How To Hit Bunker Shots Close From Every Distance (By Dan Grieve)

Hi, I'm Dan Grieve and I'm going to talk about bunker play in this video. Some bunker basics and also how you control distance out of the sand which I know is an issue for a lot of you when you're out there playing golf. I'm here in association with adidas and CodeChaos 27 and I'm going to go through the setup. The setup is the most important part to bunker play. We've got to make sure we get the setup basics right. I see a lot of golfers in the bunker, they panic a little bit, start trying to hit it too hard, and there's this big weight shift from side to side, really hard to control the low point of the swing, get the strike when you're moving around that much. So I like a nice solid base. So if you stand around about driver width, which is wider than your shoulders, have your trail foot slightly flared out, but you can see this front foot is flared out around 45 degrees, so we really flared it out. And that allows you then to really push your front knee over the foot. So I like to feel I've got diagonal downward pressure. So everything is moving down through this foot, the pelvis is forward. And if the lie has a nice bit of sand to it, there's plenty of sand in the bunk, you want to slightly reverse your shoulders and that allows you to splash it. If the bunker has very little sand in it, then you want to lean more this way and that helps the club. dig more into it so the variable really is what you do with your shoulders depending on the lie but if you've got an okay lie this would be how you would position your body ball position round about one ball inside your heel and open a club face and then take your grip very important you don't grip it and then twist it open it and then take the grip and make sure the shaft is more or less in line with the back of the ball so i've drawn a line here in the sand and that's where That's where the shaft wants to be. Medium towards the top of the grip. Don't go right down the grip for a standard shot. I'm going to talk about how you vary distance in a minute, so just hang on for that. But if we're talking about the basics here, it's really trying to get a good distance away from the ball. You can see I'm further away here, and that allows me to get my hands nice and low. You really want to look at your hands almost between your knees. That puts lots of cupping in your lead wrist there, which will help you hinge and release the club. So they're the set-up basics. I feel like I've really got the ground, I'm using the ground, I've got a good platform for me to then execute the swing. Now, in the swing, it's important to do two things. You need to blend in a turn of the body with a hinge of the wrists. I'm really looking to put some cup into this left wrist for me as a right-handed golfer. If I've done that correctly, very simply, the club face should look at my face. If your club face is looking down, you can see I've arched my wrist. If I cup this wrist correctly, it's looking back at my face. That's a really simple way of checking, but do it with turn. I do see some players who just pick it up. So you have to feel like you turn as well at the same time. And then coming down, your right elbow should stay quite close to you and you release the club back to this line. So somewhere between a release two and release three. As you do that, the toe of the club will naturally square up. You see as I release the shaft, we're not trying to hold on to the loft. We're releasing the loft, the toe releases, and then the face looks back at you here. So if you can just very simply concentrate on a face-to-face, the release. Face to face, a bit of chest turn, hopefully you'll get some bunker shots that look a bit like this. You hear that noise, it's all about the splash, the splash of the sand really is the secret. I can give a bunker lesson without even watching the ball, the noise tells me everything. But you see how my lower body is fairly static, there's a bit of rotation but you can see how the right foot isn't really lifting too much, it's very much about how I'm rotating. Around my lower body rather than driving through. To drive through is what kills so many golfers out of the sand. So turn, hinge, release and turn. And then you can splash it out just like that. Okay, so now you've got some bunker basics in there. Let's talk about how you can really start to control distance. You may want to hit a short bunker shot, mid-length bunker shot, and a long bunker shot. So I'm going to go through some of the things you need to change that will help you do that. So I'll start with a short bunker shot, quite tricky here, down a slope, only around about five yard carry. That would be about as far as I want to hit this. So the first thing is club selection. I've gone with my 60 degree, my TaylorMade Hi-Toe 5 60 degree here because I need to get as much spin as possible. Also, when I'm trying to get a shorter bunker shot, I'll go down the grip. So move your hands down the grip and get a little bit further away and really sit down. You can see how low I'm getting here. The lower you get down here, the more cupping you put in your wrist. And because your hands are so low, it really promotes a shorter swing from that lower hand position. So you can open the face up a little bit more for this shot. Really low, and just from the setup alone, it makes it very difficult to go long. My hands pretty much stay in this little box just here, so we're not traveling too much from side to side. From there, I just make a normal swing. I'm not going to hit it