9 Best Golf Chipping Drills to Sharpen Your Short Game

The best golf chipping drills train one short-game skill at a time: distance control, landing spot, clean contact, or a quiet lower body. Below are 9 drills, each matched to a specific problem, so you can fix the reason you keep leaving chips short or blading them over the green. Work the two or three that match your miss and you will convert far more of those greenside near-misses into one-putts.

How to Choose the Right Chipping Drill

Watch what your chips actually do before you grab a bag of balls. Coming up consistently short usually means poor distance control — work the ladder and landing-spot drills. Fat chunks and skulled thins point to a flippy release and weight hanging back, which the coin and one-handed drills repair. If the strike is fine but the ball never finishes near the hole, you are guessing at landing spots, not reading the roll. Matching the drill to the fault beats hitting a hundred random chips, the same targeted-practice logic behind our golf swing drills guide.

Good chipping is built on a stable setup: narrow stance, ball slightly back, hands ahead of the ball, and about 60% of your weight on your lead foot. If that base is shaky, fix it first using our breakdown of golf chipping technique before drilling.

The 9 Best Golf Chipping Drills

1. Ladder Drill (fixes: distance control)

Set targets — tees, coins, or towels — at roughly 5, 10, 15, and 20 paces onto the green. Chip one ball to the nearest, then the next, and so on, then work back down the ladder. The goal is to change carry distance by lengthening or shortening your backswing, not by swinging harder. This is the single best drill for the amateur’s most common miss: leaving everything short.

2. Landing-Spot Drill (fixes: where the ball lands, strategy)

Pick the spot you want the ball to land on — usually just onto the green — and drop a towel or headcover there. Now chip to that spot and ignore the hole entirely. Great chippers pick a landing zone and let the ball release to the pin, rather than trying to fly the ball all the way. Nail the landing spot 7 times out of 10 before moving the target.

3. Coin Drill (fixes: chunking, ball-first contact)

Place a coin (or a tee pushed flat) just in front of your ball on the target side and try to chip the ball, then clip the coin. Because the low point of your swing must be ahead of the ball, this forces the ball-first, descending strike that produces crisp contact. If you catch the coin behind the ball or miss it entirely, you are adding wrists and hanging back — the exact move behind chunks and thins.

4. One-Handed Lead-Arm Drill (fixes: flippy wrists, weak release)

Chip soft shots using only your lead hand on the club. With one arm you physically cannot flip or scoop, so the drill trains the body-controlled, quiet-wrist chipping stroke that stays consistent under pressure. Start with tiny 5-yard chips and keep the back of your lead wrist flat through impact. This is the fastest cure for the flip, the same fault covered when learning how to chip in golf.

5. Clock Drill (fixes: repeatable swing length, calibration)

Imagine your lead arm as the hand of a clock. Practice backswings to 7 o’clock, 8 o’clock, and 9 o’clock, and note how far each carries with a given club. This turns “feel” into numbers you can trust on the course: instead of guessing, you know an 8 o’clock swing with your wedge carries 12 yards. Log your distances so the calibration sticks.

6. Towel-Under-Arms Connection Drill (fixes: disconnection, inconsistent strike)

Tuck a small towel under both armpits and make chip swings without letting it drop. If the towel falls, your arms are working independently of your torso, which is where inconsistent low points come from. Keeping the towel pinned forces your chest rotation to power the stroke — the connected feel that makes contact repeatable, the same principle that steadies a full golf swing technique.

7. One-Swing, Many-Clubs Drill (fixes: rollout control, versatility)

Make the exact same length of chipping swing to the same landing spot, but rotate through a sand wedge, pitching wedge, and 9-iron. Watch how much farther the ball releases with the lower-lofted club. This teaches you to control the total distance by changing clubs rather than manipulating the stroke, which is far more reliable under pressure than trying to hit a fancy high or low chip.

8. Bump-and-Run Gate Drill (fixes: takeaway path, start line)

Push two tees into the ground just wider than your clubhead, framing a gate on your target line a few inches behind the ball. Make low bump-and-run chips that swing the club straight back through the gate without clipping either tee. An off-line takeaway is a hidden cause of heel and toe strikes; the gate gives you instant feedback and grooves a putting-like path.

9. Up-and-Down Pressure Drill (fixes: transfer to the course, nerves)

Drop 10 balls in different lies around one green and try to get up and down — chip, then putt — from each. Keep score out of 10 and try to beat it next session. This is the finisher, because it strings together contact, landing spot, and distance control under the mild pressure of a running total. It exposes which of the earlier drills you still need to grind.

Why Drills Beat Randomly Chipping Balls

Dropping a pile of balls and raking chips at a flag mostly rehearses whatever pattern you already own. Drills strip the shot down to the one broken part — contact, or carry, or landing spot — so a focused 15-minute block moves the needle more than 100 aimless chips. Use random chipping to test your progress, and use these drills to actually change it.

Common Chipping Mistakes These Drills Fix

Adding too much wrist. Scooping to “help” the ball up is the number one chipping fault. The coin and one-handed drills remove it by forcing a body-led, flat-lead-wrist strike.

Hanging back on the trail foot. Trying to lift the ball shifts weight backward and causes chunks. Set 60% of your weight forward at address and keep it there — the coin drill won’t let you cheat this.

Aiming at the hole instead of a landing spot. Good chippers land the ball on a spot and let it roll. The landing-spot and one-swing-many-clubs drills retrain your eyes to see the whole shot.

Only owning one shot. Practicing a single club and swing leaves you stuck when the lie or pin demands roll or carry. Cycle clubs so you have options.

A Simple 3-Week Chipping Practice Plan

Week 1 — Groove contact. Run the coin drill and one-handed drill for 10 minutes, 4 days, hitting short 5–10 yard chips only. The goal is clean, ball-first strikes, not distance.

Week 2 — Add distance and landing control. Keep 5 minutes of contact work, then spend 10 minutes on the ladder and landing-spot drills, calibrating your carry with the clock drill.

Week 3 — Transfer under pressure. Warm up with contact reps, then play the up-and-down pressure drill and the one-swing-many-clubs drill. Track your out-of-10 score and note which club and landing spot you trust most.

Sharper chipping compounds fastest when your putting holds up the other half of the up-and-down, so pair this work with our golf putting drills; a tidy chip means little if you three-putt from six feet. To fold chipping, pitching, bunker, and putting reps into one scoring session, work through our full set of golf short game drills too. And because setup and rotation carry over from the long game, players rebuilding contact from the ground up should also revisit the fundamentals in our pillar guide to how to swing a golf club.

When to Drill and When to Just Play

Drills belong on the practice green, not mid-round. Standing over a greenside chip on the course while consciously running through “weight forward, clip the coin, quiet wrists” overloads you and usually produces a worse shot than trusting your motion. Do the conscious reps at home and at the range; on the course, pick a landing spot, pick a club, and let the stroke you built go.