The Art of Chipping with Phil Mickelson | EP. 1

Phil Mickelson shares the foundation on how he became one of the best wedge players in the world.

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Welcome to Phil Mickelson and the Highf Flyers YouTube channel. We have something special for today. We’re going to try to give you a baseline for pretty much 90% of all the shots that you will hit short gamewise. And we’ll use this as a reference when you have questions on how to hit shots in the future. It’s the first part of a two-part series. The second part will be much more in-depth on details and so forth, but it will all be predicated upon what we learned today. This is about building a foundation of a short game technique that will allow you to hit every shot possible. that will just be a small variation off of what you learn today. In the past, you’ve heard me say that there’s only one way to chip. And that’s true, but it’s not really true. Like, there’s a lot of ways to hit a lot of shots. The reason why I say there’s only one way to chip is that there’s only way one way to chip for every shot that you’ll come across. We can learn a technique that is useful half the time based on your lie, but why would you do that? Like let’s learn a technique that you can use 100% of the time with just small variations in the setup. You’ll hear me say like never chip with with the ball in between your feet. And I mean never chip with the ball in your feet between your feet, but not really never because there are times when you might chip with the ball in between your feet, which I’ll get to, but that’s more for a nuance shot. You’ll also hear me say things that seemingly are the exact opposite. Like I’ll say, “So you want to have enough back swing so the club falls in the ball?” Or I might say you want to take the club back shorter so you can hit the ball aggressively. Seemingly o opposite things, but not really. They’re opposite, but they’re not really like they’re just different ways of doing it. I’m going to throw a bunch of stuff at you and and see if it uh what resonates uh because all things uh can be used. All things will be effective for certain situations. Now, as we get started, I have to go over the basics that we you’ve probably seen on the internet. I’ve called it chipping 101. It’s like the most basic of basic. And I’m not going to spend a ton of time on that, but it is probably the most important part because everything that we go on and talk about thereafter will be predicated on that and will be a small variation of that. So, you have heard me say the three things that you have to do in chipping is you’ve got to have your weight on your front foot because we have to keep the leading edge down. Once the leading edge comes up, it goes right into the ball and we have 60 degrees of loft. But we’ve got to keep that leading edge down because that’s making contact with the ball or the ground first. So to do that, when our weight is forward, that tends to drive the club down. If our weight gets back, the leading edge is working up and that’s no good. So everything that we do is really designed to keep the leading edge down and through the shot. So we have to have our weight on our front foot. That’s like a given. We also have to have our hands ahead. Like we have to have the club in a straight line or an inverse straight line. Once our hands are back, the club flips and the leading edge comes up and goes right into the ball. So, the the second most important thing is that we have to have our hands ahead of of the the club. I like to start with a straight line and let my wrist break a little bit off the ball. That gets my my hands ahead of the club. And what that the reason that’s important is at any point I can stop my back swing and I can move forward. If my hands are behind and I take it back, I can’t go forward from this position. I have to wait to get my hands ahead and that leads to oftentimes too long of a back swing and it doesn’t allow for um very solid consistent contact. But if my hands start ahead or is in a straight line, the other way that you can do it is just start with your hands ahead. Uh Zack Johnson, Steve Stricker tend to do that. They break their wrist before and they lock them in and they can just make a kind of a shoulder movement. Both of both ways are effective. But the reason that’s so important is one, it keeps the leading edge down. Your hands are ahead, the leading edge stays down. And two, we can stop our back swing at any point. And we’re in a perfect position to go forward. So, I can move the club back and through. And if I want to go a little shorter, I can stop it shorter. And I’m in a position from that position to go forward. And that’s a little shorter. And if I want to go a little longer, I can go longer and I’m in a position to go to to go into the ball at any point when I stop my back swing. When my hands are ahead, I can go forward. Third is we have to make a decision. What shot are we trying to hit? Do we want to go low or high? If we want to hit it high, we’re going to have it off of our front foot. That doesn’t mean always off the front foot. It means in off the front foot or even ahead if I want to go even higher. It just depends on how high we want to go, how extreme. And the same thing on the on the back foot. When we want to go low, we’re going off of our back foot. So, it’s going to be in this general vicinity