Golf Short Game: Ultimate Guide to Improving Your Short Game

For the majority of us, the short game (and putting) is where we hit most of our shots, so it is imperative that we understand how to improve and develop this aspect of our games.

There is an interesting mental dynamic to the short game where we expect to be better at these shots simply because they are closer to the pin, but this expectation can make us too aggressive and too harsh on ourselves.

When covering the ‘short game’, there are a lot of bases to consider as it is by far the most varied aspect of the game. For the purpose of this article, I will be touching upon chip shots, bunker play and pitching. Putting is such a big topic that it needs its own article to be honest, so please see our guide with putting tips for help with that area of your game!

Chipping

This section will actually cover a few subtopics within chipping (ie. flop shots, chip and run, tight lies etc) but there are a couple of overarching principles that I find help me with my short game. The main one being to keep it as simple as possible, both technically and strategically.

Consistency is more achievable when you make things more straightforward and, luckily for you, consistency is one of the keys to improving your scores. You don’t necessarily have to improve your good shots so much, improving your poor shots is often the quickest way to develop your game.

Flop shots

Let’s be honest, these are the Hollywood shots that we all love to pull off, but sometimes they are a bit scary and lead to disaster. If you are not aware, a flop shot is a chip shot with a lot of height, generally played with an open club face and your most lofted wedge. Flop shots will most frequently be used when the pin is close to the edge of the green, or there could be a bunker or other hazard between you and the hole which you need to get it over while stopping the ball quickly. The scary part of a flop shot is that you are putting a lot of speed into the swing relative to how far you want the ball to travel. This means that getting it wrong can be particularly costly.

Common mistakes surrounding flop shots can be to try and ‘lift’ the ball prior to impact. This quite literally means that you are lifting up your torso, head, arms or hands just before hitting the ball. Unfortunately this leads to the most destructive mistake with flop shots, the thin. One of the best keys to remember when playing a flop shot is that you need to “stay down” on it. This means keeping your head and torso down as you hit underneath the ball. Once you have hit the ball you can let your head move through, don’t hold it down too long. The loft on the club is going to do all of the work for you, but you need to get that club underneath the ball.

• Good technique is to keep yourself nice and stable with a wide stance, your knees will be more bent as you want to be lower to the ground with your hands.
• From that point you want to maintain your posture as well as possible while simply rotating back and through.
• You will hinge your wrists as well, but people often overdo this and get too ‘flicky’. It is important to approach a shot like this with confidence and a relaxed belief in what you are doing as you need to give a lot of power and keep speeding up as you get to the ball.
• If you decelerate as you get to the ball, it is not likely to end well, unfortunately.
• As well as that, if you tighten up and feel too nervous, it’s probably not the time to play this shot.

What about the strategy involved with flop shots? Well these are high-risk shots, so you need to be certain of what you are doing and whether it is necessary. It can be easy to overdo the height on a flop shot which makes it unnecessarily difficult to gauge distance.

Sometimes you really don’t need to open the clubface too much, just using your most lofted wedge can be the best way to give yourself a chance to hole a putt. I see some outrageously aggressive plays when the upside is actually only getting the ball to fifteen feet anyway!

So the lesson here is to decide how much risk is worth it.

he more you open the face and the harder you swing, the more risk you are adding, so try and find the best balance between getting the required height without making it too hard on yourself.

Another consideration is your aiming point. Sometimes it might be too aggressive to go directly at the pin; maybe there is very little green to find over there, or even more hazard to go over. In those scenarios it can be advisable to just be a little safer and give yourself a greater margin for error. Aim ten feet to the centre of the green and you will also improve your chances of hitting a good shot because you are less worried about the downside that you are taking on.

It is easy to let a flop shot ruin your hole and potentially get you into trouble for the rest of your round. Try to remember that if you are in a position which requires a high-tariff shot like this, then the percentages do not say that you are likely to get the ball up-and-down. This means that your job is actually to try and plot the route which is likely to give you a chance at an up-and-down, but most importantly a stress free three from that spot. Once you start compounding errors then you are really getting in your own way.

Chip-and-run

This is one of the higher-percentage chip shots and it is important to have this one in your armory. The basic point is that you use a smaller swing with less loft and then the ball will run out like a putt for most of its journey. It is also a good idea to do some calibration training with different clubs so that you understand, for example, how far the ball rolls when you use your 9-iron compared to your 6-iron.

