How To Cure Long Greenside Bunker Problems - Senior Golf Tip (Video) - by Dean Butler
How To Cure Long Greenside Bunker Problems - Senior Golf Tip (Video) - by Dean Butler

Okay. We’re talking about long bunker shots. It’s a problem that most people tend to kind of fear a bit of a long bunker shot. You can just imagine maybe 30, 50 yards away, that’s a long sort of green size of the bunker shot and you got a lot to carry and you got to try and judge that to perfection. So there’s not a leeway when you think about room for errors you can’t really afford to come in too far behind the ball or even catch the ball clean. So what I’m going to show here is how to play that bunker shot. There are two ways I want to show you, the first way is you could actually play it like a traditional bunker shot, a splash shot so you could your sand wedge or your lob wedge, but remember look at the distance that you’re faced with. So don’t go to that bunker it may be 40 yards away knowing full well that your sand wedge will get the ball 20 yards in that case you’d have to change to the next club down maybe the pitching wedge.

But let’s look at the techniques; the first one is to set up like a conventional bunker shot, so we’re going to go for a splash shot. So we would basically put the club behind the ball, hold it slightly open before you put your hands on it, put your left hand on and hold it nice and firm with the top two fingers. This is to stop of the club at impact from possibly closing over as you catch the sound, so put your left hand on, put your right hand on from here, from the ball position just ahead of sensor and the weight position on the left hand side with a slightly open set up so your body is aiming just slightly to the left hand side. Then from here we want you to focus on one about one inch behind the ball and we want you to focus on keeping the weight on the 60% on the left hand side and nice full length of swing from here and execute down and through. Not the splash shot if it’s done perfectly where you’ll get a nice result, but it’s really a very, very line between playing it to perfection and maybe just capturing that sound behind the ball. So maybe a simpler shot which is the second shot we’re going to show you is to play more of sort of traditional sort of pitch shots. So from this you could play this with you lob wedge, you could play it with your sand wedge or your pitch wedge depending on how far you hit the ball or what your capabilities are. To play this shot you need, the only difference that we’re going to do the set up is exactly the same with the grip, again these two top fingers are very, very important, gripping nice and tight, so as the club does hit the ground it’s not going to turn the club face over, because if that happens you can imagine that ball is going to remain in that bunker as you smoother the shot. Set yourself back up, this time you’ve got to put the ball position further back in the stunts, we’ve got this weight ratio in the same position. But what I want you to do this time I want you to place balls in arm shot so as you go back I want you to concentrate on the arms doing more work rather than picking the club out with the wrist. So from here if you can imagine if I was to put this ball back in my stunts, it naturally makes the swing more up and down. So if I do that and I also break my wrist I’m going to come in a very steep angle of attack which could result in hitting the ball or hitting far too much sound. So what we want to do is to set ourselves back up to the ball, put the ball position back and then from here swing with the arms, keep the weight on the left hand side and focus on going back from here and just nipping the ball. Remember we’ve gone down, we’ve changed the club selection, choose a club that you’re happy with certainly not a 9-9 pitch your weight from most probably favorite club here for the second shot but the technique is very, very similar but there are just slight differences. So when you look at these two, look at the one that we did for the splash shot, look at the one we’ve done this shot which is more of a pitch shot. There are two options here to actually get the right result, but practice is the key, it really does. So go out and practice and hopefully those results will come sooner rather than later. 2013-12-11

Okay. We’re talking about long bunker shots. It’s a problem that most people tend to kind of fear a bit of a long bunker shot. You can just imagine maybe 30, 50 yards away, that’s a long sort of green size of the bunker shot and you got a lot to carry and you got to try and judge that to perfection. So there’s not a leeway when you think about room for errors you can’t really afford to come in too far behind the ball or even catch the ball clean. So what I’m going to show here is how to play that bunker shot. There are two ways I want to show you, the first way is you could actually play it like a traditional bunker shot, a splash shot so you could your sand wedge or your lob wedge, but remember look at the distance that you’re faced with. So don’t go to that bunker it may be 40 yards away knowing full well that your sand wedge will get the ball 20 yards in that case you’d have to change to the next club down maybe the pitching wedge.

But let’s look at the techniques; the first one is to set up like a conventional bunker shot, so we’re going to go for a splash shot. So we would basically put the club behind the ball, hold it slightly open before you put your hands on it, put your left hand on and hold it nice and firm with the top two fingers. This is to stop of the club at impact from possibly closing over as you catch the sound, so put your left hand on, put your right hand on from here, from the ball position just ahead of sensor and the weight position on the left hand side with a slightly open set up so your body is aiming just slightly to the left hand side. Then from here we want you to focus on one about one inch behind the ball and we want you to focus on keeping the weight on the 60% on the left hand side and nice full length of swing from here and execute down and through. Not the splash shot if it’s done perfectly where you’ll get a nice result, but it’s really a very, very line between playing it to perfection and maybe just capturing that sound behind the ball.

So maybe a simpler shot which is the second shot we’re going to show you is to play more of sort of traditional sort of pitch shots. So from this you could play this with you lob wedge, you could play it with your sand wedge or your pitch wedge depending on how far you hit the ball or what your capabilities are. To play this shot you need, the only difference that we’re going to do the set up is exactly the same with the grip, again these two top fingers are very, very important, gripping nice and tight, so as the club does hit the ground it’s not going to turn the club face over, because if that happens you can imagine that ball is going to remain in that bunker as you smoother the shot. Set yourself back up, this time you’ve got to put the ball position further back in the stunts, we’ve got this weight ratio in the same position. But what I want you to do this time I want you to place balls in arm shot so as you go back I want you to concentrate on the arms doing more work rather than picking the club out with the wrist.

So from here if you can imagine if I was to put this ball back in my stunts, it naturally makes the swing more up and down. So if I do that and I also break my wrist I’m going to come in a very steep angle of attack which could result in hitting the ball or hitting far too much sound. So what we want to do is to set ourselves back up to the ball, put the ball position back and then from here swing with the arms, keep the weight on the left hand side and focus on going back from here and just nipping the ball. Remember we’ve gone down, we’ve changed the club selection, choose a club that you’re happy with certainly not a 9-9 pitch your weight from most probably favorite club here for the second shot but the technique is very, very similar but there are just slight differences. So when you look at these two, look at the one that we did for the splash shot, look at the one we’ve done this shot which is more of a pitch shot. There are two options here to actually get the right result, but practice is the key, it really does. So go out and practice and hopefully those results will come sooner rather than later.