with One Club (My 56-Degree):
When I first started taking chipping seriously, I thought I needed a different club for every single shot. If the pin was close, I’d use my Lob Wedge (60 degrees). If it were far, I’d use my Pitching Wedge (46 degrees). I was constantly trying to “get cute,” and the result was pure chaos. I had no consistency or feel.
The mistake was simple: I was changing the tool instead of changing the motion.
My coach gave me a brilliant challenge: The One-Club Rule. For an entire month, I was only allowed to chip with one club, regardless of the distance or the lie. This was the single biggest breakthrough for my short game feel.
Why Simplicity Creates Feel:
Golf is a game of repetition. If you chip with five different clubs, you have five different swings, five different feels, and five different results. If you chip with one club, you master one feeling of contact.
When you use the One-Club Rule, you gain incredible control over the most important element: The length of the swing (the pendulum motion from Section 3).
- Long Chip (More Roll): I use my 56-degree Sand Wedge. I use a bigger swing (10 o’clock to 2 o’clock) to get the ball higher and farther, but the feeling of impact remains exactly the same.
- Short Chip (Less Roll): I use the same 56-degree Sand Wedge. I use a shorter swing (7 o’clock to 1 o’clock).
My tempo stays the same, my setup stays the same, and my wrist stays firm. Only the length of the pendulum changes to control the distance.
Why I Choose the 56-Degree (Sand Wedge):
I settled on my 56-degree Sand Wedge as my dedicated chipping club for most situations.
- Versatility: It has enough loft to get the ball up and over short grass or rough patches right next to the green.
- Bounce: Critically, the Sand Wedge has a generous bounce (Section 4). This thick bottom makes it highly forgiving. If I hit the ground slightly behind the ball, the bounce glides over the turf, reducing the chance of that devastating “fat” shot.
By mastering one club, I stopped using my brain to calculate distances and started using my feel to measure the swing length. My success rate soared because my mind was clear and my swing was a consistent, repetitive motion.
6. My Best Hack:
We’ve covered everything in theory: the quiet wrist, the weight-forward setup, and the shoulder pendulum. But sometimes you need a simple, physical feeling to make all those concepts click in the course.
My favorite instructor gave me a drill that instantly stopped me from using my arms and hands and forced me to chip with my chest and shoulders, just like a pendulum. I call it the “Tuck the Shirt” Drill.
The Drill: Tying the Arms to the Body:
The core problem in chipping is the disconnect, the arms and hands move faster than the body, which leads to scooping (Section 1). This drill forces the arms and body to move as one unit (the “locked triangle” from Section 3).
- The Setup: Stand in your narrow, weight-forward chipping stance (Section 2).
- The Tuck: Take the top part of the towel (or a scorecard, or even just your shirt sleeve) and tuck it tightly under your trail armpit (right armpit for right-handed players).
- The Swing: Try to execute your normal Pendulum Swing (Section 3).
What Happens When You Swing:
- If you chip correctly (Shoulder Rock): The towel/card will stay tucked under your armpit throughout the entire swing and follow-through. Your arm stays connected to your torso, and the power comes from the turn of your shoulders.
- If you make a mistake (Arm/Hand Power): If you try to hit the ball with your arms, or if your wrist flips (scooping), your trail elbow will separate from your body, and the towel will drop out immediately.
This drill provides instant, physical feedback on the course. If the towel drops, you know you are swinging incorrectly and using too much arm and wrist action. If it stays tucked, you know your shoulders are rocking, and your contact will be solid.
I recommend practicing with this drill until the feeling of the arms staying connected to the chest becomes automatic. The simpler the motion, the more dependable the result.
Conclusion:
Chipping doesn’t have to be complicated. Forget the big, powerful swings. Remember that a chip is just a big putt: The setup is aggressive (weight forward, ball back), the motion is simple (a shoulder pendulum), and the goal is to hit the ball first using a firm wrist (the Clock Face Grip). Master these few simple, repeatable movements, and you will quickly see those frustrating big numbers disappear from your scorecard.
FAQs:
1. What causes me to hit “fat” shots (chunks)?
Wrist breakdown (“scooping”) at impact, causing the club head to hit the ground first.
2. Where should I put my weight in the chipping setup?
70 to 80 percent of your weight should be on your front foot, fixed through the swing.
3. How should the swing motion feel?
Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, powered by the rocking of your shoulders.
4. How do I control the distance of my chip?
Only by changing the length of the pendulum swing (e.g., 7 o’clock vs. 10 o’clock backswing).
5. What part of the club should hit the turf?
The bounce (the rounded back edge) should brush the turf, not the sharp leading edge.
6. What is the goal of the “Tuck the Shirt” drill?
To keep the trail arm connected to the chest, forcing the use of the shoulders and eliminating arm/wrist movement.