Good morning. I'm Brian Fitzgerald The
Golf Doctor In today's lesson, I thought it was about time we started looking at some bunker shots and a lot of people get very scared
about bunker shots. They don't like getting in them at all.
But most Golf Pro's, if you ask them they love bunker shots. It's actually much easier to get a ball
closer to the hole from a bunker than it is from the grass. I like to actually describe the bunker
shot as an intentional fat shot. Meaning that we take a divot and we
get the club underneath the golf ball. So as long as
we take the divot and we hit under the golf ball
there is a cushion of sand in between the club face in the ball. Which means the ball won't travel a very
long distance, even though we have a short distance to
this particular flag it's about a 15 metre bunker shot. I'm going to use a pretty full swing
because when the club hits the fan it's going to tend to start stopping down or decelerating, so we have to allow for
that when we play a bunker shot.
So I try and err on the side of hitting the ball a
little bit on the fat side taking too much sand and I try and use a big swing because there's nothing worse than
leaving the ball back in the bunker for the second bunker shot. Invariably
it rolls back into your footprints and makes it much harder. So that's that's the process. The club the energy on the club will be absorbed
by the sand as it hits the sand in the downswing so
we have to allow for that.
We want to make sure we take the club accelerating,
not rapidly, but we just want to keep it moving. So
when I'm swinging I really work on trying this get my
hands up to about shoulder height come down and swing through to shoulder
height as well. In terms of set-up a lot of
people tell me that you should open the club
face. I'm not one that really believes in that,
particularly in Melbourne where we have nice fine sand, and generally we
don't have a lot of sand in the bunker. so if we tend to open the clubface that means the leading edge of the golf
club tends to sit higher, and if there's a firm base it might come
down and bounce off the back.
I like to have a square clubface. I'm
using my lob wedge or my sixty-degree sand wedge when I play these bunker shots and it is certainly a low bounce so I find that works well. if I was going to play a bunker shot
out of a bunker that had a lot of sand and quite thick I might use my 56 degree sand wedge because it's got a little bit more
bounce this particular one has six degrees my 56 has 12 degrees, so that will help ah not dig the ball or the club face
into the sand as I hit it.
The other thing in my set up, is I want to
make sure that I had my weight on my front foot. Although I don't tend to normally say it
in those words.Because quite often I say to someone get you white on your front
foot and they do this. So I feel like i've got my
weight on my front foot but you can see I actually have my weight
back here and that's going to encourage an ascending blow. When we play a bunker
shot we certainly want to hit with the descending blow. So I try and feel that I'm going to get
my nose slightly in front of the golf ball. If I
do that that then makes sure that I have my weight
on my left foot, or my front foot.
So from there, I'm going to hit somewhere behind the
golf ball. I'm not precise with that. It doesn't have to be a half-inch or an inch or two inches. It's just some where to the right of the
golfball and then I'm gonna come down and keep following through through to shoulder height on the other side of my swing. let's see how
I go. Oh, the other thing I should talk
about is ball position. The club should enter the sand roughly
in the middle your feet, so I like to have the ball just slightly forward of
that position.
Because we don't want to hit the ball we
want to hit slightly under the golf ball. It is very very important thing. If you
have the ball in the middle you might actually touch the ball then you hear that familiar click,
which means the ball has gone too far. So it's just forward of center. Let's see how I do? And the ball comes out and that's to about
a metre, just over a metre. That's ok. Hopefully I can knock in the
putt. Thank you for letting me help you with your Golf. I'm Brian Fitzgerald. The Golf Doctor..