- Welcome back to sunny Naples, Florida.
I'm Adam Bazalgette,
two-time PGA teacher of the year award winner,
founder of Scratch Golf Academy.
Today's subject: how to hit a flop shot in golf.
Fun shots, let's check it out.
(heroic orchestral music)
So how to hit a flop shot in golf?
It's a spectacular shot,
we've all seen Mickelson and some of the other guys
on TV hit these beautiful stroke-saving shots.
But a lot of times, it can cost you shots.
And we'll get into a little bit of some of the pitfalls
and what to watch out for, here as we go.
There's two kinds of flop shot really,
or at least in my mind.
One is off a more tight fairway lie,
that's a more challenging shot.
That's the one we're gonna do today.
And the other is when you're
in a bit more of the rough grass around the green.
You kind of got to chop it up out of there,
little bit different shot, we'll cover that
back at Scratch Golf Academy.
Let's look at the tight lie shot today.
Hopefully we can give you some helpful insights.
So this would be a good example
of where you might want to use a flop shot.
I could run up the bank,
but it's a very steep bank.
I'd rather drop it on the green up there
and hopefully if I get enough height,
stop it on the green as we go.
Now as I say, I've got a reasonably tight lie here.
It's not a, it's a good lie,
but there's not a lot of cushion under it.
So the shot is a little bit more challenging.
First consideration is club choice here.
If you have a lot of these types of shots,
you'd want to have something
like a 60 degree sand wedge, if you had.
I have a 58, I think sometimes
if you get into too lofty clubs like 64's
and things like that,
they could be a little difficult to hit solidly, number one.
And also they're not very versatile,
you can't hit them very fast.
So decide for yourself,
but if you get a lot of shots like this
around the golf course where you play,
you definitely want something in the 56, 58 to 60 range,
if not a little bit more.
So let's have a go here.
Add some loft in there.
Was able to pop that up reasonably well.
Couldn't get as much height as I wanted off that tight lie
but it was a pretty effective shot.
So I'm gonna show you a few of the pitfalls,
a few of the downsides of this shot as we go through.
But let's begin with what the most important thing is,
and that is you've gotta get solid contact.
Let's have a close-up look.
So solid contact, I've accentuated
the sweet spot of this club with a black dot.
You could hit a little bit on the bottom edge of that
but you wouldn't want to go all the way
to the bottom edge of the club.
Now this is a great lie but it's fairly firm,
so you just have to use your initiative and your mind
as to what does it take to get sweet spot
or at least low side of sweet spot contact?
Now there's two ways to add loft,
you can either open the club face up, that adds loft.
And, or you can tilt the shaft back a little bit,
which also adds loft or perhaps a little bit of a combo.
But you've gotta look down there and say:
hey given the situation, can I skid that club under there
and get the ball on the club base?
You know as much as I do now at this point,
you can look down there and use your mind a little bit
and figure out what to do.
This is a pretty tight lie.
I'd be somewhat careful with this.
And there's some nuances here.
You get just a little bit more cushion there,
just another day's growth or a little softer,
it can really change the dynamic
of how much loft you could use
and still get under the club.
So you've gotta feel it out a little bit.
This would be at best a yellow light situation.
One of the point that's very important,
it is a fallacy to think that hitting down at the ball,
look at that fly off there,
is a fallacy to think that hitting down at the ball
makes it go up in the air, it doesn't.
It makes it go lower if anything.
It can have the effect of hitting
the sweet spot on the ball.
So remember, if you want to use the effect of loft,
you want more of a skid mark under the ball,
in this fashion, a nice brush mark.
And that will probably involve
clipping the tops of the grass
as you come in and skidding through the ball,
not talking about hitting it fat.
But you will allow for yourself as I did here,
to skid across the grass and go through.
That that is what allows you
to keep the true loft of the club.
So now that we have a sense of adding loft
and what's required at contact, given the lie we have,
this is a fairly tight lie I have here.
Let's look at a couple of things you have to do.
Well, another feature of solid contact
is when you get down to impact,
you cannot have a lot of action or activity down here.