here. So, if I want to go moderately low, it’s kind of off of my toe. And if I want to go super low, it might even be further back. And you can see it goes even lower and hotter and and and takes off. So, we have to make a decision if we’re going low or high. And that helps us commit to the shot, but it also helps with our ball placement when we have the ball in the middle of our stance. And I say never hit a chip with the ball in the middle of your stance because you haven’t made a commitment on what shot you’re going to hit. You’re not if you want to go high, well, it’s too far back to go high and you have to try to help it up and it’s too far forward to go low. You can’t get your weight far enough forward. So, so it’s really just a non-committed shot and it also leads to the club wanting to try to scoop it up because we want to try to hit it high and so we try to like help it up and and that’s not that’s not a good thing. We really want to commit to lower high. put the ball off your front foot or back foot in that vicinity based on how extreme we want to go. So, those are the three things that we really need to do and identify when we’re chipping. Like, all right, am I going low or high? So, it’s going to be back foot or front foot. Am I going uh I’m going to have my weight forward? Obviously, how much? Like, how much weight forward? Well, it depends on the the the turf interaction. If it’s the ball sitting up and the the ground is soft, maybe 55 45 or 6040, not that much more forward. But if it’s really firm, tight, compacted sand, hard pan, we’re going to have 100% on our front foot. We’ll just drive it down into the ground. So, those are uh the three basic things. Now that now that we covered that, I want to move on. But I also need you to master those things and and and know that that’s that’s the foundation because from here on out, everything we talk about is going to be a variable of that. Like how far back, how far forward, how much weight forward, how much hands position, all that stuff uh is going to come into play from here on out. So, we’ve got to master those those three things. You’ve probably heard that before. You’ve probably heard seen on the on the internet. You’ve heard me talk about that. That is the most basic of basic stuff for for chipping. Let’s move on to some more of the nuances on hitting shots. As we move on to more of the nuances of shots, we’re going to start to use loft as a means for touch. Because if we’re doing our first three things where we have our weight forward, our hands are forward, and ball position is proper, then it’s going to be very easy to make solid contact because the club will just want to naturally go down into the ball. So, if I want the ball to uh release a little bit, I can go off of Let me say this. It’s always easier to chip off of your back foot because you’re coming in steeper. So, let’s start every shot and say, can I hit this off my back foot? If I can play it off my back foot, it’s much easier to come in steeper, makes solid contact than when it’s off my front foot and I’m coming in shallower. Whether I’m in the rough catching more grass or whether I have a tight lie and the club’s coming in too shallow, it’s always easier off of our back foot. So, let’s start there. And we say, okay, can how can I get this shot close to this hole that I’m shooting at? If I put it off my back foot and I have a square face, that’s probably a little too much. So, I fly it on the green and sure enough, the ball goes racing by. Okay. So, can I open the face enough and give it enough loft to maybe soften it even though I’m going off my back foot? So, I’m going low. I’m going off my back foot. I’m going to run it, but I’m going to add loft and see if I can get it to slow down a little bit. Well, that came off low, but it certainly didn’t come off as hot. It stopped around whole high. So, yeah, I think that’s that’s viable. I can put it off my back toe. I open up the face and I can hit a low runner, but it will soften it enough to where it should stop by the hole. So, I always want to start there. So, yes, I’m committed to going low, but I’ve used loft to soften it a little bit. Now, I could also I I also do the same thing in reverse. So, I’ll say, “Okay, so I have a square face here. I don’t think that’s going to stop. So, I have my weight forward. My hands are forward. I’ve set up properly. The face is pretty square. I’m going to hit a nice soft shot, high shot, soft shot. Oh, but it’s still going. It’s going way by the hole. So, now I have to make it even softer. So, I have my weight forward, my hands are forward, and I open up the club face. I add a little bit of loft, and the ball pops up nice and soft and ends up about hole high. As we move forward, I want you to understand something about the lob shot is that the reason I’m able to get the ball to go vertical. It’s actually I need a little bit of firmer ground. When the ground is soft, I have to kind of shallow out the bottom of my arc to make solid contact. When the ground is firm, this is how I get the ball to go vertical. I drive the club in behind the ball. It hits the firmness of the ground, pops up into the ball, and the ball goes vertical. I’m not doing it with my hands. I’m not scooping the ball up. So, when I put somebody a yard in front of me, three feet in front of me, I actually need a little bit of firm ground to get the ball to pop up to go