3 Golf Shots that will Lower Your Scores Around the Green

Hey everybody, Danny Ward here. Thanks for joining us this week. I've got three shots that if you learn them, it could save you a load of shots on your round of golf. The first one is going to be a chip and run. How do you get that ball up onto the green, over this little bit of rough and running out and judging that distance each and every single time? But sometimes for shot number two, you might not have the luxury of chip and run. You might need to get some backspin on your shots because the flag's really close to the edge of the green. You need to loft it up and stop it. What's the difference in the technique? Because there is one. We'll go through that in shot number two. Shot number three, you don't have the luxury of any backspin. You need to lob it maybe over a bunker and you need that ball literally landing and almost stopping dead. How do you play that one? We call that the lob shot. Those three shots we're going to cover in this week's golf lesson. Now before I get into the video, look, if you're new to the channel, it's one of your first videos of mine, please consider subscribing. Just press that little bell button, next subscribe button, you get notified every time I release a video just like this one. And you never have to remember a thing, I always put a free downloadable practice plan in the description box below so you can just take away and enjoy. Okay, shot number one, the chip and run. Now, the chip and run, why are we chipping and running? Well, look, if we were closer to the green, we might even use our putter. But we've got a decent amount of rough grass to grow over here. If we use our putter, it could bounce off in any direction, costing us direction and distance control. So all we do is we take a club that's going to loft over this grass and then release beautifully out to the hole. We don't need a high shot, we just need enough height to get over this rough ground. To do that, I've got an 8-iron here. The second thing, once you've chosen your club, is we realize, look, you don't need loads of power in this shot. We don't need lots of rotation because it's only a gentle shot. So we can take advantage of that and we can almost make this chipping action almost like a pendulum. Pendulum means it's very, very accurate. So what I want you to do is you take your 8-iron, put it nice and vertical here, put the ball position towards the back of your stance, and then just allow your arms just to hang. Now what this does is when your arms hang in here, we can now simply swing backwards and through. A little bit like putting, but it's slightly different. I'm going to go into that in a second. A little bit like you're putting action here. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. A little bit of weight on the lead side. Now, I'm allowing my arms to hang because I see one of the problems golfers make here is that they have a lot of flex in their arms. Now the problem is if that flex comes out during the swing, you could end up fatting it. So simply allow the arms to hang, nice tall motion here, so that when your arms are hanging, you're only just brushing the ground. Once you've done that, the one little ingredient I want you to get for now is this. Bring in some feel, listen for the sound of the ground, but I want to see not this long, slow motion, because if I was going to throw a ball to you now, and I was just going to do this, I wouldn't go like this. There would be a rhythm to this, wouldn't they, right? So look at this here. There'd be a rhythm to this. Now from here, I want you to have that rhythm too. One, two. Okay, so nice and vertical. Hang, let the arms hang, ball back in the stance, and let it just release outlook to the hole, right? So that's your chip and rum. Now let's have a look at what you need if you need some spin, get some backspin on the shots. Okay, right, shot number two requires backspin. We've got a lot of rough ground to go over, and then the problem with this green, it all slopes away from us. So if I did try and play a chip and run, it could bounce off this rough ground, but more importantly, it's going to release too far away from the hole. So I want the ball to loft up. So the first thing I've done is I've chosen a 60 degree lob wedge. Now, once I've done that, I then need to realize that it's a different type of shot. We actually need more power in this shot, because to get spin, we need a bit of club head speed. This club needs to slide under the ball with some speed. So I can't have this vertical shaft position now. I need to have it a little bit more angled. The next thing we need to realize is we need to make sure that the type of ground contact that we've got, we want to keep the loft on the club through impact, and we need to glide through the ground. So we need to set up to help that. The ball position, therefore, gets put forward in our stance, and as opposed to getting a shaft lean at the start, we want to now get the shaft very, very neutral, very straight, because if we can do that, we've got the maximum amount of loft on, plus we get to use the all-important bounce of the club here, this section here. If we can use that, we simply glide through the shot. We don't get that horrible fat shot and thin shot. So once you've done that and you've got the idea of setup and what we're trying to do, we want to return the shaft to neutral, the question is, how do you do it? Well, let's see what I want you to do. Good image here. Take your trail arm, bicep, just simply rest it on your chest, and all you're going to do now is this. You're not going to move the arm back by swinging the arm back, because that's going to swing the club out of control. What I want you to do is you want to have some way of guiding this momentum so it doesn't go all over the place. So keep your trail arm just connected