Stop Hitting Fat and Thin Shots with Shirt-Buttons to Zipper Drill

The shirt-buttons to zipper drill is a simple way to clean up fat and thin wedge contact by improving how your body is organized through impact. On finesse wedges and distance wedges, you do not need the dramatic body tilt you would use in a full driver swing. Instead, you want your upper body and pelvis to stay much more stacked, with your shirt buttons and zipper staying roughly in line as your body rotates. When that relationship gets out of sync—especially when your pelvis drives too far forward ahead of your chest—you make it much harder to control low point, and that is when heavy shots, thin shots, and even double-hit chips can show up.

How the Drill Works

This drill gives you a visual reference for proper body alignments in short wedge swings. Think of the center of your upper torso as being around your shirt buttons, and the center of your pelvis as being around your zipper or belt buckle.

In a full swing, especially with the driver, those two points are often separated by a noticeable amount because of axis tilt. But in a finesse wedge or distance wedge swing, that separation should be minimal. Your torso should remain much more vertical and stacked over your pelvis.

That does not mean you stay frozen. Your body still turns. The key is that you are rotating around a more centered spine rather than sliding your lower body so far forward that your zipper outruns your shirt buttons.

When your zipper gets too far ahead of your chest, your body tends to dump the club into the ground too early or throw off the bottom of the arc. That is one of the most common body-motion patterns behind inconsistent wedge contact.

Step-by-Step

1. Set up for a short wedge shot. Use your normal finesse wedge or distance wedge setup. Stand in a balanced posture with the shaft and ball position you would normally use for a controlled scoring shot.

2. Identify the two reference points. Picture one vertical line dropping down from the middle of your shirt buttons and another from the middle of your zipper or belt buckle.

3. Start in a stacked position. At address, those two points should feel fairly close to lined up. You are not trying to create a big backward or forward tilt.

4. Make a small practice swing. As you swing back and through, focus on keeping your spine relatively vertical while your chest and pelvis rotate together.

5. Check the finish. After the shot or practice swing, pause and evaluate whether your shirt buttons still appear roughly over your zipper. Because of rotation, it will not look perfectly identical from every angle, but they should still feel generally stacked rather than separated.

6. Repeat with short shots first. Start with very small chip or pitch swings. Once you can maintain the relationship between chest and pelvis, gradually lengthen into your distance wedge motion.

7. Use feedback after every rep. The value of the drill is in the check. Hit a shot, hold your finish, and ask yourself whether your zipper got too far ahead of your shirt buttons.

What You Should Feel

If you are doing the drill correctly, the motion should feel centered, stable, and rotational.

• Your chest and pelvis move together. You should feel more like your torso and hips are turning as a unit rather than your lower body lunging ahead.
• Your spine stays more upright. On these shorter wedge swings, you should not feel a lot of side bend or dramatic tilt.
• Your pressure stays controlled. You may still have pressure moving into your lead side, but it should not feel like a hard shove of the pelvis toward the target.
• The club brushes the turf in a predictable spot. When your body stays stacked, low point becomes easier to control, and contact gets more reliable.
• Your finish feels compact and balanced. You should be able to hold the finish without feeling like your upper body got left behind your lower body.

A good checkpoint is this: if you freeze after impact and your shirt buttons feel behind your zipper, you have probably overdone the lower-body drive for this type of shot. If they feel stacked, you are much closer to the right motion.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Driving the pelvis too far forward. This is the big one. If your zipper races ahead of your chest, contact usually suffers.
• Trying to hit wedge shots like a full swing. Finesse and distance wedges need a different body pattern than a driver or full iron.
• Holding the chest still. Staying stacked does not mean staying rigid. You still need rotation through the shot.
• Overchecking from the wrong visual angle. Because your body is rotating, the alignment will not always look perfectly straight from your eyes alone. Focus on the general relationship, not a perfect visual illusion.
• Adding too much side bend. Excess tilt can move the bottom of the swing unpredictably and make strike control harder.
• Skipping the finish check. The drill works because you stop and evaluate after each swing. Without that checkpoint, it is easy to fall back into old habits.

How This Fits Your Swing

This drill helps you understand an important truth about wedge play: different shots require different body geometry. In a full swing, you can have more axis tilt and more separation between the upper and lower centers. In a scoring wedge swing, that same pattern often creates too much motion and too much low-point variability.

By learning to keep your shirt buttons stacked over your zipper, you build a body motion that supports crisp, predictable contact. That matters not only for basic chips and pitches, but also for distance wedges where you need the ball to come off with reliable launch and spin.

If you tend to hit behind the ball, catch it thin, or feel like your contact changes from shot to shot, this drill gives you a simple body cue to organize the strike. It teaches you to rotate around a more centered posture, which is one of the keys to controlling the bottom of the arc.

In the bigger picture, this is a low-point control drill. It is not just about posture for posture’s sake. It is about making your wedge motion repeatable so the club enters the turf in the right place more often. When your body stays stacked and keeps turning, solid contact becomes much easier to produce on command.