I Wish A Golf Coach Had Told Me How To Chip Like This Sooner

Get This Free Practice Plan

Transcript Summary- 

So, I’m just warming up before my round, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to show you my five-minute chipping routine — the same one I give to most of my students who struggle with chip shots around the green. It’s super simple but so effective. The goal is to build confidence and get that solid, consistent contact before heading out on the course. Because let’s face it — when you’re thinning or fatting chips, that anxiety creeps in, doesn’t it? So, this little warm-up sorts that out.

We start with a drill I call the “Leaning Tower”, something I picked up from my good friend Joseph Mayer. It’s brilliant for helping you control where and how the club strikes the ground. Most golfers move too much — leaning back or swaying — which ruins consistency. So, this drill helps you feel a more stable motion. You simply set up, lean slightly forward, and lock out that trail leg. That keeps your upper and lower centers stacked, helping you control your strike every single time.

Once you’ve got that movement, I get my students to use a bag drill. Just swing a bag side to side like you’re making an underarm throw — no twisting, no fancy moves. It helps you feel that natural rhythm and body pivot. Then, when you grab the club, all you focus on is that same feeling — controlling the pivot, keeping that trail leg braced, and letting your height rise naturally through the shot. Forget about distance or target for now — it’s all about solid contact.

When that’s feeling good, we move on to the trail arm action. Most golfers twist their hands or try to scoop under the ball, which causes all sorts of bad strikes. Instead, we want that trail arm to swing just like the bag — palm facing forward, calm wrists, no rotation. Think of it like throwing the ball underarm. That’s it. Keep it simple, keep it repeatable.

Once you’re striking it beautifully, then we can talk about flight and distance. If you want it higher, just move the ball slightly forward and open the face a touch — but keep everything else the same. The motion doesn’t change. Let the club do the work for you.

Finally, for distance control, it’s all about developing feel — just like tossing a ball underarm. Once the strike is consistent, you’ll start to sense how hard or soft to swing. The confidence builds, you relax, and that’s when your short game really starts to come alive.

Honestly, if you can give this routine just five minutes before every round, you’ll head to the first tee feeling confident, striking it crisply, and ready to take those skills straight onto the course. Give it a go — I promise it’ll transform your chipping.

Full Transcript- So, I'm just warming up before my round of golf, and I thought, you know what? I'm going to film a video and show you my five minute chipping routine that I give to most of my students who are struggling with chip shots around the green. I give them a drill to start with. I don't think I've shared this on the channel yet that basically they do before every shot that guarantees helps them guarantee consistent contact because if you don't have consistent contact, the anxiety, the nerves coming and you need that confidence to take to the golf course. Okay? So, I show them how to do that first. The next thing once they've got contact and the confidence is starting to rise, two, three minutes. The final section of the uh warm-up routine is developing a rhythm with the arms and the club head to help them control distance. Once they've done that, then we experiment with a few difficult shots around the green from rough bare lies so that they're ready to take it to the golf course. I can't wait to share it with you. It's super super cool. Before I do though, if you're new to the channel, it's one of your first videos of mine, please consider subscribing. I release videos just like this one every single week to try and help you improve your game. But you never have to remember a thing. Everything we do here, I'll put into a free downloaded practice guide in the description box below. So, if you're willing to spend five minutes practicing this before each round of golf, your short game will improve like no end. So, here's what I want to do. Let's start with when you're warming up. The first thing to do is this. Forget about distance control, where the target is. I want you to build that confidence up so you get strike out on the golf course. You know, if you're thinning it, fattening it, that awful anxiety is terrible, isn't it? So, how do you get strike? You need two things to control. The first thing, you need to control where the club is hitting the ground. It needs to be consistent time and time again. And the second thing is how it hits the ground. We do not want it to be going too deep, and we don't want it to be missing the ground. So, you need to be controlling the depth of your arc through this golf swing. Now, how do you do that? Well, just use this drill every single time, just for a few seconds before each and every single shot. Now, I got this from my good friend at the beginning of the year, Joseph Mayer. Absolutely brilliant. It's helped my students no end. And it's the leaning tower drill. All you're doing here is this. Most of the time golfers, they aren't controlling where the club hits because their bodies often are leaning back trying to help the ball up in the air. Sometimes it's swaying forward. They're moving around too much. We want to have something that's more repeatable, more consistent. So, what you do is you get yourself set up. And I don't care where the ball position is. The further the ball is forward in your stance, the higher the ball goes. If further the ball is back, the lower it goes. I don't really mind. The hand position is just opposite your lead leg. I'm going to raise my hand a little bit here, so it's away from my legs here. And I'm stood reasonably close to the golf ball. Right now, what I do now is this. I imagine my body tilting forward and leaning like the leaning tarper. To do this, I to exaggerate my students, this is the drill. I get them to almost lock the right leg or the trail leg out. So, it's pushing this way. Now, that really in a sense keeps this dot, the upper center and the lower center stacked on top of one another. And the aim is to keep it there all the way through the shot. as opposed to if this leg starts to kind of flex now, we can start to get stuff like this where these dots now become misaligned and your strike completely disappears. So stage one is to get the correct body movement first. Learn to feel it. So I get offset here. I don't care about my arms at this stage. Leaning to lock that trail leg out. And then all I'm going to do, look here, I go I'm rocking here and notice where my body's going. It's working up through the shot. It isn't working down where most people are doing it right. It goes up through the shot. Now, every one of my students has a bag in the back of their car because it helps. This is huge. It really helps them to feel this in a rhythmical way. I get them to hold the bag like this. Get themselves set up. Leaning tower. Now, all we're going to now look is this. Swing the bag side to side. And notice here, do you see any turn turn? None at all, is that? This is the feeling I want you to have. It's basically, look, an underarm throw. It's an underarm throw. And the rhythm is this. You got it. So, let's hit a shot now and show you what I get my students to focus on as they're doing this. I say to him, please, please, please don't worry about target or distance. All we're going to do now, we're going to develop the pivot in your body. So, we're going to lean the shaft forward. We're going to lean the body forward. Lock this out here. Now, from here, all I'm going to do is focus on keeping that right leg, that trail leg locked out. No. Yes. Notice how my in transition my height goes naturally up through the shot versus down through the shot. Right? So that's all I'm focusing. I do don't care where this ball goes. All I'm focus on is can I get the pivot of my body working beautifully to help control contact.

