Pitching is probably the hardest part of the short game. It has the largest gap in distance and requires the most feel. If you have a a 50 yard pitch shot over a bunker, it requires both distance control and distance control. This is one of the most practiced parts of the golf game by the Professional Golfers we see playing on the PGA Tour.
They practice this part of the game so much that the expect to be inside 15 feet almost every time they are within 100 yards. If not they are extremely pissed.
Where if we just hit the green we are relatively happy. Funny how that works right? But then again they are playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So exactly what do the pro’s do to be so good at their pitch shots? There are some basic set-up that you master so you can have consistent out comes. Their next part of pitchin is their mental strenght. So please read my post: mental game for more information.
So the basics are to aligned a little bit left of parallel left, so your stance is slightly open, have the ball in the middle of the stance, open the club face, and swing back on the line of your feet and not the line to the target. I’m about to go into more explanation of each of these.
First:
Parallel left is where you line your feet parallel to the target line. So it should look something like this. | |
They are both straight and parallel to each other which is what we want. The line on the right would be the clubface aiming at the target, and the line on the left would be your feet line which should be parallel to the target line.
This is what we want for the full swing, but for the pitch shot we want to have our feet slightly left of parallel left, which is open. | So it should look something like that.
Second:
We want the ball in the middle of our stance and weight on our front foot so we can swing down on the ball and hit it on the descent and not the upswing. This is critical for consitent contact shot after shot after shot.
Third:
We want the clubface to be slightopen so the ball actually goes towards the target instead of left. Since we are swinging on the plane of our feet line instead of the target line. So if we open our stance and clubface, this will create a straight shot that is higher and softer.
And there you go, there are the basics for that all Professionals do to have a successful pitching game.