It is foolish to try any shot on the course that you haven’t rehearsed in practice. Golf is a hard game, and you need to be as prepared as possible before you try things during an actual round of golf. If you regularly attempt shots that you’ve never before practiced, the results are unlikely to be pretty.

And so it is in the case of a spinning greenside bunker shot. If you just read this article and plan on using this shot in your next round, we wouldn’t expect you to be successful. Rather, you are going to need to spend some practice time working on what we have advised before you can rely on this shot to get the job done. When you do set aside some practice time for the purpose of learning how to spin the ball out of a bunker, keep the following practice tips in mind.

• Give yourself a good lie. This is a shot you should really only be trying when you draw a good lie in a greenside bunker. So, as a result, you should only practice this shot from a good lie in the practice bunker. After all, it would be a waste of time to attempt this shot from a bad lie if you are never going to do the same thing on the course. If necessary, rake the practice bunker before you start hitting shots, just to make sure you have a nice patch of sand from which to work.
• Pick specific targets. It is always important to have specific targets in mind when hitting any kind of practice shots. As you are working on spin, it would be easy to just aim for the middle of the green and focus only on whether or not the ball is spinning. That is not a particularly productive way to work on this part of your game. Instead, pick out a specific hole and judge your results based on how close you are able to leave the ball to that hole. In the end, you will have worked on a skill that is actually relevant to what you will be trying to do on the course.
• Take your time. When you get some time free to work on your golf game, you probably have a lot of areas of the game you would like to address. You want to work on your bunker game, but you also want to work on your full swing, your putting stroke, and on and on. As a result, you might be tempted to rush through each section so you can get to everything in the end. This is a bad idea. It is better to put in quality work on just a few areas than to hurry through everything and do sloppy work in the process. If you have decided that you are going to invest at least some of your time working on spinning bunker shots, don’t short change yourself by hurrying through it.
• Be consistent. You shouldn’t expect to master this tricky shot in a single practice session. Rather, it is going to take some time to build your confidence in this area, so try to hit a few of these shots during most of your visits to the practice area. You may struggle at first, but consistency is your friend when trying to learn a new skill in golf. Stay with it and eventually you’ll start to see positive results. Wait to put this shot into action on the course until you have built up sufficient confidence in practice.

We probably didn’t need to tell you that practice is going to be required if you are going to learn this shot. As a golfer, you are already familiar with the difficulty of the game, and you know just how much hard work goes into learning any kind of new shot. As long as you respect that process and accept the fact that there are going to be challenges along the way, you can steadily work yourself toward expanding your game.