So quite often when you’re watching instructional videos like mine we talk about how to hit these particular shots. But we’re generally talking about how to hit them from a decent lie on a range map on a golf course. We very rarely talk about a situation that most golfers get themselves in quite regularly which is how do we do all of these from thick rough? So this question answers that idea of how do we hit a pitch shot from thick rough? We’ve hit two decent shots to the side of the green but we find ourselves in some quite lush cloggy grass around the side of the green. We still need to hit the ball out at the right height, at the right distance, with a decent element of control. So there are two issues here. First thing is making sure we get the right club for the shot and then the second one is getting the right technique for the shot. So the right club; basically use a lot of loft. A lot of loft on the golf shot will help you. If you have loft, you have a neater knife edge at the front and the loft is going to cut through the grass a little bit more easily to pop the ball up. If you’re hitting with a lower lofted club, you’re just going to hit into the side or bus it’s just going to hit the grass the clubs just going to stop. So we want this knife edge to slide underneath the ball to pop the ball up with plenty of height and let the club cut through the grass nicely.

The second thing we need to consider here is how the club reacts as it hits the grass so making sure we get the right contact. Now simply put we need to hit less grass. If there’s lots of thick grass around this area, and our club gets down into that grass too early and scoops the ball up, we’re just going to get too much grass caught between the club face and the ball and the club face would slow down too much. S if you played the ball forwards in your stance and leaned back its quite an instinctive thing to do when you see the ball buried, you lean back, the club bottoms out here drags all that long thick grass before you hit the ball, it simply does not work. So we’ve actually almost got to go counter intuitive here, we’ve got to play the ball back in the stance and hit down more steeply, which for a shot that goes high it doesn’t feel right but trust me this will work. We play the ball more to the back of the stance maybe in the back third, we grip down on the golf club, we have the hands nicely ahead and we hit down quite firmly. Now when we hit down we grip the golf club really tight it’s probably one of the only times I would encourage you to really hold onto the golf club tightly because as you hit into that long thick grass that’s going to try and slow the club down and twist the club out of your fingers. So you actually need to hold on to this really tight, hit down really steep and really sharp. So we play the ball back, play the body forwards be careful you’re not going back to fetch the ball that won’t work for you. Grip it nice and tight and chip down really firmly. And you almost feel like you just chopping the legs off the back of the ball and just pitching down into it really hard.

Now if you don’t have grass area where you can go and practice this shot, there’s maybe an exercise I can give you that would just help visualize this shot a bit better. I’ve just taken my towel and I’ve folded it over a few times so it’s quite thick. I’m just going to lay it at the back here. Now if I play this shot correctly, you can suddenly see that I don’t want to be coming in shallow and hitting into the towel. I do want to becoming in steep and chopping down on it. So that visualization there tells me I don’t want to scoop into the ball as if its long grass. Play it in the back of my stance play it nicely hit it down I can play the ball out well and I don’t disrupt the towel. If I just take one more now this is going to go wrong I’m going to do the opposite thing and we’re going to do the bad thing I may lose my towel here. I’ll play the ball too far forwards in my stance I lean back this is the instinctive thing to do. I want to try and scoop the ball in the air but it won’t work I’ll hit the towel and then you can see I’ve scuffed it there. Now if that scuff had happened on the golf course you understand how that would have been some long thick grass that’s slowing the club down twisting the club face, not giving me good ball and club contact. So when you’re playing your pitch shots or your chip shots out of thick rough consider you need a lofted club, you need a good steep downward swing and an extra little bit of grip pressure would work really nicely for you too.