The technique is less fussy than a flop shot and you don’t need to over complicate matters, it is essentially a putting stroke with a bit more freedom.

• The ball position should be closer to your back foot and your hands slightly in front of the club face (this will help you to hit down on the ball and encourage consistent strike).
• You will then find that you have a ‘triangle’ between your shoulders and hands which you want to maintain as you rock your shoulders back and forth.
• I see a lot of amateurs get too ‘stabby’ with these shots, where they sort of stab the club into the back of the ball and it gets caught in the ground, meaning there is no follow through.
• This isn’t a big issue, but I find it causes the ball to come out with too much speed and varied spin, so I prefer to have a smooth follow through.
• If the lie is not looking too good, then you can hit down on the ball a little more in order to guarantee better connection, in which case you are likely to have a stab kind of finish.

The strategy around a chip and run shot is to keep it simple. I quite like to use a formula that goes as follows; I want to land the ball five feet onto the green, so how far will the ball need to run out from that point to get to the hole? Which club will provide that run out, considering how far it will travel in the air? After answering these questions, you should have an idea of one or two clubs that will work out well for this shot. You will not always make the correct decision, but maintaining a consistent decision process will allow you to learn for the next time.

You should also make an effort to read the green like you are hitting a putt. Your ball is exposed to all of the slopes on the green, so don’t just aim at the hole and get annoyed when it follows the slopes away. Get closer to where you want to land the ball and then read the green, adjusting your aim using this information.

Tight-lie shots

I frequently get asked how to approach these shots because they cause genuine anxiety among many amateur players. The good news is that these are actually the easiest and most fun shots to play if you have the correct technique and some confidence. The main cause of anxiety is the fear of fatting or thinning the chip shots off a tight lie. This commonly comes from head movement, but also too much wrist hinge or lifting of the torso and arms.

• When you are chipping from a tight lie, you can use a similar technique to the shoulder rock that you use for a chip and run shot.
• The absolute key is the strike, so the first thing to work on is the consistency in that area. Using more of a pendulum rotation is highly repeatable and does not require much wrist hinge.
• The difference, in comparison, to a chip and run shot is that the ball and hand position is more neutral, quite central in reality.
• If you practice with this shoulder rock motion, you will find that your club is only grazing the ground as you reach the impact point.
• This means that you can rely more consistently on the strike as you have minimized how bad your bad shot will be.
• You still will not strike them all perfectly, but now you should only hit it slightly fat or thin, instead of that one which barely gets past your foot, or the one scurrying over the green.

A good drill to work on your stability and gaining a consistent strike is to stand to the ball with your rear foot bent backwards with your toes touching the ground. You will feel pretty much all of your weight on your lead leg, but try not to tilt too much into this side, just find a good balance. Now you simply try to hit the ball while staying in balance. You will find that you have to rotate your body and shoulders and your lead knee stays stable. This will feel like you are “working around your base”and it is an effective way to help you graze the top of the grass instead of being steep and having inconsistent strike.

As you begin to get more confident with tight lies, you can start playing around with moving the ball further back or forward in your stance, depending on what the shot requires. If you are feeling more nervous or have lost a bit of confidence on the course, then pushing the ball back a bit and holding your hands in front of the ball can help to ease the pressure on your strike.

Another tip is to make the shaft more ‘upright’ or vertical. Essentially you will stand closer to the ball and your hands end up being closer to the ball in terms of eye line. This is helpful for getting the ball to come out a bit ‘softer’ or slower. I use it if I am playing a particularly short shot, or just if it is an extremely tight lie as it helps to avoid the heel of the club digging in. Give this one a practice before you take it on the course though!

Bunker play

In my opinion amateurs do not really understand what they need to be practicing with bunker play, so I very rarely see a higher handicap do any practice here at all. Considering that it is one of the biggest areas of concern for many players, this is a waste of a chance to improve your scoring quite easily. You do not need to be brilliant out of bunkers to lower your scores, I see many amateurs who struggle to get it out or simply do not have an understanding of what technique to use. If you are one of those players, then you can already take a couple of shots off your game by simply understanding how to get it out in a respectable manner.

It can definitely be confusing and daunting to play out of bunkers, not helped by the fact that many bunkers are different and you may be faced with loads of sand, or quite the opposite. As a starter though, you are always trying to hit into the sand around one or two inches behind the ball. If you really struggle with your bunker shots, then don’t worry about being too precise by changing it around, just find a comfortable spot that helps you get the ball out more often than not, and stick to that.

