Using a fairway wood from the fairway for a full second shot into a par five is a very useful skill but it's not an easy skill. This is one of the longest clubs in the bag, the second longest club in your bag. But with the longest club you've got a massive club head and a great big tee to put the ball upon. Here we've got the length of the club but we don't have the big head and we don't have a tee peg so it can actually be a very difficult shot to get right. The hope is that when we hit this ball from this tight lie here is that we can nip the ball nicely off the fairway, nip it off the surface without taking too much of a divot.

I’ve caught that one, pretty much the best shot I’ve hit all week right out the middle very nicely. Now no real divot coming out of the ground but the ball hit right in the center of the club just a couple of little flex of grass left on the club face. Now the combination of the way we hit this ball is quite important to get right because we do want a relatively shallow angle of attack. Angle of attack is the idea of the direction the club head is traveling in terms of its vertical plane as it hits the ball so we don't want this to get steep and to be hitting down into the floor too much. But likewise we can't be hitting up because the ball isn't on a tee like it is with the driver, the ball’s sitting on the floor so we can’t hit up but also we can't be too far down. So we want a relatively shallow angle of attack.

Now by having the ball slightly forwards in your stance and your body weight slightly back that on its own would create a relatively shallow angle of attack which is fine. But then I would also try and avoid a very aggressively inside swing path because an inside swing path in from this side here which would often relate to seeing someone draw the ball, that could actually cause the club to ground out, to bottom out too early. So we've got this shallow angle of attack already we then bring in the club from the inside the risk here is that we hit fat and we hit behind the ball too much from the inside. So if you're quite a natural drawer of the golf ball and you sometimes over turn the ball and you've already got a shallow angle of attack, you may struggle hitting fairway woods off the deck.

It might be better for these shots that you bring the ball position back a little bit and try and swing a little bit steeper and focus less on swinging from the inside to sweep that fairway wood away, you don't want to get too shallow too far from the inside. And one last piece of advice here is just make sure you keep your eye on the ball, it's a very simple piece of advice an old piece of advice something golfers probably hear all the time. But it's quite important particularly here because the ball is so far forwards in the stance, the golfer desperately wants to look up and see where the ball goes to. There is a real risk that coming down into the ball, we jump up and we look for the ball that lifts the arc of the club up and we hit over the top of the ball.

Because the ball so far forwards in the stance like I say, we want to stay down and chase it forwards and make sure we make good contact by staying down before we look up. And hopefully if you can stay down by the time you do look up you're going to see the ball 50 yards away and flying 200 yards further down the fairway, rather than hitting the ground or lifting up and hitting the top of the shot and see it dribbling across the floor. Try and utilize those changes to your game to hit better three wood shots.