Three Basic Bunker Elements (Video) - by Pete Styles
Three Basic Bunker Elements (Video) - by Pete Styles

If I'm completely honest with you I'm quite happy with that bunker shot. It’s played from a tight lie on a wet sandy bunker, it’s a quite a tight pin position. And I think if I played that shot out on the golf course I’d be pretty happy with the result there. Now there’s three pieces of techniques that are used in that shot that I really think would be beneficial if you bought them into your game. Now the first one is having an open club face. Now the concept of an open club face can look quite strange when you first start doing this, because it’s probably the first time in golf where you’ve lined up and the club face isn’t aiming towards your intended target or square to your stance. So what we do with the club face here, the concept of opening the face is if that club face is vertical and square at a target. I open the club face so it aims to the right, effectively I'm pointing at it one o’clock, 12 o’clock being vertical, one o’clock on the clock face pinned to the side, I would hold the golf club in this position then I would make my grip. And that sets the club face open or pointing to the right of target. Now to counteract that I would aim my feet left of target. So my feet point on one angle, the club points on another angle and there’s quite a big diversion between where my feet and the club face point and that sets the face in an open position.

The next thing I want you to use in a greenside bunker shot like this is a longer backswing than you necessarily feel you would do if you were chipping the ball. So a little chip from here just to go to the edge of the green here would be quite a shot backswing, chipping the ball gently forwards. But for a bunker shot because the sand is going to slow the club down, we’ve got an open club face as well that hits the ball quite high, we therefore need to hit the ball a little bit harder. So we must initiate a longer backswing to generate sufficient power and speed through the ball to splash it out. One other area you could concentrate on really driving through the sand is do a little bit more work with your right hand. If your right hand get’s quite passive, there’s a risk that you’ll hit and the club will stop as soon as it makes contact with the sand and the shot will effectively come out quite fat and quite short of the green. So it’s really quite important we initiate a good full follow through with the right hand, the right hand really works around to a big full follow through, otherwise we stop the golf club too quickly. So it’s three things again, open the face, longer than normal backswing, fire the right hand through impact and try and splash the ball out as close to the flag as you can. Use those three checkpoints to make sure you’re hitting better bunker shots. 2015-11-02

If I'm completely honest with you I'm quite happy with that bunker shot. It’s played from a tight lie on a wet sandy bunker, it’s a quite a tight pin position. And I think if I played that shot out on the golf course I’d be pretty happy with the result there. Now there’s three pieces of techniques that are used in that shot that I really think would be beneficial if you bought them into your game. Now the first one is having an open club face. Now the concept of an open club face can look quite strange when you first start doing this, because it’s probably the first time in golf where you’ve lined up and the club face isn’t aiming towards your intended target or square to your stance. So what we do with the club face here, the concept of opening the face is if that club face is vertical and square at a target. I open the club face so it aims to the right, effectively I'm pointing at it one o’clock, 12 o’clock being vertical, one o’clock on the clock face pinned to the side, I would hold the golf club in this position then I would make my grip. And that sets the club face open or pointing to the right of target. Now to counteract that I would aim my feet left of target. So my feet point on one angle, the club points on another angle and there’s quite a big diversion between where my feet and the club face point and that sets the face in an open position.

The next thing I want you to use in a greenside bunker shot like this is a longer backswing than you necessarily feel you would do if you were chipping the ball. So a little chip from here just to go to the edge of the green here would be quite a shot backswing, chipping the ball gently forwards. But for a bunker shot because the sand is going to slow the club down, we’ve got an open club face as well that hits the ball quite high, we therefore need to hit the ball a little bit harder. So we must initiate a longer backswing to generate sufficient power and speed through the ball to splash it out. One other area you could concentrate on really driving through the sand is do a little bit more work with your right hand. If your right hand get’s quite passive, there’s a risk that you’ll hit and the club will stop as soon as it makes contact with the sand and the shot will effectively come out quite fat and quite short of the green. So it’s really quite important we initiate a good full follow through with the right hand, the right hand really works around to a big full follow through, otherwise we stop the golf club too quickly. So it’s three things again, open the face, longer than normal backswing, fire the right hand through impact and try and splash the ball out as close to the flag as you can. Use those three checkpoints to make sure you’re hitting better bunker shots.