over them. If it’s too soft, if I drive that club into the ground, the club just keeps digging. It never bounces into the ball and the ball just kind of goes blah comes out comes out soft. So, I have to use my hands to try to flip it up. But when I do that, the ball launches a little bit lower and it takes longer to get it the the apex and get the height. The way I get it to go pop up straight is I drive it into the ground and then the wedge pops up right into the ball. So that’s the physics of the lob shot and how I’m able to hit it off of tight fairways. And you’ll realize why then it’s so important to have your weight forward. Because when you have your weight forward, that keeps the leading edge down as we drive it into that hard ground knowing that the club’s going to pop up. It gets it underneath the ball before the club pops up. Okay. Couple of little tricks now on some of these chips that we should really know and and uh develop. When we have a full swing, the club has a lot of momentum takes us up into the finish. These little pitches, we we don’t have enough me momentum really to get us up into the finish. Our knees are bent. They they they are designed to bend forward. And I want momentum taking them this taking us this way. So the club the full swing has enough momentum it gets me towards the target. But in chipping, I don’t have enough momentum. So, I have to somewhat make an adjust. I’ll call cheat a little bit or make an adjustment. And basically, I just take my feet, my back foot, and I just turn it 20, 30° towards the target. Now, by turning my rear foot, instead of being, you know, perpendicular, by turning my toes a little bit, now I’m able to easily kind of move my knees and bend it uh towards the target as such. very easy to kind of get into the finish and continue the momentum and not have a stop at the ball. So, that’s a nice little trick on these shots. And and I I do want to clarify these shots are all 30 yards and in. Once we get outside of 30 yards, it becomes more of a fuller swing, 45 shot yard shots. And we will start putting the ball right in the middle of our stance. I put all my short irons in the middle of my stance. And once I get over 30 yards, right around 45 or so, balls right back in my middle of my stance. So when I say don’t ever put the ball in Miller stands for chipping. That’s 30 yards and in all these short shorter little shots. Okay. As we move on now and we talked about loft as our touch element. When we open the face, ball’s going to want to go to the side. So, we just have to adjust our alignment a little bit so that we’re aimed a little more open or so that the club face is aimed more at the target so that when I go out to the target, the ball goes there and I don’t have to cut across it as much. So, that’s just a slight adjustment that we need to be aware of as we use loft to soften our shots. We also have to make a slight adjustment u in in our setup. So, as we move forward, there’s one other thing that sometimes gets misconstrued among some of the people that I’ve worked with, and that is kind of our shoulder alignment, if you will, or our shoulder pitch or or uh degrees of which it is relative to the ground. So, when I talk about weight forward, sometimes we get our shoulders tilted down. And this tends to be um kind of a natural instinct is that all right, I got my weight forward, but our our shoulders are tilted down and it kind of drives the club down into the ground and the ball comes hot. It it it comes too steep. It doesn’t soften the impact condition. So, I just want to point out that there’s a little bit of a difference here. And that is the difference is that I can have my weight forward. You can see uh I have all my weight on my front foot, but I can have my shoulders like this or I can level them out. I still have my weight on my front foot. So, let me align here. I have my weight on my front foot, but as I tilt my shoulders and level them to the ground, that’s going to come out to a softer, more level shot. So, when I have a a nice lie, I’m kind of leveling the impact condition out by using my upper body rather than my shoulder or my lower body. And I just want to point that out because sometimes when we put our weight forward, our shoulders tend to uh tilt a little too much down. All right, I picked up the balls. As we move forward, I just want to show why it’s important to develop that technique and that style of setup and that understanding of how the the the club and the ball and the turf interact because going forward, again, every shot we hit will be a slight variation or or uh adjustment off of that. Now, I say never hit the ball chip with the ball in between your stance and never let the club pass. Now, can you do that? Of course you can. You can hit shots effectively that way. I have the ball in the middle of my stance. I have my hands back and I’m letting that club flip underneath. I hit a very nice chip there. I also have a slight uphill lie and the ball’s sitting good as I move to this little hump here. And I now put it, as you can see, on a downhill lie. I’ll get it to stop right here on a downhill lie. If I have the ball in the middle of my stance and I let that club pass, there’s no way to get the club under the ball. It’s going to blade. I can’t hit the hot shot, the high shot. So, I have to for hopefully be able to putt it or or hit a little lower chip or or or what have you. But