Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

So here’s another area where Sam Snead’s knee action, the idea of keeping that stability and keeping those knees apart can really help you is when you’re on the golf course and you’re getting a different variety of golf course conditions. This might be on wet ground, on slopes, uneven lies, ball below, ball above your feet, all of those types of environments or areas where golfers will often struggling, particularly if they don’t have a very stable platform and their knees are moving too close together.

So a classic case would be a wet day on a slide down, if a golfer has a narrow stance and then the knees comes in together, it’s very difficult from this position to generate a good enough balance to generate enough power to maximize your distance maintain the expected distance, because of that uneven lie. And often when the lie gets on the even, ball above, ball below or wet lie, golfers lack distance because they lack the confidence in their sort of ground work, they feel like their legs are going to slip, so they pull out of the shot, wonder why the ball comes up 20 yards short of the green. So if we can work on maintaining a stable knee position, we’re going to actually hit the ball onto the green a little bit further each time.

So in your address position when you’re in uneven lies or down slopes on wet ground, make a little bit of extra width between your feet, create a little bit more stability there. From the top of the swing, keep the knees nice and broad and then turn through rather than slide in. And if we can create that good wide turn in, the downward pressure on the instep of the right foot against the left foot there creates my stable platform, my stable base, so I can generate power that I couldn’t necessarily do if my leg was just sliding across this way.

So this is an important technique to work on on flat lies but super important on uneven lies, poor down slopes, wet ground conditions. And you’ll often see there are sort of opportunities to watch this when the golf pros that you see on the TV are stuck in bunkers. We’ve all seen that one where, you know the ball is just in the bunker, the player is still on the edge of the bunker and they stand super wide and get down really low and then you watch their leg action and it’s very, very still.

There’s very little movement through the legs and that’s really an exaggeration of the element we’re talking about here. So if the lie gets slightly uneven, widen the stance, widen the knees particularly and then work on that super stable turn through. And that’s how Sam Snead’s knee action can help you adapt and adjust to different on course golf situations.