Shaving strokes off your handicap often comes down to what you do inside 50 yards, and a reliable chipping game is your fastest ticket to lower scores. Forget complicated mechanics, consistent chipping is about a simple, repeatable setup and a pendulum-like motion that you can trust under pressure. This guide lays out a step-by-step framework to transform your chipping from a source of anxiety to one of the biggest strengths in your golf game.
Before we build your new technique, let's get one thing straight: a chip is not a miniature full swing. This is the single biggest mistake amateur golfers make around the greens. They try to use their normal swing, just smaller, which leads to all sorts of inconsistency - fat shots, thin shots, and a total lack of distance control. A chip shot is designed to be a low-trajectory shot that gets the ball on the green as quickly as possible and lets it roll out toward the hole like a putt. Think of it as a low-risk, high-reward play. It’s all about minimizing airtime and maximizing roll time. The enemy of good chipping is any excess motion - things like wrist hinge and trying to "help" or "lift" the ball into the air. Good chippers let the club's built-in loft do the work. They focus on making predictable, clean contact and letting the ball react like it's supposed to.
Our entire goal is a low-maintenance shot that you have full confidence in. Here we focus on how to use a single basic chipping motion, changing clubs as needed, to control how far the ball goes. Let’s build your new, bulletproof chipping motion from the ground up.
More than 80% of chipping success is locked in before you even start the swing. If your setup is correct, a bad shot becomes very difficult to hit. A proper setup puts you in an ideal position - one where the only thing left to do is make a simple rocking motion with your shoulders. Get these fundamentals right and you'll immediately see more consistent contact.
Forget the wide, athletic stance of a full swing. In chipping, you want your feet close together, almost touching, a club-head's width apart at most. Why? A narrow stance severely restricts your ability to sway your hips and lower body off the ball, which is a major cause for hitting your chip shots fat or thin. By narrowing up, you're essentially forcing your swing to become a simple rotation of your chest and shoulders, removing the unruly moving parts.
This is arguably the most important element. You need to favor your lead foot (your left foot for a right-handed player) by setting about 60-70% of your body weight on it before you do anything else, and it must feel like it's there throughout the shot as well. You'll know you're doing it right when your lead shoulder is located directly over your lead foot. To complement your center of gravity being forward, your hands must also be well ahead. The butt of the club shaft should point to your left hip's inseam and line so you see the shaft angled forward toward the target.
Doing these two things - weight forward and hands forward - accomplishes a few critical things. It presets our swing axis, guarantees that your club is traveling downwards when it strikes the ball, making solid ball-first contact almost unavoidable, and effectively "de-lofts" the club just a bit, which creates the lovely low-flying, running chip shot we're after.
Where should you position the golf ball in your stance? To make it easy, position the ball in the back of your stance, just inside your trail foot's ankle. Similar to pushing our hands and weight forward, this promotes a downward strike to the ball and ensures the club's base finds the ball first, prior to the turf. Think of your swing as a circle, by putting the ball in the back side, you're making sure that the club is on the downward section of the swing as it connects, instead of the upward portion which creates mishits.
By putting all those pieces of the puzzle together in your setup - with a narrow stance, weight ahead, hands forward, and ball positioned back - you have basically 'baked in' the correct impact into the setup. The next steps become far easier as a result of doing this.
With a solid setup established, the actual motion for reliable chipping becomes surprisingly simple. Our objective is to eliminate any independent hand and arm movements. Instead, it's all about building and maintaining a connection among all the body parts throughout this shot process and feeling like the whole system is integrated together and moving in 'one-piece motion'.
Look in a mirror in your golf posture addressing the ball. You will see a distinct triangular shape formed between your two shoulders and hands' position. The secret to simple chipping lies within maintaining that triangle's form constant during the chipping stroke from takeoff and back - and even more when it’s coming through from contact with the ball forward to the completion of the shot. It's a very simple concept to grasp once you start seeing it from that perspective - the motion is not so much a swing with the club as rocking and rotating the triangle back and forth. The hands and the wrists just go along for the ride on the moving triangle.
Seriously, one of the absolute best mental cues that I give my coaching students is that you should chip very much as if you were putting. It is the identical motion type, just slightly larger because it's a bigger, heavier tool than a putter. But just imagine the same identical, pendulum rock-back and forth through your shoulders with minimum wrist activity. The engine driving these chip shots should be small rotations from your torso - a slight turn of the torso and chest as you complete the backswing and then a slight turn through so they face the target more after you finish. This body-controlled action is much more reliable and easier to reproduce consistently compared with any method involving wrist manipulations.
From backswing length to the finished follow-through, you should keep thinking 'symmetric', so however far the golf club travels in the backswing, it travels through the follow-through, keeping the swings always balanced. Just after the contact moment with the ball, ensure your hands remain well forward of the club head. Resist the powerful urge inside to scoop or flip at the golf ball. Keep rotating your body through, and that club will stay low as it should and finish low as well, with the club head pointing directly down the target line you've chosen.
One of the things that makes golf so much more difficult for the average golfer is that they try to control their distances with different swing lengths instead of just swapping the club in their hands. The beauty in perfecting your 'one-piece' chipping motion is that it can apply the very same small swing with a range of different clubs and produce predictable distance results every time. When we have our fundamental setup and motion solidified, this step becomes the easiest part.
Here is a straightforward guideline for what club to use and where the chip shot comes up:
By allowing the club to do all the work, you've removed the guesswork from your chipping game. You are just executing your same reliable, consistent chipping swing without being tempted to tinker with your swing technique on the go. This is a major step towards developing more consistent results and ultimately lower scoring.
Knowing the theory is one thing, but to get the moves and feel into your muscle memory and make it second nature, you have to practice them with purpose and intention. Here are some simple yet powerful drills for dialing in your chipping technique:
Place a bathroom towel flat just a few inches ahead of where your chips are going to be landing on the green. Now your only goal is to land each of the chips just beyond the towel onto the green. It's a very simple drill that forces you to strike the ball crisply and at a downward angle with some forward shaft lean. The setup and execution reinforce that running, low-trajectory shot you are trying to hit. Anytime you try to scoop your chip shots, the ball is going to fall short and land on the towel, which means this drill is a good self-coaching tool on its own.
This is a great drill for really solidifying that "one-piece take-away" and feel of your body controlling the swing. Just grab your chipping club with only one hand - your lead arm (that's the left arm for any right-handed golfer). Then you are going to hit a series of small chips. What you'll find is that it's really difficult to scoop or flip your wrists with just that one arm. You're forced to rock your shoulders and keep the whole triangle structure intact, feeling how the arm should add to the body, and stay connected is a key feeling that good chippers have.
Mastering the art of chipping isn't about some secret move, it's about committing to simple steps and motions. By keeping your stance narrow, leaning your weight and hands toward the target, and by using your body instead of your wrists, you can develop a repeatable chipping stroke that will save you strokes and relieve pressure from the rest of your game.
Some things are simplified with personal guidance. When you find yourself on course looking at a complicated lie and uncertain of how the shot will react, getting an expert analysis can make all the difference. This is exactly where our tools can help. Caddie
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