Instruction
How to analyze your lie in a greenside bunker
There’s a lot written about the proper bunker shot technique — you know, open your face and stance, and thump the sand — but that’s only half the battle. There’s more to being a good bunker player than just the standard technique; you also need to be able to play the ball from various lies in the sand, each of which requires slight adjustments.
This is GolfWRX, so I know the majority of you know how to play from a good lie in the bunker — and most of you also know how to play from a plugged lie, too. That’s why I’m skipping those topics in this article. What I do want to explain is how to play from a few uncommon lies in the bunker. Over and over again, I see even really good golfers fail to make the proper adjustments to hit these shots.
Related
- Adjust your setup and swing for better bunker shots
- How to hit a bunker shot, as analyzed on Trackman
Below are four lies that most golfers NEVER seem to get up and down. Hopefully, after you read this article you’ll join the select group of golfers who do.
1) The Downhill Lie
The best way to handle this lie is to lean your body with the slope, set the club up quickly and hit down and through the ball with a low finish. The ball will come out low and hot, so be prepared for it to run after it lands.
You may be able to get the ball to stop if the lip isn’t too invasive to your backswing, as shown above. But if the lip is higher and you really have to pick the club up quickly on the backswing, just know that the ball will come out scooting with very little spin. Think bunny slope (slight lip), versus a double black diamond (steep lip).
Sometimes with a steep lip, it’s better to cut your losses and aim for the fat part of the green. From this kind of lie, the goal is to have a putter in your hand on the next shot, not a wedge.
2) The Uphill-Sidehill Lie
This is my least favorite lie in the bunker. It’s just so difficult to predict how the ball will come out since there’s usually more sand in the face of the bunker than there is in the middle of it. The extra sand makes it more difficult for you to get the clubhead through the sand without the heel “dragging” and closing the face prematurely.
There is nothing like the feel of a chunked heel-drag, forcing the ball to shoot way left of your target. The best thing here is to make sure your wedges have some type of heel and toe relief. You can either buy them that way, or take your wedges to a certified clubmaker if there’s one in your area. I always suggest this type of grind for golfers who tend to open the club a lot around the greens.
If you don’t have a heel grind on your wedges, you must practice this lie from various densities of sand to understand how the ball will come out. There’s two factors at play with this shot:
- The steepness of the slope itself.
- The amount of sand on the slope.
Try to estimate the slope and sand density on a scale of 1-10, and then make the proper adjustments. Do NOT assume all side-hill lies are created equal. But either way, most of the time you’ll catch too much sand and the ball will come out left, so plan for it.
3) The Uphill Lie
Here’s a fairly common uphill lie with the lip well above the ball. Surely at some point in your golfing life you’ve been told to lean backwards with the slope and swing harder, as the ball will tend to pop way up in the air and won’t get to the hole. Sometimes people tell you to take your 56-degree wedge to compensate. I advocate something different, however, as long the lip is not too high that it impedes the shot.
My thought has always been that if I take a huge swing and the ball shoots way up in the air, I’ve completely lost control of the ball; I can’t determine how it will land or where it will go with any type of consistency.
Instead, I recommend centering your spine or even leaning slightly into the slope with your normal, open-stance, open-face bunker setup. With this adjustment, the ball will tend to release a bit upon landing, having a more predictable roll. The tendency from this lie is to leave the ball short, so the added roll will help.
This will require some experimenting with the degree of forward lean you employ. If you lean too target-ward, you may hit the ball into the lip, and if you don’t adjust enough, the ball will up-shoot as previously discussed. Find the happy medium and you’ll become a master.
4) Sneaky Sitting Down
Looks like your average bunker shot, right? Hold on, look closer. Can you see that the ball is sitting down between rake marks? This type of lie is more common than you think… but you may have never noticed.
Unlike a ball sitting up, this lie necessitates an angle of attack that is a touch more down than your normal shot. A steeper attack angle will ensure that your club moves down and through the shot, not just through the shot. Whenever the ball is sitting down, you must dig deeper for the ball to come out predictably. You don’t want the topography of the sand dictating the reaction of your golf ball, you want as much control as possible.
If you make your normal bunker swing with this lie, it will tend to come off a touch thin, flying past the pin with a bunch of spin. While seeing the ball grab when it lands is good for style points, it often still finishes too far past the pin to count on making a save.
Now that you know what to do, my advice to you is to practice these funky lies in the bunker, and embrace the process of experiment. If you skull a bunch, or leave a bunch in the bunker, who cares! That’s what practice is for, especially in the bunker.
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Instruction
Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?
Some call the image on the left laid off, but if you are hitting a fade, this could be a perfect backswing for it! Same for across the line for a draw! Stop racking your brain with perceived mistakes and simply match backswing to shot shape!
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Instruction
The Wedge Guy: The easiest-to-learn golf basic
My golf learning began with this simple fact – if you don’t have a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, it is practically impossible for your body to execute a fundamentally sound golf swing. I’m still a big believer that the golf swing is much easier to execute if you begin with the proper hold on the club.
As you might imagine, I come into contact with hundreds of golfers of all skill levels. And it is very rare to see a good player with a bad hold on the golf club. There are some exceptions, for sure, but they are very few and very far between, and they typically have beat so many balls with their poor grip that they’ve found a way to work around it.
The reality of biophysics is that the body moves only in certain ways – and the particulars of the way you hold the golf club can totally prevent a sound swing motion that allows the club to release properly through the impact zone. The wonderful thing is that anyone can learn how to put a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, and you can practice it anywhere your hands are not otherwise engaged, like watching TV or just sitting and relaxing.
Whether you prefer an overlap, interlock or full-finger (not baseball!) grip on the club, the same fundamentals apply. Here are the major grip faults I see most often, in the order of the frequency:
Mis-aligned hands
By this I mean that the palms of the two hands are not parallel to each other. Too many golfers have a weak left hand and strong right, or vice versa. The easiest way to learn how to hold the club with your palms aligned properly is to grip a plain wooden ruler or yardstick. It forces the hands to align properly and shows you how that feels. If you grip and re-grip a yardstick several times, then grip a club, you’ll see that the learning curve is almost immediate.
The position of the grip in the upper/left hand
I also observe many golfers who have the butt of the grip too far into the heel pad of the upper hand (the left hand for right-handed players). It’s amazing how much easier it is to release the club through the ball if even 1/4-1/2″ of the butt is beyond the left heel pad. Try this yourself to see what I mean. Swing the club freely with just your left hand and notice the difference in its release from when you hold it at the end of the grip, versus gripping down even a half inch.
To help you really understand how this works, go to the range and hit shots with your five-iron gripped down a full inch to make the club the same length as your seven-iron. You will probably see an amazing shot shape difference, and likely not see as much distance loss as you would expect.
Too much lower (right) hand on the club
It seems like almost all golfers of 8-10 handicap or higher have the club too far into the palm of the lower hand, because that feels “good” if you are trying to control the path of the clubhead to the ball. But the golf swing is not an effort to hit at the ball – it is a swing of the club. The proper hold on the club has the grip underneath the pad at the base of the fingers. This will likely feel “weak” to you — like you cannot control the club like that. EXACTLY. You should not be trying to control the club with your lower/master hand.
Gripping too tightly
Nearly all golfers hold the club too tightly, which tenses up the forearms and prevents a proper release of the club through impact. In order for the club to move back and through properly, you must feel that the club is controlled by the last three fingers of the upper hand, and the middle two fingers of the lower hand. If you engage your thumbs and forefingers in “holding” the club, the result will almost always be a grip that is too tight. Try this for yourself. Hold the club in your upper hand only, and squeeze firmly with just the last three fingers, with the forefinger and thumb off the club entirely. You have good control, but your forearms are not tense. Then begin to squeeze down with your thumb and forefinger and observe the tensing of the entire forearm. This is the way we are made, so the key to preventing tenseness in the arms is to hold the club very lightly with the “pinchers” — the thumbs and forefingers.
So, those are what I believe are the four fundamentals of a good grip. Anyone can learn them in their home or office very quickly. There is no easier way to improve your ball striking consistency and add distance than giving more attention to the way you hold the golf club.
More from the Wedge Guy
- The Wedge Guy: Golf mastery begins with your wedge game
- The Wedge Guy: Why golf is 20 times harder than brain surgery
- The Wedge Guy: Musings on the golf ball rollback
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Instruction
Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!
Not the dreaded headcover under the armpit drill! As if your body is defective and can’t function by itself! Have you seen how incredible the human machine is with all the incredible feats of agility all kinds of athletes are accomplishing? You think your body is so defective (the good Lord is laughing his head off at you) that it needs a headcover tucked under the armpit so you can swing like T-Rex?
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Dave R
Nov 19, 2016 at 8:12 pm
Thanks Dale good read makes sense .
SV
Nov 18, 2016 at 9:05 am
What I would like to know is how to play a bunker shot when there is “no” sand in the bunker; the type where it feels like there is sand and when you swing the club hits concrete. How do you determine this and how do you play it?
Dale Doback
Nov 19, 2016 at 11:48 am
I get this type of bunker a lot in Palm Springs especially out of season when courses do minimal maintenance after the snowbirds leave. The best way to check what lies beneath the surface is digging in your feet and feeling the resistance and seeing how deep your feet settle in when you build your stance. That’s also a good time to check the sand density and wetness or dryness below the surface. Any wetness in the sand will cause the club to bounce more. Once the concrete is suspected beneath the ball there are a couple options. assuming your normal bunker technique will bounce into the ball from what you described in your post the reason is it’s to shallow of a path bottoming out to soon behind the ball and the club is simply doing what it was designed to do. I have found moving the ball back in my stance a little allows me to drive down and under the ball and I also square up the face. Not necessarily totally square it depends on the lie and the trajectory needed for the shot. If you have to get the ball to spin and need more trajectory because you have little room to the pin then what I do is keep the ball back about 1 ball width in my stance, open the face about 45 degrees depending on surface texture. I get a little more weight on my front foot and keep it there about 80/20 because I want to get steeper with my path. My normal strike is about 2.5 to 3 inches from the ball with the face open and firm sand, I now have to about 1 to 1.5 inches behind the driving the open face under the ball before the bounce kicks the club back up. This shot is very dangerous. I hope I explained that well. The under lying concrete bunker gave me the yips for a couple years when I first moved to the desert from washingtons soft fluffy sand bunkers.