Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Here we're going to look at how to play an effective bunker shot from a fairway bunker. So when you got into a fairway bunker, the first thing you got to look at and consider is whereabouts you are. You got to look at the situation how close are you to the lip, how steep is the lip that you need to get the ball over. Don’t be too greedy or ambitious here. Your priority is to get the ball out of the bunker and advance it as far down the fairway as this situation will allow.

So rather than looking at the distance the left, and then picking that club, look at what trajectory you need to achieve to get over the lip of the bunker, and then if you get in distance with that, then that's a bonus. So the further back you're in the bunker, you'll be able to play a slightly steeper face club, a straighter face club which is going to allow the ball to go further. But if you're trapped under the front lip, you just need to get the ball out. So we're going to assume here you've got a situation where yes we've got a lip, but with further back in the bunker and the lip isn’t too high, so we can play an iron or maybe even a hybrid or a wood out of that bunker.

So the way we want to do that is as we setup we're going to wriggle our feet into the sand. Now that lowers you into the sand. Okay so what we've got to do to counter that is hold lower down on the handle than we usually would because that's going to showing the length that there's between the club head and the shoulders, so effectively you're pulling the club up away from the surface. The idea within a fairway bunker is to hit a crisp clean shot. We don’t want to catch the sand first, so we must be working on taking this ball very clean.

So we're going to hold down the handle by a good inch or so. And we're also going to hold a little bit tighter than usual. Again holding a little bit firmer it's going to encourage you to work, get the muscles in the forearms working, and it’s the muscles where in the forearms work they shortened. So again that's helping you to pull the club head up to towards you rather than get it grounded in the sand. So we're going to setup, we're going to keep our weight quite even once we've wriggled the feet in okay.

We're just going to keep the hands forward slightly. That's going to allow us to just pick the club head up, but we don’t want to work on that we don’t make too steep an attack angle back down into the ball. So as we're swinging back we want to work on having quite a shallow, quite a flatter swing, so that we're not attacking down too steeply, but we want to swing in and catch the top of the golf ball, catch the upper part of the ball to take it really clean so that you don’t hit any of the sand in the bunker.

You take those few tips onboard. The next time you're out on the golf course and you find yourself faced with the fairway bunker. You should find that you hit a much more effective shot, but again remember if you're up against the lip, just take a lofted club to get the ball back out and play. This is only if you've got available room to get the trajectory needed to clear the bunker.