Master The Matt Fitzpatrick Drill To Improve Your Chipping

Whether it’s chunking or thinning, lots of amateurs struggle to make consistently good contact when chipping, which saps their confidence and costs them shots. In the video and article below, short game guru Dan Grieve runs through a cross-handed drill that will improve your technique and get you striking your chip shots better.

So flipping when you chip is a real common fault among amateurs and what I mean by that is the right hand wants to take over, which causes the lead or left hand to break down. That's going to result in some really poor contacts, particularly the thin shot that rushes over the other side of the green and potentially into more trouble.

So the drill you can do or even maybe play with - as someone like 2022 US Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick has done very successfully - is the cack-handed drill. So for a right-handed golfer, this means putting your left hand lower on the grip than your right. It's the opposite for left-handers.

What you'll find when you do this is that it levels your shoulders, which is what you want. With amateurs, something I see all the time is a big upward shoulder tilt, which results in the low point of the swing moving being too far back. 

So by levelling the shoulders, that's going to encourage you to rotate better and get the low point just in front of the ball to hit those nice crisp chip shots. So left hand low, nice level shoulders, and you'll see when I hit the shot in the video above, how the finish there is nice and crisp and there is no breakdown of the wrists. 

So if you struggle with your chipping and flipping your wrists through impact in particular, try this drill. Over time, it'll really improve your technique and get you striking the ball much better.