Spin Your Pitches and Chips: One Arm Drill

The one-arm drill for softer pitch shots.

Matt Walter here at the Vanderbilt Legends Club. I'm going to show you a little tip on how to use just your trail arm to hit a great pitch shot. One of the key things that we're talking about here is how to effectively use the wedge to hit soft pitch shots and utilize the bounce of the club. We're going to highlight how your back hand, your trail arm, so if you're a righty, your right hand, works through the shot. One of the key things that I see too many players trying to do in pitching is, they're trying to get a lot of shaft lean on their pitch shots because they're still thinking full-swing mechanics, they're still thinking full-swing strike in order to deliver a pitch shot to the green. We need to understand that the way we interact with the golf ball is not the same on a pitch shot as it is a full swing. When we hit a full-swing shot, we're trying to compress the ball against the face and use the core and club head speed to produce spin. When we hit pitch shots, it's almost the opposite. We're trying to provide a glancing blow so that the ball spins more off the face and we spin more of the outer core, or the cover, of the golf ball. What we're trying to produce is a different way of maximizing spin on the golf ball so your pitch shots land soft and quickly. Now, to understand that, shaft lean, or hands well forward of the golf ball as far as a face-on view look, will produce a high compression, but with this shorter distance and slower club head speed, it will interfere with your ability to control distance and you will have a lower spin rate. So, what this trail arm drill, or your right arm only, will allow you to do is learn how to release the club effectively around your body so that you can create a lot of spin on the golf ball for only a 30-yard pitch shot. And so, Tiger was actually doing this on the BMW Championship, hitting one-hand pitch shots. And what you'll notice is that we don't want the club to travel, what we would say, linearly, straight back and straight through to the flag. That's not the natural arc of the swing. So, if you do this drill and your arm goes straight out and straight up towards the flagstick, you're doing it wrong. What we have to get is a bend in our right arm so that the club can work around us. So, with that, I'm going to leave you guys with that golden nugget.

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