Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

With this here we're going to look at how to play effective golf shots from fluffy lies. Fluffy lies just means the ball is sitting up right on top of the longer grass. It hasn't nuzzled down. It's sitting really high up off the ground on top of the grass. A bit like this situation here where the ball is on top of the tee peg. One of the main things you want to think about even before you play this shot is as you come into address don’t allow the club to be grounded on to the floor on the surface below. Hover the club up. Keep it as high as the ball is. If you allow the club to drop into the grass, the ball sitting up on top of the longer grass and its going to move the grass and then the ball is going to move in; you're going to incur a short penalty for moving the ball.

So my first tip is to hold the golf ball up above the grass. Hold it level with the golf ball so it's hovering. Also to encourage you to keep that golf club a little bit higher just grip down on the shaft a little bit. That will encourage you to again keep the club head off the floor. Keep it up in the fluffy grass because its shorten in the distance between the shoulders and the club head. So we're hovering the club up I would play the ball from the middle of your stance and now we want to look at making a sweeping action into the shot. If we hit down too much with this shot, so if we do this, you can see what's going to happen. You're going to go straight underneath the ball and the ball just doesn’t going to go anywhere because its sitting up on top of the grass, so that would have happened because as I have swung back there, the club head, has stayed in front of me too much. It's got very vertical, very upright, I've got a very upright swinging playing there.

You can see the shafts got into a very vertical position. So as I attack down, I attack down, I really attack down right down onto the ground at the bottom of the ball but because the ball is not on the ground. I've kind of gone under the ball and the ball hasn't gone anywhere. So we don’t want a V shaped swing. We don’t wan to steep down with action into the shot. We want more of a U shaped swing where it's flat at the bottom of the swinger, and to achieve this we need to get this more sweeping action.

So to do that we want to work on letting the club head rotate around those getting the shaft of the club into this flatter position rather than seeing the club here. If we got this position we will be able to approach the ball a much gentle, a shallower angle of attack and that will allow us to sweep through the shot and clip the ball off the top of the grass. So we won't drop the club under the ball not move the ball. We'll clip the ball off the top of the grass. So let's have a look at playing that shot with this most sweeping action. I play the ball in the center of the feet. If you want the ball to come out a little bit higher just lean it a little bit more on the left with the hand slightly forward, sorry that's for the lower shot so little more on the left and hand slightly forward.

If you want to play it slightly higher from there, just get the weight a little bit more even and the hands moreover the top of the ball, but the setup is the same. Hover the club, and then make a sweeping action so that you will strike the ball off the top of the lie. That's if you follow those swing tips that's a really good way, a really good method of been able to cope with those fluffy lies and you won't find them a problem when you're out on the course.