Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

So we are going to consider here the problem of having a buried lie in a bunker and how to get the ball out from that situation on to the green successfully. Buried lies in bunkers don’t cause much of a problem if you know how to attack correctly and address this situation. Now if the ball is buried and it’s really nestled down in the bunker, one of the first things that instinctively you are going to want to do is open the clubface up to get some height on the shot. But this is completely the wrong thing to do; you won’t be successful if you do that. The biggest tip I can give you, with hitting from a buried lie in a bunker would be, you need to do the opposite of that, you need to actually close the clubface. Now the reason for that is, if you close the clubface, so we have toed the club in. Okay, we have got the clubface pointing to the left of the target, that will take all the loft off that golf club.

And you will think that’s not going to get the ball up into the air, but what we are going to do is we are actually going to get into that position, because we want the toe of the club, we want this part of the club to dig into the sand first. So this is the area of the club we are aiming to make hit the sand. As the toe of the club digs in, the heel will not yet be in the sand and the club will twist, because the heel will still be accelerating. So as the toe impacts with the sand, it slows this area of the club down, the heel isn’t slowing down and it accelerates past the toe and it makes a scooping action and actually digs the ball out for you. So it’s absolutely crucial that at setup, you turn the clubface left of target, so look at closing the clubface by notice where the handle of the club is and the name of the grip guide on that club and rotate them left of center, then place your hands on.

That’s now close to clubface. Because we have got the clubface closed, we don’t need to aim left for this shot as we would for the greenside splash. So we are just going to aim, parallel to where we want the ball to fly, parallel to that target line. Okay, we are going to play the ball a little bit to the left of center and we are just going to lean slightly on our left side, with our hands ahead or to the left of the ball on the club head as we are looking. This is now going to promote us to pick the club up, so that’s the other main thing we want to work on here, we have closed the clubface and now as we swing back, we really want to pick the club head up very steeply, giving it a very vertical upright swing plane.

So that we can really attack down and hit two inches to the right of the ball, but in a real vertical descending way, and we want to be aggressive with that. It’s not going to look pretty with the follow through here, we will probably get quite stunted, but we need a V shape action in the swing here. So to get that V shape action, we are going to pick the club up, really hinge the wrist, very upright and we are really going to attack down and make a chopping action. Remember, attack down so the toe enters the sand first, it will slow the area of the club down, the heel will accelerate past and it will make a really nice scooping action, as you force the club down and under the ball. So work on that and you should find the buried lies are no longer a problem for you and you can play some really great effective shots out close to the pin.