to your body. That's if you start to pivot your body backwards and forwards, like this and like this. So basically, as you pivot your body, your arm's simply following. Now put your trail arm on the club as a single motion. One, two. Nothing more complicated than that. Problem is, that alone, it looks a bit wooden. So now you've got the guide and the arc beautifully. All you do now is you start to feel that guiding the momentum of the club. Very, very important, because a lot of people, when you're developing your chipping action or pitching action, you do it, like we said before, you are throwing like this. That will never get the ball up to the hole. We want to create, look, some pop, some rhythm. That's going to get the ball up. The length of the action hasn't changed. Look, just the rhythm. So yes, we want this guiding, but that won't lead to just a perfect, perfect pitch shot. We need to make sure that we add some momentum to this motion, backwards and forwards. Now apply your lead hand. Do exactly the same thing. I've got it controlled here, look. Grip to pocket, grip to pocket, and it's all under control with some momentum. That means we're going to be, hopefully, a lot more consistent. Let's have a look at this in action. So I get myself set. Let's see if we can get a little bit of spin. A little bit long, but see how that one just stopped up beautifully. It didn't release. It probably released maybe a couple of feet. Really, really nice. So we've done the actual chip shot. We've done the pitch shot. We've managed to get, now look, a little bit of backspin. Let's now move on to step number three, or shot number three, the most difficult one out of all of them. Okay, shot number three. Look at this. We've got no green to work. We've got to get this ball up high, landing soft, barely any roll at all to get this ball anywhere near the flag. Now here's the alteration I want you to make from the standard pitch shot number two. I want you to, we've got a 60 degree lob wedge. I want you to open the club face. Then I want you to grip it. I then want you to, we want to somehow keep the loft on this face. I want you to now lower the handle and widen your stance. By getting low, it enables us, look, to work through the shot and almost slide it underneath, right? We're going to have the ball position forward. Now we're in the rough here. We get different types of lies. When the ball's perched up, I want you to feel like you're swinging quite level with the ground. If the ball's nestled down, all you do with this is you make sure that you put a bit more pressure on your lead side so that the club naturally enters the ground a bit steeper. That's the only thing. When you're swinging, I want you to imagine this. If I take my trail hand here, we're keeping the loft on the face on the way back, look. We're keeping the loft on the way through and all the way through. Now I'm going to do it, first of all, the simple way, which is just going to maybe pop it up. Then I'll show you how Phil Mickelson plays it to get the really high lob shot. Ball's forward, nice low hands. I've just got to be confident with this. Just literally slide it to here, slide it to there, allow the bounce still to work backwards and forwards. A little bit left, but do you know what? It stopped. It's on the green. I've got now a chance to make my par. Now, let's show you how Phil Mickelson would play. He would be a little bit more bolder than this. He would play a little bit more aggressive. This basically gives you more elevation and more stoppage. The same principle applies. We're going to lower our hands, still take the 60-degree wedge. In fact, look, I'm actually using Phil's 60-degree wedge here. Actually, it's a PM grind. All I'm going to do here is make a fuller motion. I'm literally going to go fuller in the swing. Now, people get scared of this. You might get scared of this because, oh, it's going to go too far. As long as you throw the bounce into the ground, the ball will bounce, sorry, the club will bounce and pop the ball airborne. Nice and committed. Really commit to this shot. Nice and simple. Watch this. Look at the difference. Now, that one there literally has rolled one foot, two feet maybe. That and look at that. We've now got a really good chance again to make par. Now, it's entirely up to you which one you go for. Try the easy one maybe to start off with just to develop the sense of using this bounce. Then move on to obviously maybe the Phil Mickelson one to show off to all your mates. So I really hope you enjoyed this little kind of three-shot series here. So chip and run. We can take advantage of a nice vertical shaft. Let your arms hang down into position here. Just swing the club backwards and forwards. Make sure you've got a popping action. With the pitching motion, similar principles. Make sure you've got some kind of rotation back, rotation through. You're controlling this motion. Hand to pocket on the backswing. Hand to pocket on the thrusting. Just simply take your time. And finally, the Phil Mickelson lob shot. Lower your hands for loft. Get the ball forward here. Keep the loft on here. Keep the loft on here. Feel that momentum of the club going backwards and forwards. Backwards and forwards. And if you really want to be brave, just make sure you fully commit and you'll get more height and the ball will stop much, much quicker. So I really hope you enjoyed this training. If you did, give it a thumbs up. Maybe share it with one of your friends who could do with also saving a few extra shots around their golf course. But remember, if you're new to the channel, there's a free downloadable practice guide in the description box below so you never have to remember a thing. And of course, look, come and join the community by pressing that subscribe button if you haven't already. But until next week, have a great golfing week.