DO THIS And Master The 50yd PITCH Shot

I think I'll take that one from there. Over water, tricky distance. So we're going to cover how you play that shot, the 50 yard pitch shot. Now this particular one was 54 yards, so pretty good. 50 yard pitch shot, how do you play it? Well look, there's so many different ways you can play this shot. You know, we can hit it low, high, lots of spin, no spin. We're going to go through what I would consider to be the basic shot, the go-to shot. Now I've selected 60, simply because the situation I've got, you can see there's a lot of water, I need some height. So you know, you can choose 54, 56, whatever it may be, but I've got 60 for this particular shot. So we have to start off with the setup. So many of these shots that I see hitting, being hit badly, is due to a poor setup. So what am I looking for? I'm looking for a relatively narrow stance, not super narrow, but probably the width of two club heads between my heels. I'm looking for the ball to be in the middle of my heels. I'm also looking for the ball to be underneath the buttons on my shirt, and I'm looking for a tiny bit of club shuffling, but not much. So you can see, that would be my normal starting position. For this basic shot, we're just trying to avoid any extremes, you know, ball super far back, ball forward, any tilts that we don't want. You need to try and eliminate those. So heels pretty close, buttons over ball, a little bit of shuffling, that puts me in my starting position. We then start to think about the swing itself. What do we actually do? Well, we need some body pivot, you know, and that's, again, where I see so many golfers going wrong. They just tend to use hands and arms. If you use hands and arms, you can often get a lot of height, but you don't get much distance. The difference with this 50-yard pitch shot, is that we want the body sequence to be a little different to what it would be for a full swing. We're looking for the upper body, the lower body, to be rotating at about the same rate. What we're looking for in the full golf swing, is we actually like to see some separation. We like to see the legs moving, stretching, we see a difference in the sequence. So initially, I move the club away with a body rotation, and I'm also trying to feel on this shot, that I keep the club head relatively wide. Notice how when the club shaft is level with the ground, the grip of the club is comfortably outside of my trail side. If I was using too many wrists, or too much wrist action, you can see that when the club reaches horizontal, the grip of the club is on the inside of my thigh. We want to be eliminating this early reset. We want to be taking the club nice and wide. Think about your golf club around your body on a big circle. We want that circle to be squashed and wider. So you can see how this circle is wide, this circle would be more narrow. The wider we can make that circle, the more likely it is that you're going to get a good strike. We don't want this super narrow circle, where the margin for error is reduced. So I'm trying to play this with limited wrist set. Yes, there will be some wrist action, but it's certainly not this kind of early wrist hinge here. The more we do this, the less we tend to engage the body. So my feeling on this shot is lots of body turn, keep the wrists wide, and then I rotate through, and I keep the wrist wide on the other side. Feeling like a very wide swing with limited grip. Now in terms of what the body does, really important to get that moving correctly, and this is one of the best exercises I've found to really help them understand that. I'm going to take an alignment stick, I'm going to pop it down behind my belt. Now when I take a setup, I'm going to look a little strange, but you should see that alignment stick points out behind my heel, simply because I'm tilted over, it points out behind my heels. Now when I rotate towards the target, I want to feel like I move the alignment stick from behind my heels to in front of my toes. So notice how when I go from this tiptoe position to this standing up position, the alignment stick points in front of my toes. So I want to start from here, but when I go through, I actually want to rotate, and notice how I push the alignment stick out in front of my toes. What that means is I've got rotation, but I've also got extension of the body, and those two movements for a pitch shot are so incredibly important. So I'm going to be going super wide, super wide, and then point the alignment stick out in front of my toes. If you don't get body movement correct in these shots, it's very very difficult to get the club working correctly around your body, it's almost impossible. So the core of this shot, the essential part of this shot, is to make sure that we engage in the body early, the hips and the torso are rotating, that helps us keep some width, the body then rotates on the way through and it extends, and what that does is it helps the golf club interact with the ground as we want it. We want to hit the ground, we can't get away from that, there's no point trying to avoid the ground, never going to end well, but we don't want the club slamming into the ground too steeply. So if I do this correctly, I can make contact with the ground, but because my body movement is correct, it helps that club interact with the ground in the right way. It's the soul of the golf club So a pitch shot from 50 yards, a basic pitch I should say, because we can vary the flies if we want, but for a basic pitch that's how I'm playing it. The keys are the setup, getting the body action correct, and then making sure that we understand what we should be doing with the wrist. We're not looking for this super early wrist set. Now you can see the green keepers on the green doing some work, so I'm actually going to hit this one kind of out to the right just to finish, but hopefully you'll be able to see all those things in place. So there's the setup, I'm going to go super wide, point the imaginary alignment stick in front of my toes, and there's my little pitch, onto the green, out to the right of the fly, but that was exactly what I wanted, and again the interaction with the ground. The only thing you'd have to do in your own time, just figure out a little bit of distance control. From 50 yards, I'm not really thinking too much about where the club goes, I'm just really looking at the shot that I've got, absorbing that, and letting my body react. So, 50 yard pitch shot, get those things keyed in, and you should be able to hit some better shots. Especially when it's tricky over water, you've got to have a fault-proof setup.