too hard, and then we can start to get little control shots like that. I can't see from down here, but I think that was pretty close. Let's try that again. We're going really down the grip, super low with the hands, still getting the basics through that left foot there, hinging, releasing, but you can see it's not a particularly long swing because my setup basics are really limiting my ability to get a long swing and allowing me to play a little short, cute shot like that. That's how you play the short bunker shot, a little bit more loft. Lower, further away, and then still release it. It allows you to play that little cute shot. Let's get into the mid shot now. Okay, so now it's a mid length bunker shot now, which is about 15 yards. We've done the five yard one where my hands were really low and really opening the club face. Don't need to be as aggressive in terms of opening the face or your hands quite as low for this shot because we want this ball to go forward more. It does not necessarily need to go quite as high. So I've gone to my 56 degree, my sand wedge. That's going to help me get increased distance. And I'm now at my regular hand position. They're still low, but not as low as I used them for the really short shot. So slightly longer swing this time, a little bit more speed with the chest. I start to think about controlling the distance of the shot with the speed of my chest. Basically how hard I'm working the sand will dictate for me how far I start to hit the shot. So slightly longer swing here, but again, a lot of that comes for free from the setup. And we start to get some nice distance control in there. I would probably struggle to get that with the 60 degree to that pin. So if you're a player using your 60 everywhere for all length bunker shots, I think this will really help you just let the loft dictate the distance control a little bit more. So regular setup, a little bit more speed of the chest, and then we can start to get distance control just like that. Now we're getting to a long one. Right, so we're on to the long bunker shot, the hardest shot in golf, so they say. Now, it is the hardest shot in golf. If you're trying to attempt this with a really lofted club, such as your 60 or 58, you would really have to play a world-class shot. And sometimes you've got to do that because you might have no green to work with. But in this situation, which I think is generally what we get on a long bunker shot, we have green to work with. We go down the loft. We use a 60 for the short one, a 56 for the mid. I've now got a 52, which is a gap wedge. A 50 or 52 would be an excellent choice if you carry either of those lofts. And this time, again, open the face quite as much now. We're progressively squaring that face, so it's still a touch open. We still want to use the bounce, want to release the club, so we don't want it dead square. Still taking sand here, by the way. This is now 30 yards, 35 yards or so. So we have the face a little bit open, we're setting up exactly the same way, standing maybe a little bit closer now. The wrist angle isn't quite as pronounced, it's going to help me produce a bit more energy moving forward and less of the sand working upwards helps me hit a longer bunker shot. A little bit more speed of the chest, but this setup we worked hard on at the beginning, really putting the pressure down is key for this shot because I do think subconsciously, when you've got a long bunker shot, I tend to see players losing the ground too much because they're trying to get the ball out to that long pin, the hips go, and then you can hit the ball first, and we've all done that, and it's just game over when you do that, isn't it? So really root your feet down, get the right club in your hand, and then just make a regular swing and trust the loft of the club will get the ball there. and you can see you can start to longer bunker shots there and that was nice it still had a bit of spin on it you know it's the 52 still had control but for me to hit that type of shot that quality shot with a sand wedge or a lob wedge it would be much much harder so you can see i'm just increasing the speed of the chest and that's helping make the carry now it's hitting a little bit of an upslope there so another version of of playing this shot, if you want the ball to run a bit more, using even less loft. This is a 9-iron, believe it or not. Now the lip is, I know it looks quite tall, the 9-iron will still carry that. Open the face, do it with a 9-iron this time, down the grip now, almost at the bottom, make the same swing of a 9, and hopefully we'll see this ball run out a little bit more. So in this particular shot with that upslope as well, I don't even mind going down to a 9-iron. You see how this ball wants to run out more. So it's running out towards the pin which really for a lot of you probably is the safest shot from this situation if you got down in three from here for a lot of you you're low in your handicap you don't have to get this up and down so a nine iron maybe a pitching wedge just playing your normal bunker shot technique see that's got into that bank but this one's going forward because we got the right. club in the hand there so the 9-iron who'd have thought it for long bunker play i think is a great way of doing it so you can see from this video you've learned how to get your bunker basics in terms of setup and swing you've got a short bunker shot technique a mid bunker shot technique and the long bunker shot you've got solutions for all of those tricky shots. Hopefully that helps you and enjoy your short game.