• Your posture for bunker shots is very similar to a flop shot as you want to be lower to the ground with a wider stance and strong legs.
• The club face should be open, but your stance actually shouldn’t be too far open. It was an old-school technique to have the feet way open, but nowadays it is generally considered better to be more neutral to your target.
• It will help you to have your hands lower than if you were addressing the ball for a normal shot, this makes it easier to slide the club underneath the ball.
• There is considerable wrist hinge in a bunker shot as you are trying to generate a lot of speed to punch through that sand and get the sand to push the ball forward.
• Don’t be shy to add wrist hinge while you turn your upper body, then just hit down into your spot behind the ball and continue to your full follow through.

You don’t have to go as extreme as this, but Padraig Harrington plays his bunker shots with his weight almost entirely on his lead side. I personally play them with probably an 80:20 ratio of weight favoring my lead side. This is because the loft on the club and the descending blow into the sand will lift that ball up for you. I’m not suggesting that you adopt such a strong front foot preference yourself, but I would encourage you to favor that side if anything. Once you start tilting backwards or being stuck on your back foot, the club will bounce off of the sand in front of the ball and you will hit the ball on its equator!

I can’t emphasize enough how unsuccessful it will be to try and lift the ball out of the bunker. You are far better off hitting too steeply down into the ball, than trying to pick it off the top and lift it up. If you get the chance to practice your technique here then you can develop real confidence with how hard you can hit into the sand. This allows you to avoid trying to be too precise behind the ball, plus it’s more fun to give it some welly.

Pitching

When it comes to pitching I would say that there is an imbalance with expectations among a lot of amateurs. We can watch the PGA Tour golf on TV and think that they all hit it to five feet every time, but that simply is not the case. I think that players can get a little lazy and too aggressive when it comes to their pitch shots.

Assuming that, as it is closer to the hole, they should be able to hit a good shot, they aim directly at the pin which creates issues when they do not hit a perfect shot. So the first part of this paragraph is about being smart with where you aim these shots and taking on the shot level that you can confidently execute. If there is a bunker in the way, or a big drop off over the green, then continue to take that into account. Your job is honestly not to get the ball in the hole in two shots from this distance, your job is more likely to be averaging between three and four, so try and strategize with that in mind.

• Technically speaking I see a lot of the old “knee collapse” leading to the biggest strike issues.
• This is when a players’ knees drop on the downswing and cause their entire body to drop, meaning there is suddenly very little space for their arms.
• This causes strike inconsistency as your body tries it’s best to get to the ball with less space to maneuver.
• Considering this swing fault, you basically want your lower body to be pretty quiet throughout a pitch shot. Ideally your knees will not move towards the ball in your downswing, with your lead knee getting out of the way so that you can rotate through the shot.
• It can be a good key to try some practice swings while engaging your core so that you feel what it is like to maintain that torso level.
• In general I find it helps just to focus on my torso and head staying as level as possible during the swing.

In all honesty though my biggest piece of advice to begin with would be to have a better understanding of distance. It will really improve your dispersion if you are confident that you know, relatively well, how far you hit each club.

You can keep this simple, maybe you just have two shots with each wedge such as a full shot and one where you only take the club to shoulder height. We are often too focused on accuracy with golf shots and we say “good shot” to someone’s ball which is headed in a good direction, but then it flies thirty feet past the hole and it is ten feet further away than the playing partner who hit one pin-high but twenty feet left and we all thought it was bang-average. The lesson there is how much you can benefit from getting the distance correct.

It will also help you with your decision making because you can favor the club which might go a little too far when there is a hazard in front of the green, and vice versa if the trouble is long.

Summary

Hopefully you have been able to pick up a couple of technical tips from this article. As I have said previously, I prefer to offer some technical advice based on my experiences within golf rather than trying to outline what a “perfect” technique may look like.

What I would like you to take from this article is that you can make the short game more simplified and hopefully take some stress off in the meantime. It may not sound simple when you read technical advice, but the point is to simplify your technique and make it more repeatable.

I think that a good idea for improving would be to work on a technique which is less complicated and have a strategy which is more conservative. If you take those ideas with you as you practice and go on the course, then I believe you will start to see improvements in your consistency. With that comes the confidence and then you can really get going and start looking into more advanced technical aspects of the short game!

Good luck and thanks for reading!