Ever been in a bunker with an extremely high lip?
Do you have trouble catching shots thin or heavy?
My name is Sean McTernan and you are watching another episode of My Golf Tutor the number
one place on the internet to play your best golf now.
Welcome back, todays question comes from Teddy.
He says, "Hey Sean, my home course has extremely high lips on every bunker.
I really struggle to get out of them, any advice on to get more hight on my bunker shots?"
Teddy before we get into technique, there are a couple things I would lie to share with
you what we do.
The best players in the world all use the bounce of the club.
What that means is when they are coming down into the sand the back of the club is touching
the sand first.
You never see the leading edge coming in.
This is one of reasons why people chunk shots and catch them heavy.
Because the leading edge comes in and makes it very very difficult to be consistent.
From a setup perspective before we go hit these high bunker shots there are a couple
things we need to do.
The first thing is we need to get the ball slightly forward in our stance and our weight
fifty fifty.
This is very important to bunker shots.
For me I like to stand slightly bit open for those of you who get down lower you need to
stand a little bit more square and we will shot you exactly what that means in our next
segment.
In order to hit these high bunker shots that you are looking for the first thing I want
to talk about is opening the face.
It is very important that you get the height you are looking for is to open up the face
and add loft.
The second thing I want to talk about is setup.
You are going to have about fifty fifty as far as weight distribution.
As regards to standing open to the pin that is your personal preference.
For me I like to stand maybe two-three yards open.
Some people like to aim square and thats fine.
The one thing that I do see with some of my students who come to me is when I ask them
to open up the face they feel it is pointing way to the right.
What I want to show you today is that there is a difference between where the face is
pointing and where the loft of the club is pointing.
When I was fifteen I was introduced to a tool that is a little magninent.
When I was on our Irish National Team our coach introduced use to this and it gave me
a whole new understanding of where the loft of the club is pointing when I get into my
setup.
So Josh is going to help me here illustrate exactly what I mean.
I'm going to get into here fifty fifty and I am a fraction open.
I have the face wide open with the bounce exposed to the sand.
Josh if you could just come in here.
So as you can see the face is wide open, but the loft of the face is pointing somewhat
in the general direction of the pin.
Those of us who like to get down really low and wide.
The lower I get the more the face points left.
So in this example here my face looks like its pointing over here but because I'm down
low you can see the loft of the face is pointing to the left of the target.
So for those of you who are down low I would suggest aiming square.
For me I like to setup a little bit open and get my weight fifty fifty and set the face
like that.
Now that we have given you some good fundamentals to execute this bunker shot there are couple
other things I would like to add to help you generate the hight you are looking for to
get out of these bunkers with steep lips.
The first thing I want you to work on is after you get your setup correct and you have the
face laying nicely open.
Is on your backswing, I would actually like you to rotate the face open a little bit more,
this is going expose the bounce even more and add a little more loft to the club.
One final thing I would like you to think about to help you get that height you are
looking for is obviously get the setup right, we get fifty fifty.
For me I like to play the ball slightly forward in my stance.
We are going to get a little club face rotation on the back swing, but on the way down I want
you to feel that the head and the handle lineup.
What I mean by that is I don't want to see lead to much and I don't want to see you scoop.
We are going to feel they're going to line up exactly like this at impact.
I hope this help Teddy and if you or anyone else watching has a question about your golf
game please leave it in the comment section below.
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