This NEW Pitching Technique Works Instantly (No Practice Needed)

There is nothing more frustrating than finding yourself 20-30 yards short of the green and then knifing the ball over the back or fatting it just in front of you. It's so frustrating because it looks like a relatively simple shot. I'm going to teach you two things in this video, just two. Focus on these and you'll start to hit your pitch shots much more effectively. Now these are pitch shots rather than chip shots so we're talking this 20-30 yard range and this is an area that has never been a strength of mine but I've been working on these two things. It's really helping my game. I know it can help yours. So the first thing would be where are you relative to the ball? And we're talking setup, backswing, impact. I want you to think about your belt buckle and your sternum. I want those to be this side of the ball at setup, end of the backswing and at impact. Now I probably should give a shout out to Joseph Mayer. You might follow him on socials. Great coach based out the US. I really like what he's doing in the short game. He's talking a little bit about what we're going to discuss in this video. I say it's really helped my game as well so credit to him. You can see I've got a light stick on the ground. That's obviously just there representing where my ball is and I want to have my belt, as I said, target side of the ball. So how do I do that? Well there's two ways I can do it. I can either push my butt forwards or I can move the ball back relative to me and it makes sense that we do a little bit of both because if we only do one we've got to do that one thing quite extreme. So you can see that I've got that ball closer to my trail heel than my lead heel. It's back in my stance. Then I'm going to use my knees and hips. I'm going to put some weight forward. So you can see that my belt buckle is now significantly in front of that golf ball and then provided I feel pretty stacked, i.e. not tilting with my shoulders, that's also going to put my sternum in front of the golf ball. So you can see that's around here somewhere. So why am I doing that? Well really what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to build in the low point of my swing being target side of the ball. It's the same as a 7-iron. If you can get the low point target side of the ball, you're likely to hit the ball before the ground. That's going to guarantee you a strike. So here's my setup. I feel relatively level shoulders, belt buckle forward, sternum forward, ball slightly back and naturally that's going to give me some amount of club shaft lean. So I want to now think about, in my mind, you're going to have your own number, what percent does that feel like I've got on my lead side? Doesn't really matter what it is, but I just want you to put a number to that. I'm going to say 75. Very simply, when I make a backswing and I stop, I want to feel like I'm the same. I don't want to, from here, think about the fact that I've got 60, think about the fact that I want this height and then start to move into positions which might feel like they give me those things. I want to go, what does this feel like? Almost take a mental snapshot. It feels 75. So when I make a backswing, it's 75. So what does that mean? It means my sternum, my belt are still in front of the ball. Then we just need to make sure that we are turning and extending through. When we extend through, it allows us to move the club more up away from the ground. Again, what we don't want to do from here is undo all that good work by leaning back again to try and get that height because we're going to knife it right across the back of the green. So this is the first thing I want you to think about. Where are you relative to the ball? Forward, forward, forward impact, and then you're standing up. Pretty good, just roll a little bit past. The second part of this is there is something called swing plane and the angle around your body which you swing the club. It's called vertical swing plane. The easiest way to think about this, driver, it's longer, you stand further away. That's got a lower swing plane than something like a wedge, which has got a more vertical swing plane. So very often the club length and the setup dictates that. But we can influence that with what we do. So think of it logically. As we start to lower the swing plane, it becomes more difficult to be able to hit down on the golf ball. So I appreciate this is really extreme, but if I was to go so low with my swing plane that the club hardly left the ground, it would be almost impossible for me to hit down that golf ball because the club is coming from so low. The opposite to that would be if we got the club, you know, sort of hanging this way. We had a vertical swing plane. You can see how the club has got a lot more up and down in it naturally. If we can work towards more vertical, we should be able to strike the ball better. So there's two ways we do that. Number one, we adjust our setup. We adjust our setup by standing in closer to the golf ball. That means raising the handle up, getting that club closer to vertical and moving it a little bit closer. So for many of you, this will feel as if you're crowding the golf ball. It will feel as if you're in close and you're almost a little bit cramped, but that's absolutely fine. That's probably the feeling you want to be looking for here. But even from that setup, we can use the body, use the hands and bring the club very much inside and still have a quite low swing plane. When you do that, you're very likely to hit the ground before the ball. Strike is going to be very difficult. And the club often moves very much out to the right of the target. And then what do you do? You start flipping your hands at it to try and get it back and you can start shooting them across the green and fattening them and just all sorts of shots. If any of those sound familiar, swing plane might be something you need to work on. So once you're stood in close, all I really want you to do is give yourself a reference. Really, really simple. Just put something in the ground. That's an alignment stick. Once I'm in close, give or take, it needs to be around about at the same angle as my golf club. It's not an exact science. And it just gives me a little reference that I want to be working my club this side of it, not this side of it. Now, for many of you, when you do this, it will feel as if you're chopping across the golf ball high to low, out to in. That's absolutely fine. If that's what it feels like, great. That's probably not bad. The opposite, which is this low in to out feeling, is terrible for the short game. So if I was to hit a shot now, even from that good setup position, it's almost impossible. I mean, the result might not be too bad, but I caught the ground early and had to flip at it. In fact, it's not a bad result at all, but I wouldn't want to be doing that every single time because that's not going to be consistent. That feels difficult. So now if we do the opposite, if we take that same setup, we've obviously still got our checkpoints and face on, but this time I'm going to work the club up. I'm going to feel it's working more out to in and we're able to hit much, much better shots. That was a much, much better strike. There's that low spinning shot. That's a much, much better result. So that does feel a little bit out to in to me, but if you do that, you've got fresh grooves. These are brand new wedges. I've got premium golf balls. You get those low spinners. Do you know what? They're really great fun to hit. If you've never hit one, you're going to start hitting them if you can start to work body in front of the ball, more up and down with your swing plane. Those are the two things which are really going to level up your pitching.