Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Here are two great golf shots for you to learn to play to help you recover when you’re out on the golf course and it really will rescue a situation if you’ve got slightly out of position on the course. The first of these shots is learning how to hit the low punch shot. This is a really great recovery shot if you’ve got out of position and now you’re in the trees or you’ve got overhanging branches that are affecting the trajectory that you need to hit the ball. Instead of just hitting a small chip and just getting the ball back onto the fairway where you will lose your adage and it might cost you an extra shot or two on the hole learn to play the low punch. Get the ball going low under the trees and get the ball working down the fairway for yourself. You might even be able to catch the green by getting the ball to run this far. So to play this low punch shot you need to set up to the ball slightly back in your stance more than normal, weight slightly on the left more than normal I would say get about 70% of your weight onto your left side and really lean the shaft of the club forward. You want to work on having a really straight line from your left shoulder down your left arm to your hand and then continue that on down to the club head. When we’re going to hit the punch shots important as you move the club away you don’t use your wrist so you don’t set your wrist during the swing we’re just going to swing back and really work on keeping the straight line down the left arm and into the shaft of the club. If you start to hinge your wrist that’s going to start to put more trajectory and a higher launch angle onto the shot.

So work on swinging back, keeping the arms straight, keep the weight on the left as you swing through, really work on leaning the shaft forward again as you hit the ball and you will see you get quite a laid off swing position as you finish which just means that the club head is lower than your hands. So again just maintain that straight line through the shots you’ll get a very low trajectory. The second shot that I would say is absolutely vital for you to learn to play well when you are out on the golf course is to play from the rough. Again if you got yourself into a position where you’ve hit the rough being able to play out well absolutely crucial if you want to get a low score on the hole and it doesn’t matter if you’re further back up the fairway or quite close to the green. I suggest you play this shot with a much more lofted club so here I’ve swapped my club up to my Sand Iron; it’s got a lot of angle to help the ball pop up out of the longer grass.

Play the ball so that it’s in the centre of the feet and again weight on the left side so a good 60/70% of your weight leaning on your left hands forward, creating this straight line. Okay we now want to hinge the wrist so we want to pick the club head up quite steeply so that we could make a downward hitting action. And we’re looking to really get the club down so the club head hits the back of the ball, hits the ground and it will pop the ball up really high. So looking this way the action we want to make is to get the club head up quite steeply rather than around you. So make sure you use the wrist, get the club head up steeply and then you can just work on how big your swing is going to be and how hard you are going to hit the ball depending on the distance for the shot. So work on those two; rescue shots and they should really help you lower your scores when you are out on the course.