what if there’s a bunker there? What if there’s water or what if there’s a rock or something in front of me? It doesn’t allow me to do that. You want to be able to hit all the shots. So, so why work on a technique that works half the time, that only works under half the conditions, that only works when you have a a perfect lie for it? That that does us no good. We don’t know what we’re going to face on the golf course, what kind of lies we’re going to get, what kind of shot we’re going to have. So, let’s be prepared to hit them all. And we can simplify it by those those few three things that we talked about at the start where we have our weight forward, our ball position front or back, and our hands forward. And then everything will be an adjustment off of that. So if I if I get now on this downhill lie again and it’s tight. I mean this is fairway and it’s tight and I’m like I want to hit the ball high and soft. Well, I have to be a little more extreme with our fundamentals. I’m going to have all my weight on my front foot. I’m going to drive this club down into the ground even harder because I’ve got to make sure it gets underneath this ball and it’s on a downhill lie and it’s firm. I’m going to lay that club flat. So now I’m just going to extreme. I’m going to do the My hands are forward, ball’s forward, weight is forward, just like we talked about. And I’m just going to get extreme with it to drive it underneath the ball. And I’m able to pop it up and hit a flop shot off of that lie. And it’s no different than the basic chip that we were doing. All it was was a variation in our setup and going a little bit more extreme. And I want you to have that foundation to be able to tackle any shot as it comes. I don’t want you to be limited to one technique that only works when oh the ball’s up sitting up perfectly and I’ve got a nice lie and it’s uphill lie and I can go hands back and let it flip underneath and be fine. Whatever that that this makes no sense. So let’s equip yourself to hit all shots. And that’s why it’s so important. Okay. There’s a number of really good short game instructors. They say the same thing I’m saying but like a little different way. And I’m going to say a couple I’m going to say again. Let me start with one thing. I’ll say five different ways. You’ve heard me say hinge and hold. All right. You’ve heard me say you want to break your wrist going back and hold it going through. So I break them going back. I hold them going through. Now you can see I held them going through because I have a straight line with my arm and club. So I’ve obviously held it going through. My hands are up here. They do not stop at impact. And it’s it’s very important. So now I’m going to say it a different way. It’s important to get your hands to pass your hip. I want my hands to make sure that I accelerate past my hip. Okay, so now I’ve just passed my hip. Yeah, I still have a straight line, but I’ve passed my hip. As long as I pass my hip, the leading edge will stay down through the ball. It does not matter what my hands do after they pass my hip. I can flip it like this. I can pass as long as my hands get past my hip. Now I have a little bit of a V. And as long as my hands get past my hip, I can have a lot of a V. I flipped it over. Doesn’t matter. Same shot. As long as they get past the hip. So, hinge and hold is a way of saying it. Another way of saying it is I want your hands to feel like they’re hitting your front pocket. So, I put my put a little uh microphone here in front pocket. I’m going to try to like hit my front pocket as I go through. What that’s going to do is keep my hands moving and keep it low. So, I hit my my front leg. Club went right on through. We also don’t want our hands to get high, right? We don’t want our hands to get high. So, hitting your front pocket keeps your hands low. It’s another way of saying keep your hands low through the shot. So, I want them to accelerate. I want them to hit my my front pocket. I want them to get past my hip. I want to hinge and hold. Same thing. I’m just saying the same thing different ways. And there’s a lot of great instructors that say the same thing in a different way. And there’s one really great instructor who talks about coming into the ball vertically, like it’s very important to come in more vertical. And that’s absolutely correct. I’m going to reverse it and say it another way. So, hear me out. When we putt, if I have a closed putter, my stroke is going to go out. All of ours will because we intuitively know that the face is closed and we have to swing out for the ball to go to our target. If I open the face at a dress, I instinctively know the ball’s going to go pushed. And so, I putt and I pull across it in an effort to get the face to hit the ball towards our target. If I keep my hands closed going back, whether I start with a open face or a square face or whatever, if my hands are closed going back, I the ball’s going to be steep and it’s going to be a pull and I have to work my hands out. Now, my hands are working high and they’re working out away from my body, which is not what I want. If I if my hands go are closed going back as opposed to opening. If they go closed going back, I have to either shut come out swing out to the target or if I just let it come down steep, I hit a hot I hit a hot pull. So to combat that, if I if my hands are like closed going back, I have to then go forward