Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

It's really important for any lady golfer to be able to hit her 3-wood effectively. Ladies tend to struggle with achieving distance in their playing golf. So if you can hit your 3-wood effectively of the fairway, you're going to have a major advantage over other golfers, and you also are going to say that you really lower your golf scores because you're able to get the ball onto the green in a fewer number of shots, so working on the shots really going to help you a lot to lower your scores.

So let's have a look at how to setup effectively and then the correct swing to make. What are we going to do here is to address the 3-wood and the ball is we're going to play the ball about an inch inside the left heel? We need to have a more forward ball position to play this 3-wood shot. The reason for that is the 3-wood because of the length of the club its going to sit quite flat, quite low to the ground so the shaft angle is relatively low to the ground, and that's going to mean that we need to use a flatter swing and a more sweeping action to clip the ball off the surface of the grass and to get a good connection and a long flight.

So because we got that more sweeping action and that flatter swinger arc means that the club needs a little bit longer as its coming back onto the target line to actually start traveling down the target line. So if we play the ball a little bit further forward, and we get the ball inside that left heel that's given us the time to make this flatter swing, make this most sweeping action back into the ball, but to travel down the target line and to square the clubfaces to connect. So that's why we need to play the ball position about an inch inside the left heel.

We're also going to look at here that as we setup we want just to touch more way on the right foot so maybe 55% of the way on the right foot to promote that flatter swinging action and that sweeping action coming in, and we also want to setup so that your head is behind the ball. It's on the right of the ball is you're looking down at the ball. We don’t get on top of the ball because this with the head position is we promote is to pick the club up, and we don’t want a steep action into the ball. I'll swing, we want to be thinking it as a U shape rather than a V shape so we're going to sweep in, and we're going to have nice flat bottom to the swing rather than with the V shape we got this real steep angle of attack down into the ball, and that doesn’t, that's not going to where it can be effective to your 3-wood.

So ball position forward wait slightly on the right, head behind the ball and hands working on getting the hands over the crown of the club. We don’t want the hands forward again or promote is to pick the club up. As we swing the club then, we're going to work on having this flatter angle that we swing the club round, so we don’t want to see the club head going up steeply and staying in front of you. We want to allow the club head to rotate around you working again a really good shoulder turn during the swing and that's going to allow us to create a very wide swing arc, so the club head is going to really travel out wide away from the ball. It's going to give you more to generate club head spade as you come back through and into the shot.

So if you take those setup ideas, implement them well, ball forward in the stance, wait on the right foot, head to the right, and the hand position, and then work on making that nice flatter swing back in. You're going to hit a great goal shot. So learning to be able to hit your 3 would effectively clip in the ball off the turf, taking it really cleanly its going to give you a consistent strike, but more importantly than that its going to give you plenty of distance. You're going to be able to hit the green and much fewer shots its going to get you scores much lower.