How to Hit a Pitch Shot
My golf coach Garrett Louis, instructor for Top 50 Teacher In America and PGA Teacher Of The Year Martin Chuck’s, Tour Striker Golf Academy in Phoenix Arizona, teaches me how to hit a pitch shot.
Garrett Louis here with Tour Striker Golf Academy, and today, I want to talk to you about the dreaded 30 yard pitch shot off of a tight lie.
So the keys to this are a narrow stance. Ball’s going to be somewhere in the middle of my narrow stance, and then I’ve got a neutral shaft. And then let’s start to learn how we can pace and face the target. And a good feel for this is to take the club in your lead hand, and then you’re going to key in on the butt end of the grip here.
What I want you to feel is I want you to feel like this has got a string attached to it to your lead hip here. And this butt end of the club is going to move at the same rate as my lead hip. You can see how my lead arm isn’t coming off my body. It’s not outracing me. It’s all connected here with my lead hip. And I’m moving this with my core. I’m moving this with my pivot.
I know it’s an odd feeling, but I want you guys to get this, because oftentimes what I see when people are struggling with this is they’ll set up in here and they’ll swing their arms and they’ll keep their head down and they’ll blade it over the green or they’ll have too much forward shaft lean and use too much leading edge and they’ll hit it fat. So we’ve got to start to understand how we can use our pivot to hit this and we can pace and face this club head.
So I’ll hit one for you. I’m going to tip over to little widey down there. I’m going to take a look. I’m going to energize this with my backswing. And then I’m going to pace and face. That was clipped nicely. Right?
So let’s start to understand how we can have a narrow stance, the ball somewhere in the middle of that, we can pace and face, and we can feel like our eyes can follow the golf ball. I’m not going to keep my eyes down forever. So that’s how we can start to understand how we can hit this dreaded 30 yard pitch shot that you have and that you’re faced with quite a bit in a golf round, and you can clip little nice ones out there.
And then let’s be mindful as well, guys, of keeping a clean club face. That’s another thing. Let’s not have a super dirty face when we’re hitting these shots, so we can get that nice spin that we’re always looking for.
