Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Knowing how to work the golf ball when you're out the golf course is something really, really valuable to do especially when you've hit a shot that's got you out of position. If you're in a situation where you need to actually get the ball swing around something and you understand how to do that, its going to save you a lot of shots if you do get out of position. So for example, you could be faced with a situation where there's a tree over hanging branches anything like that between you and the target, and you need to work the ball, you need to shape the ball around the object. So here we're going to have a look at how to shape the ball left to right, and right to left hitting the fade and the draw.

Understanding what causes these shots will then allow you to execute them successfully. So if we look at what causes a fade to start with. The golf alignment pole on the flow heads represent the target line that we want the ball initially to start from and finish from. But if we're hitting the fade, the ball is going to go from the target line. Its going to start left of the target and then its going to swing back onto the target line and finish on the target line. So it’s a really controlled shot.

A draw just works the other way. It starts on the target line. It's going to finish on the target line, but in between that its going to start it moving right at the target, and then swing back in, and finished in the controlled manner on the target. And that's allowing us to shape the ball and work the ball in the air. So to hit that fade, we want to look at; we need the clubface to be open as we start the shot. So we're going to aim the clubface to the right, sorry to the left of the target. The clubface is aiming to the left of the target. That will start the ball left of the target line, and so to achieve that we're going to aim the feet to the toes, the knees, the hips and the shoulders are all going to take an alignment to the left of the target.

But we need now when we swing through to swing from the outside of the target line and then across to the inside. You got out-to-in swing path, so if we set the feet and the alignment in this way that's going to allow us to create that swing path so we just swing the club now. But what we need to do is we need to angle the clubface so that its pointing left of the target, but not as left as the club head is going to move in. So, if we got a divergence between where the clubface is pointing and where the club head its traveling that will impact tilted access spin onto the golf ball and it will give us a nice controlled curve.

So we're going to aim left of the target and we're going to swing with this out-to-in swing path which goes left of the target. But as we do that, we're going to set the face so its only just pointing left of the target, so we're going to set that face position and then hold the golf club. So we now are going to keep that golf club is just going to clubface position is just going to come back to this where it started just left of the target, but we're going to work on swinging across that target line. That's going to give us a really controlled shot. If we want to hit the draw we just do the opposite so we need the club to be traveling from the inside to the outside of that target line.

We need to the club head traveling to the right so in order to achieve that we're just going to aim the feet, knees, hips and shoulders to the right of the target. That will allow us to swing the club with the correct swing path and then we're going to turn the face to the clubface is pointing right of the target, but not as right as the swing path is moving. So we're going to set the clubface in that position. We're going to hold the club and then we're just going to make the swing with the clubface in that position and that's going to give us the ball that flies right to left, so have a go, hit in those shots on the driving range. And then when you're in a situation where you need to work the golf ball on the course you're going to have a strategy of how to do it.