Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Here we're going to look at how to play out of the situation where you've got yourself into thick rough. Now, one of the main things here with thick rough is don’t be over ambitious. You've got to just look at from this situation, get in the ball out of the thick rough and back into play, so take a lofted club, don’t play for distance. If you feel the lie isn’t too bad, and you can get less loft onto it, then that's fine. But if you're in thick rough and the ball's nuzzle down, take a lofted club okay.

The other, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to look at opening that clubface up again to help get the ball out of this thick rough and back into play, so rotate the handle of the golf club to the right, and then put your hands onto the golf club. Really important you do this way around because if you put your hands on and then rotate the face effectively you haven’t opened the golf club up. We want to create some height here to get the ball out. The other thing we also want to do is if the rough is really long and thick, as the club comes back into the rough.

The rough is going to grab hold do the hustle here, and is it grabs hold to the hustle and its resistance been met by the hustle, its going to slow this part of the club down, so the toe is going to turn in, and as the toe turns in because its not yet been slowed down. It will square the clubface for you as you strike. If you start with the square face address position and that happens it's actually going to rotate the toe of the club head and close the clubface making you deloft the club and hit the ball into the grass. So open the clubface up number one to give you a bit more height, but number two if the resistance of the club going into the grass if that resistance is there, it will allow you to rotate the clubface, but still got the ball out.

The next I would say is just hold on a little bit tighter to the golf club because when you swing through and you do meet that resistance it's really important you've got a nice firm grip. If you're holding too lightly as you hit the club down into the grass and the grass grabs hold of the club and the shaft then if you hold into loosely the clubs going to come away from your hand, so you've really got to be quite firm with the shot so hold on nice and tightly. We're going to play the ball from the center of your stance, and we're going to lean onto the left foot.

So we've opened the clubface up. I would aim slightly left okay not too far left, but slightly left to allow for the fact that if the clubface does come in a little bit open you'll still hit the fairway or your target with your recovery shot. And if the clubface does turn in slightly again you're still going to hit the correct area. So we've got slide him away on the left side here. I'd be quite aggressive here and put 80% of the way onto that left side. If not 85, and we really want to work on hinging the wrists, really want to work on picking the club head up, so that means as we're swinging back we're really look into getting the club head forward of those into a high position we're not looking for a sweeping action where the club head is going to move around the back of us.

So pick the club head up. We're going to make a very V shaped swing here. The club head is going to go up, and then it's really going to drop down steeply to catch the ball and to catch the grass. So open the clubface, ball centered, hold in slightly tighter than usual and we've got a good 80-85% of our weight on our left foot. We now really hinge the wrist, pick the club head up and drive down to really catch the back of the ball, really force the club down very powerfully to make sure that you could get enough club head speed to get the ball out of the rough and to resist the club being grabbed by the rough and stopping it.

You're going to find when you play this shot that you'll get stuck in the rough as you go through, so your follow through is going to be stunted. Low club head position is absolutely fine. The key points though is to make its V shaped swing and attack down very aggressively. You'll find that you're able to escape from the thick rough, but again remember priority is to get the ball out back into play.