Lesson #4

April 7th 2019

 
 

So here we can notice your weight was about 50/50 at address and your ball position was middle which tells me you don’t know what shot you’re trying to hit. Ball position will always be either back or forward for low and high. At impact you can see the ball rolling up the club-face because of ball position and angle of attack. The shot comes out soft and short and we see you finish with a middle release. The release is either a lot of wrist or none at all. Below is an example of what the low shot should look like.

 
 
 
 
 
 

You picked up the new form quickly and had immediate success. You can see you finish nice and low on these pitches with a landing spot in mind.

 
 

Here you were working on a drill that helps you be able to control the low point of your golf swing. Draw a line in the sand and take 10-20 practice swings paying attention to your divots. The divot should start on the line and be shallow with a thud noise. If the noise is loud and more like a whack and the divot dark and deep, then the bounce was not engaged. We want quiet but stable lower body and mostly arms and hands hitting the sand about 1 inch behind the ball. Same action as the high chip shot. Weight forward and finish with the clubhead high, releasing the hands a lot.

More great work learning the high chip. We can see your weight is forward, club-face is open, body aiming left to counteract the face. Good early wrist set on the takeaway, slight forward shaft angle at impact which is why some of these were coming out a little too hot and too far.. Club-head was also finishing low which by nature de-lofts the club.

 
 

We had some success with the mid-range bunker shots. The ones that were not satisfactory we can see you were tending to aim your cone too far left and because the shot looks longer your body was trying to put in extra effort to hit it farther and made you lose control of your low point. We can see the club entering the sand 3-4 inches behind.

You can see the club-face aiming right because it is open in order to enable the bounce/sole of the club. Body is aiming left to counteract this and now you can see your shots are going to fire out like a small cone in between those lines.

 
 
 
 

We finished up with some on course scenarios of the low and high shots to help blend the practice into play. The low shot wasn’t successful at first because you carried over some fresh/new feels of hitting it hit out of the bunker. Your last try was the best and we can see that in your finish here which is nice and low with the shaft not releasing. Didn’t get pictures of you trying the high shot but memory tells me that you executed the proper technique multiple times but had trouble feeling how fast and how long to swing the club. This will come with practice and experimenting with how long to swing back and through and at what tempo. Faster tempo is usually better to ensure a solid, clean strike on the ball. Also experiment with how much you open the face to control height and distance. Here’s a bonus video from one of the greats on the high soft pitch. You should see lots of similarities between our lesson and his. Enjoy!