Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

If you feel that you’re still fatting the golf ball even though you’ve gone ahead and made some really good changes to your technique you know you’ve looked at this idea of ball position, of bodyweight, of swaying. You feel like you’re doing okay on the driving range, you’re not fatting the ball on the range but when you go on the golf course, you still struggle with fatting the ball. Consider maybe that you’re not evaluating the quality and type of lie well enough. One of the things in the drive range there is always a flat lie, flat [Indiscernible] [0:00:34] or flat mat. It’s that easy to chip the ball consistently from there.

But if you’re playing on an uneven golf course and you’ve got uphill, downhill, left to right, right to left kind of slopes that could cause you fairly big concerns and big issues within your stroke which could result in fat golf shots. So generally we’ve got four types of lies on the golf course. We’re going to have the ball above the feet where the ball is effectively nearer to you. Now that is a big one to be prone of fatting the ball because the ball is nearer to you. You’re going to hit down and hit the ground first before the ball. So be really careful of fatting the ball when the ball is above your feet.

Now the type of lie is the ball below your feet, so you’re standing high. The ball has dropped down a little bit lower. Generally speaking that isn’t the type of shot where people would fat their wedges. Occasionally they might actually be complaining of them hitting the top of the ball too much simply because the ball is lower than it used to be and you hit over the top of the ball because the ball is below your feet. So consider that generally where you’re going to top the ball, unless you make an issue of falling off balance, dropping your bodyweight forwards too much, dinging the ground and hitting it fat because you’re off balance. But generally ball below the feet, not too many problems.

Then we’ve got two other types of lies. We’ve got uphill and a downhill slope. So an uphill is where I’m playing this way and I’m on an up slope. Now this is generally not an issue for fatting the ball either because the ball sits nicely on the slope, ball in the middle, you come down, hit the ball and then you carry on into the turf. It might feel like you take quite a big digging from that sort of lie but you generally shouldn’t hit the ball fat from there. However, the alternative to that is the down slope, so the back of the ground is high. The ground in front of the ball is lower. Everything is tilting this way. That can be quite prone to a golfer hitting the ball fat because we’ve got the slope. We’ve got the ball here and as the club comes in the ground gets in the way of the normal angle of attack. So in that situation that’s when a golfer is prone to hitting the ball heavy. So if that slope is now like this, what I’ll often encourage the golfer to do is make quite a big lean to the left almost trying to negate the slope by getting the shoulders perpendicular and the spine angles perpendicular to the slope, shoulders parallel to the slope, hitting down the hill quite steeply and try and take out the fat shot.

So it’s really important you practice on uneven slope and lies and certainly when you go on the golf course you evaluate the lie, don’t just play the same technique you would play on the driving range, but you evaluate the lie for these sloping lies, for these pitch shots to avoid hitting them heavy and fat.