Your golf club has to be pretty stable
and pretty firm as it goes through there.
Or you're gonna have some problems with it.
So if you like, you can certainly,
and let me just add to that.
That doesn't mean you have to be rigid.
This doesn't have anything like the speed
of a Fairway Wood or something.
I'm only hitting this ball 15 yards or so.
So I can be relaxed,
but I still have to feel firm and stable at the very bottom,
as I get that club underneath the ball.
Now one little thought here as well.
Then we'll look at the shot.
You can actually, as I showed you,
have your hands fractionally back,
a little loft on the face,
but if you do that,
don't make the mistake of tilting back
like so many people do,
it just feels like you're gonna get more loft.
And theoretically you would if you could hit it solidly.
You'll get a lot of mishits if you get like that.
So I'm gonna make sure my body center
is up to the golf ball.
That ensures that my brush mark
is gonna be relatively up there.
And then okay, if I add a little loft, that's fine.
But as long as I'm forward,
and as long as I've got control of the shaft,
I'm likely gonna hit it reasonably solidly.
So just looking in slow motion,
you can see my hands are back,
club face is laid open,
I haven't tilted too much back with the slope though.
And as I go back, I've chosen not to cock my wrist
a lot in this particular shot,
because with the tightness of lie,
I want a nice shallow part at the bottom of the swing.
I don't need that much club head speed from this distance.
So I'm not using a lot of wrist cock.
Wrist cock really only adds club head speed,
it doesn't have a magic property to add height.
And here I come and again, without being too stiff,
I'm keeping the shaft stable
and I'm just letting it slide off the ground
and slip under the ball there.
And through we go and just a nice graze mark,
and it pops right up off the club face.
Okay just a passing thought on alignment here.
If you open the club face a lot, which is adding loft,
does that mean the ball's gonna go way to the right,
and you've now gotta aim way to the left to offset that?
Not as much as you probably think.
Any, the principle's this,
any time you hit near the bottom of the ball,
the ball doesn't tilt or curve as much.
An open sand wedge slid under the ball
won't put the ball much off line
even with an open face, a driver with a face that open,
hitting near the equator would hit it miles to the right.
So find out for yourself, experiment,
but I think what you'll find is that
if you truly hit underneath the ball as you're supposed to,
you can open the face a fair amount.
And you'll only have to modify your alignment
to the left a modest amount
to get the proper direction out of it.
So what are the downsides to this shot?
Well let me show you,
this is an easy one to demonstrate, by the way.
This is about the swing speed I had to hit that shot.
If I hit that ball thin,
I hit that a little bit thin there,
that thing's gone, I bet that ball went
three times the length of the shot I'm anticipating.
And the reason is,
with the expectation of sliding under the ball there,
and launching it in the air,
when you hit it with the front edge,
you directly compress that ball.
And you're using so much speed here
relative to the distance you have,
that if you compress it like I did,
I even topped it a little bit, it's gonna go, believe me.
So the downside is it's double bogey
or worse when you do that.
So what you have to manage is,
you have to take into account your skillsets.
You have to take into account the lie,
that's not a particularly good lie for this shot.
And also to some extent, you have to take into account
the situation in the match.
I mean if you're in a scramble,
and you're the fourth guy up, what the heck,
if someone's already on the green, give it a try.
But if it's a stroke play, then you're a little bit nervous.
You might just want to bump that up the hill
or play for a 15, 20 foot comeback putt,
and not use as much loft through impact.
So balance out the lie and your skillsets.
And I can tell you,
anytime you try a shot that you're really
not that confident in, and that you know
the downside of it's gonna be pretty significant,
you're gonna feel some anxiety,
and it's a known fact that the chemicals
the brain produces throughout the body
when there's fear and anxiety,
are not good for managing golf shots and for motor skills
and those sort of things.
So just be judicious when you use it.
And remember you can always build skill,
hey practice it, get good at it,
these principles are fairly simple,
and then you'll be able to use it a lot more
and in lot more different situations
with a good level of confidence.
Well thanks as always for your time,
I hope that helps you with how to hit a flop shot in golf.
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