Beautiful ball first contact. Absolutely beautiful. I could feel myself working beautifully up through that golf shot. through the shot. Right? So, I'm not allowing myself to fall backwards in any shape or form. I would get my students practicing that and only focusing on that first. Nearly every single person has some of their long game faults in their short game. So, those who slice will tend to spin out their body too early. They'll start to rotate too early here. Notice with a bag, I am simply swinging. Look, underarm. Okay? It's an underarm throw here. It's not a spin out here. Which brings us on then to step number two. We've started to get the pivot. So, we're starting to control where you strike the golf ball. Notice when I threw uh swung the bag here. What do you notice about my trail arm? The position of my right arm. It's in this place here. This is where I want you to be. And notice it's swinging. I am I at any stage rotating round. I am not doing this. I am simply keeping that right arm swinging. Look. Where's it pointing? This almost like I'm giving blood. pointing towards you and I'm swinging it in this direction all the time, right? Super super important. So, when you put the the uh the right hand on the golf club, my right hand is in this position. But there's one thing that I would say most golfers screw up here. The arms in here, but we don't want the hand there. The hand, that's what controls the face. Unfortunately, what most people do is they do this. They turn everything this way. When you do this, that that gets you thins, the fats, you name it. Or worse still, they know we've got to get underneath the golf ball and get the arm in this position. So now they turn everything. They turn the hand there and now they're jabbing at it and almost getting these nervous kind of twitches. Yeah. The right arm and trail arm stays in this position. The palm faces forward. Very important. And all you're doing here is this. We've got the body pivot. We don't do anything with the wrist. They stay basically calm and passive. We're not rolling, not doing anything. We want to keep it simple and repeatable. I've got the pivot now. I keep my wrists in place. And it's an underarm throw. Notice where my trail arm is. It's not wrapping underneath. I'm not flicking it this way. I am simply got my pivot and my right arm, my trail arm, is working underneath just with an under arm throw. Beautiful, beautiful strike underarm throw every single time. Not caring to start with where the ball's finishing. Now, people say to me, "Well, if you I'm I've been told not to get underneath the golf ball." You're not. What you've done is is I've set the wrist angle and I've set my body position so I'm naturally going to be striking slightly down on the golf ball. I don't try to strike down on it. My body is simply swinging like the bag's swinging and the ball gets in the way of this swing. But this trail arm is never spinning. It's not we're not trying to hit down on the golf ball. That happens as a natural byproduct of the club or the ball getting in the way of this arc. If I wanted to hit it higher, I would hit more ground behind the golf ball by simply moving the ball further forward. So, I'd catch the ball slightly later on in the arc. But notice I'm controlling my pivot. I'm not doing fancy stuff with my wrists. Those wrists are staying in position and I focus on locking that out and working up through that shot. So before we finish up with distance control, let me just show you a slightly more lofted shot doing exactly the same thing. So I've put my ball forward in my stance. I've opened the face a little bit here. But this is so important. Notice where my hands are on the golf club. They are still where they were on the previous shot. Again, when people start to try and get elevation, they start to try and change their flight of their shot with their body as one and sometimes with their hands. That's what we got to avoid. You've got to trust everything we've just done will work and let the club do its job. I've got 60° here. I've moved my ball forward. My height and what I'm trying to do, I built in at setup. All I do now is again control that pivot and the strike and then just swing underarm. So, same principle as before. Let's have a look at this in action.

And there's the height. Clearly, it's not going to go as far, nowhere near as far, but immediately we have more height. And all I'm doing is the same principle. I get myself set here, and I simply just swing in the same way I've just done before. Keep my wrist angles backwards and forwards. And the ball pops up beautifully. And I'm not doing anything different, right? Exactly the same motion, same pivot, same hand position, just move the ball forward and open the stance. Right now, distance control. For most of my students, once they start to strike it like this, they that's almost enough for them. They're like, "Oh my god, I'm can play. I Danny, I I'm I've saved my embarrassment now. I I that's already enough for me." When you've got this, sorry, strike, the next thing is simply it's just an underarmand throw. So, just like you would learn to control your distance throwing a ball underarm, well, eventually what you start to do is you start to get yourself set like this and you're going, "Right now, I've got strike. I've got something consistent. I just need to develop the feel now of throwing the ball onto the green in almost like this underarm throw manner." And what will happen in time? Look, you'll start to control your distance time and time again because your strike's good, because your confidence is starting to build. You start to build the skill. Not straight away. You know, you won't get distance control straight away, but once that strike improves by doing these things, your confidence improves. You'll start to relax into your shots. You'll start to enjoy it. You'll start to experiment. You'll start to do many different things around the green. It'll all start to come together. If you donate these five minutes before every single round of golf, I promise you, please, please give this a go. If you enjoyed the video, give it a thumbs up. Maybe share it with one of your friends who's struggling with their shot game. If you enjoyed this video and you want to maybe improve your driving, click this one out right here. If you'd like some personalized help from me, head over to head over head on over to dannymod.com. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing.