How to a Hit Sand Shot Like a Pro
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Hitting a bunker shot is literally one of the easiest shots in golf, but to the average amateur it can be terrifying. The fear of blading a shot across the green or chunking it and leaving it in the bunker is enough to paralyze a golfer over the shot and just hoping for the best. But with these three simple keys you'll learn in this instructional video you'll be thinking about hitting it close, not worrying about hitting your playing partner.
- Bunker shots need to get up into the air, which requires plenty of loft and spin - spin comes from loft and speed
- The club face doesn't strike the ball directly - it strikes the sand, which carries the ball
- Set up with the back of the club face in the sand and the shaft very low to increase loft
- Take a fairly open stance with the ball off your left instep, and some backward shaft lean
- Strike with the bounce of the club to travel through the sand shallow & get closer to the ball
- Drill by drawing a series of boxes in the sand - swing through several empty boxes to check your divot, then move on to balls in the last boxes
There are three critical things to understanding how to hit good bunker shots.
The bunker shot is really one of the easiest shots in all of golf, but so many golfers struggle with it.
So I'm going to give you the three keys that you have to understand in order to hit good bunker shots and also to make the shot more simple.
So you understand how it actually works.
The first key that you've got to understand is that we need to get the ball up in the air, obviously we've got to get it out of the bunker, and we typically need it to land pretty soft on the green.
That's going to predicate a few things.
A, we need loft.
We're not going to hit our bunker shots with a three iron for obvious reasons, so I typically use my 60 degree wedge any time I'm around the green unless I have a very, very long shot.
So that gives me plenty of loft to a degree.
The second thing is we need spin.
Obviously, if we've got a short shot, we need to stop it very quickly on the green.
We need more spin, and spin is dictated by two things.
A, loft.
The more loft you have, the more spin you can potentially put on the ball.
And B is speed.
Speed is one of the most overlooked parts of bunker play.
The more speed you have, the more potential you have to get the ball up in the air, and the more potential you have to put more spin on the ball to get it to stop quickly around the hole.
So, in order to do that, we need to understand a couple simple things.
The first thing is that A, the club face never strikes the ball unless you're either trying to put a ton of spin on the ball and you need to hit it just perfect.
And typically, you don't want to do that.
So just for the most part, understand that you typically never strike the ball with the club face.
You're going to take the sand out, and it's usually a good chunk of sand.
You're going to take a couple handfuls of sand out, and that's going to predicate that we need a lot of speed because the sand is heavy.
And depending on where you play, the sand is deeper, fluffier, what have you.
This is a really light, fluffy floor to sand, so we need to move a lot of it, and I need a lot of speed in order to do that.
The more speed I have, obviously, the further the ball wants to go.
So in order to counteract all that speed that I need for spin and to get the ball out of the sand because the sand is heavy, I need loft.
And so what I'm going to do, my 60 degree, even though it has a lot of loft, it's the most lofted club I carry in my bag, I need even more loft in order to hit the shot the way that I want to.
So what I'm going to do, the first thing that I'm going to do is adjust my setup.
And that is, A, I'm going to lay the club face on its back, literally the back part of my club is going to lay in the sand.
Now obviously you can't touch the sand when you're playing, but for practice, lay the back of the club in the sand so that you leave an imprint in the sand.
Now I have 90 degrees of loft if I make some other setup adjustments.
The second thing I'm going to do is I need to lower the shaft angle at address.
And what I mean by that is if I look down the line, you look down the line, if my shaft is very upright, it's going to have less loft versus as I lay it down.
Now as I lay it down, the club can rest on the heel, it can open the face up even more, and that gives me even more loft.
So how do I do that? As I set up, I'm going to lower my hands by lowering my seat.
I'm going to squat down a little bit.
As I squat down, that allows me to get the shaft very, very low.
Now I actually have negative loft.
That's when we're getting a little extreme with it on certain shots.
So instead of standing really close and upright, I stand a little further away, squat down.
That lets me lower my hands a little bit.
And now I've got all the loft in the world, which means I can be aggressive.
I can take a wipe at this ball and get a lot of spin and a lot of loft and get it to stop very quickly.
So that's the first key to setup.
Now what we're going to do is we need a drill that's going to help us start understanding how much sand we need to take, and that's really simple.
So I've got a fun drill for this.
Call it the box drill.
All I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a box or several boxes in the sand that are about the width of my foot.
And I wear a size 10.
You can get the idea.
It's close enough.
It's just a little bit smaller than my shoe size, okay? What this is going to do is give me an entrance point and an exit point for my club.
So I know how much of a divot I need to take.
If I swing correctly, my club is going to enter on this line and exit about on that line.
And the ball is going to be sitting right about a couple inches in front of that line, somewhere in the middle of that box.
Again, we're not going to strike the ball.
So I'm going to enter the sand behind it and exit in front of it.
So in order to do that, I'm going to have an open stance.
So obviously as I squat down and lower my shaft, I've got an open stance as well.
And the ball is going to be very, very far up in my stance.
Most amateurs never put the ball up nearly far enough in their setup.
So I've got the ball the equivalent of off my left end step with my open stance.
So the middle of this box is about the left end step.
Now, as you look at it from the camera angle, it's almost going to look like, because I have an open stance, even though I'm wanting to hit the ball that way, that the shaft looks like it's leaning back behind it.
That's a good thing because the last most important part of a bunker shot is I need to use the bounce of the club.
That's this trailing edge.
This is called the bounce.
The angle that this hangs down beneath the leading edge is the bounce angle.
The more you use the bounce, the less the club is going to dig into the sand.
That allows you to come through the sand very shallow and get a little bit closer to the ball so there's less sand between the face and the ball.
That allows you to put more spin on it.
So, as I use the bounce, that's going to allow me to come through really shallow and not worry about digging and chunking the shot.
So that's why it looks like the shaft's a little far back.
It doesn't look like I'm leading here because that's going to lead with the leading edge and I'm just going to chunk the club in the sand.
I want it to be sitting on the back of the face to have maximum bounce.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to go through this drill, take my swing.
You'll notice it had a nice thump sound to it, that's because I'm hitting the sand with the back of the face.
My divot entered on that box, exited on that box, that was good, and go to the next one.
Same thing, a nice thump sound because I'm trying to physically, my mental image is I'm trying to hit the sand with this part of my club, not this part, but the very top back of the toe.
That's how you get a nice thump sound to it.
Same thing, divot started here, exited there.
One more time, now without even thinking about it, I'm going to step up to the ball and the ball comes out just fine.
Simple bunker shot.
You can keep going down the line, you don't have to think about it, get a lot of speed, a lot of spin, the ball comes out fine.
So as you practice this box drill, This is going to help you get the ball out of the sand and get you less fixated on the golf ball.
Because what you need to be really concerned about is taking out perfect divots as you go down this line.
The more consistent your divots get, the more consistent bunker player you're going to become.
So work on my box drill, the setup cues I give you, remember that you need loft, speed, and you need to take out some sand because you need to put a lot of spin on the ball and your bunker play.
You'll never worry about hitting a bunker shot again, it's a very simple shot, practice my box drill and watch your bunker shots improve dramatically.
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