Once you get out on to the golf course, one thing you may be asking is, in what situations should I utilize bounce angle? The truth is in most wedge shots you are going to be using bounce angle whether you know about it or not. But the actual technique where you feel that that club head is sliding under and that you’re bouncing the club head along the ground underneath and just skimming the surface. In what situation would that be advisable?

Depending on how confident you feel, you can use that technique from a lot of different situations. But there are some general rules that you may want to observe. For example, here I have a very, very decent lie. So, it sat on nice and cleanly. It’s on top of the ground. And if I hit a shot here using the bounce angle, I can really skim down underneath the ball and clip it away very, very nicely.

However, my sand wedge has about 10 degrees of bounce. So, if I want to really hit the ball cleanly, it will have to be on a relatively good lie. If it’s on a very tight lie like this, so it sat down in a divot, this might be the point where I put that ball a little bit further back in my stance, I keep my hands ahead of the ball a little bit more, steepen down the angle of the attack on to the shot, so make sure that I hit the ball first and then the turf.

Now just notice how much lower that ball came out. However, even with striking down that much, my club was guided back out of the turf because of the high bounce angle. But it’s from those two different lies where I’ve had to adjust my technique to make sure I've hit a successful shot. I can play the bounce angle shot that I’ve just described from the good lie out of the bad lie as well. But it takes practice. It takes confidence and it takes a real will to do when you're out on to the course.

You are much safer to begin with using those two different techniques if the lie is good or the lie is bad. But by all means please practice and you'll be able to use that bounce angle from a lot of situations out on the golf course.