Tip Tuesday: Getting Back to the Basics

Trouble with your full swing? There’s a simple method to help you get back to the basics, as we learn in this video tip from Scott Tanguay of the Coastal Golf Academy in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

 

 

Scott Tanguay:
Hey everybody, Scott Tanguay here at the Coastal Golf Academy, right across the street from Myrtle Beach International Airport. So you guys on your buddies trip, come by and see us right across the street!

Today what I want to talk about is the simplest motion which is chipping. Chipping is one part of the game, but you could also think of it as the base of your entire swing. If we can’t do the simplest, smallest motion like this, and if we’re doing a little something like that, then that’s going to hurt your short game and your full swing. So this is going to help your chipping, but also let this kind of bleed into your full swing. When we’re chipping, we don’t want too much wrist flicking back and through. It’s much more of a body movement this way.

All right. We’re just trusting the club to do the work for us. We’re just going to give it a little turn and a little turn. What I see a lot of people do is just stare at the ball and try and flick it up like this, looks a little something like this. And that’s going to give you a lot of inconsistent results. You’re going to see a lot of chunking, a lot of blading. What we want to do is, like we talked about before, is ball-then-turf contact. I’m going to get my feet nice and close so it can help me turn really well, and just relax. Lose the tension, lose the tension. So I got my feet close, a little bit of a turn back, a little bit of a turn through, and just let it go.

See all that body rotation through the shot. Now if you have a lot of green to work with, you want to use less loft, something like a gap wedge, pitching wedge like I have here, maybe a nine or an eight, but nothing less than that. It’s because we want to get the ball rolling as soon as possible. So if I got a lot of green to work with, we’re just going to grab the pitch, or the nine maybe, get those feet nice and close. Little one, two. All right? And then there’s your simple little chip there.