How to Improve Pitching Technique in Golf

How to Improve Pitching Technique in Golf
Now from here, I am going to talk about pitching. Basically just the shot in between a full swing and a chip. Same idea here; you want to have a little less lower body movement, little less moving parts but maintaining of course that accelerationI keep talking about. You could probably guess by now that the only changes for me is to hit this green flag versus the purple, another 50 yards down. The only difference is going to be the length of my back swing. If I can maintain that slow smooth stroke, this shot here to go up by the green flag, the speed of my body should be fairly similar. Only thing that changed, was the length of my back swing. It made the ball go 60 yards further. For this shot, as long as you maintain that acceleration, that is the key. As soon as you decelerate, which is a word I don't even like to use, as soon as you decelerate, all bets are off. Suddenly whatever I do or whatever mechanics I have, whatever tempo I have, suddenly gone. It doesn't matter any longer. Now you are just hoping for that, hoping for that lucky shot. But set up here is fairly similar to a full string. The only difference is I like to have it one to maybe 2 inches behind center. What I mean by that, let; stand right here. I'm just going to put the ball al ittle further back in my stance, maintaing your hands in front of the ball at all times of course. You may have seen people hit this a flop shot, okay. This is a very hard thing to do. A lot of people just like it and they like seeing the pro's hitting on the green. It's nice to see but it is very hard to do. Now if I want to hit this flop shot here, as you can see I kind of changed my mechanics here and I have a flat swing here. Hit quarter of an inch, maybe half inch behind the ball and I flew my target. It's that easy to do. But as soon as I maintain that lower body staying quiet basically keeping my lower body from moving, line up square toward the target, kind of get close. I like to choke up a little bit. Same thing with chipping and putting. Get close to the ball; it's easier to do. If I was going to tap a nail with a hammer here, I probably wouldn't be able to do it very well like that. As soon as I do it like that, I would do it well; pretty accurately too. Same thing here; get close to it, have a short little shot and acelerate. I hit way further behind the ball than I did with the flop shot and I'm still on the green, 10 feet from the cup. My flop shot actually took a lot more skill and actually used more of my skill for that shot and didn't end up with anything good. So lower shots with lower optic clubs are actually much easier to do than let's say a sand wedge. You wouldn't want to take a sand wedge and be going for a 3 inch cup, would you? Not with a full swing anyway.