Keep your connection

One of the most common problems club golfers experience in the short game is inconsistency of contact with their mid-range pitch shots.

Although these golfers are more than capable of striking the occasional pitch shot well, all too often they will hit the ground before the ball (only moving the ball a few yards) or contact the middle of the ball (sending it scurrying across the green).

This inconsistency can lead to high numbers, anxiety and incredible amounts of frustration.

Let’s discuss a way in which a visualisation and feel exercise can help improve your contact.

The two necessary ingredients for a correctly struck pitch shot are descending pressure and acceleration.

In a pitch shot, the acceleration should be achieved by a firm, sustained upper body rotation towards the target. In my experience, the two aforementioned bad pitch shots tend to occur because our upper body slows down through impact and our hands ‘flick’ in an effort to help the ball into the air.

The combination of these two errors makes it very difficult to contact the ball in the same place each time, resulting in said inconsistency.

In order to improve your contact, let’s visualise that you are practicing a 40 yard pitch shot on the edge of a very high cliff and you are hitting the balls down into the sea. On this particular occasion, there is also a very strong wind blowing out in the direction of the sea. Finally, imagine that you have two winning lottery tickets (one placed at the top of each inner arm) and your job is to hit shots without the tickets blowing away!

Naturally, you will try to keep your arms pressed tightly into the side of your chest throughout your swing in an effort to keep the tickets safe. This will result in good connection. If you practice this, you will notice that a slight rotation of your upper body away from the target will produce your backswing and a sustained rotation of your upper body towards the target will produce your through swing.

If you ensure that you maintain this good connection throughout your pitch shots, you will notice that your hands are less likely to ‘flick’ at the ball as the club will be accelerating nicely through the impact zone.

Now that your hands are less active at impact and the bigger muscles are in control of the acceleration, you should see an immediate improvement in the consistency of your contact.

Improving the connection between your arms and body is a very quick way of encouraging better contact in your pitch shots. However, it is very easy to become engrossed with technical aspects of the golf swing and eventually experience ‘paralysis by analysis’ where your mind becomes ‘clogged up’ with too much information. Therefore, it is important that you experiment with visualisation and kinaesthetic drills and see if they work for you.

If you would like any more information on the content of today’s article or are interested in golf tuition, please feel free to contact me on 39761873 or email mwsc23@hotmail.com

Happy Golfing!