and kind of like open the face to try to get it to go to the target because my body reacts to the club. So if I let the face go open, what am I going to instinctively do? I’m going to get steeper to try to get it to come back onto the onto the target line. So, if I open the face going back, whether I let it come inside or out here, my instincts are going to get more vertical, more on top of it as a way to try to get the ball to go to the target. So, we as players, all of us react to the club face. So, what I am saying is in the in reverse to some excellent instructors which are saying come in steep. Absolutely. What I’m saying is let the face go open and you’re going to come in steep. By rotating the face open, I’m also going to come in steep because it’s going to force me to come over to get the ball in line. Now, our setup also controls our shot. If my weight is forward, that also is going to make it steep. So, if I want a steep path, which I do, my weight needs to be forward. As soon as my weight goes back, the path comes in. Weight forward, path up, weight back, path comes around. So, our setup controls the path as well. The more weight forward, the more vertical it’s going to be. So, what am I what am I really saying? Like, when I want to hit these chips, I want to feel as though my weight is forward, my hands are forward, right? I’m I’m set up for success here. But I also want the club face to open. I want to let it open up a little bit so that I can slide the club under the ball, get some spin on it. I also want to let the club rotate open as it goes vertical. So, I’m weight forward. Club’s going to go vertical. I’m going to rotate the face open. That’s going to help keep me vertical. It’s going to help me get right under the shot and just hit these nice soft little shots. There’s one more little tidbit I wanted to go over on the details of these fundamentals. So the way I see it is like we have these three fundamentals of our weights forward, our ball position is front or back, and our hands are forward, our hands are ahead. Okay? So we have those three basic fundamentals, and then we have these variables that we’ve talked about. We’ve talked about opening the club face uh to create a little softer shot whether we go high or low with it. We can play play it off our back foot and open the face. We’ve talked about how uh we want to turn our toes or our feet more towards a target so we have momentum taking us there. We’ve talked about how um we want to have a steep path, but how our weight determines that. And I want to show one more thing that you’ve noticed probably as I chip. My feet are pretty close together. Okay. So, as my feet are close together, my center of gravity or my sternum, let’s say, it’s over the ball. it’s going to create a uh a vertical swing path. So, what what a lot of people do is have a wider stance. Oh, what just happened? I widened my stance, my sternum went back. So, now my center of gravity moved back, my sternum moved back, and now the bottom of my arc moved back. We don’t want to do that. So, I start with my front foot and I widen my stance and my sternum just went from here to here. I I I don’t want that. That’s why my feet are closer together. I don’t want to pull my center of gravity, my sternum, my center of mass back and create the bottom of the arc back and shallow it everything out. I want it more vertical. So, I’ve got to have my feet a little closer together so that I’m not pulling that back. So, that’s one more little tidbit. Uh, I wanted to point out as we move forward and start talking about the subtleties, nuances of these shots, you now have enough of a basic understanding of physically how to do the how how to do it, how to hit these shots, and like what it is you have to process to go through and the little tidbits. Well, why can’t I get through the shot? Well, you you need to turn your feet forward. Or like, why is that ball too hot? Well, open the face. Or, you know, I keep hitting the ground first. Well, yeah, you’re a little shallow. You’re hitting back. So you have a basic understanding of how to make solid contact, how to make the adjustments to to get the ball close and hit the shot that you ultimately want to hit. And we’re going to talk about like different lies and and different u ways to attack that to get the ball to do what you want to get close to the hole. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I know there’s questions about the wedge itself. And people are like, “Well, how much bounce should I have?” And uh how much bounce do you have? And do I want 10 or six or eight or 10 or 12 or whatever? Okay, the bounce of your particular club does not matter. All that matters is that whatever your bounce is, it’s going to affect your setup. So, if you have more bounce, 10, 12 degrees like I do, guess what? I’m going to have more weight on my front foot than you do. If you have six or eight, if you have six or eight degrees of bounce, you’re not going to get as much kick into the ball. So, you’re going to have to level your weight a little bit. You’ll never have it back. You’ll never have more weight on your back foot. That won’t happen or should Well, it shouldn’t happen if you’re any good. We’ll have our weight forward, but I’m going to have more weight forward for a basic shot if I have 10 or 12 degrees of bounce than you are at six or eight. You’re going to be 6040, I’m going to be 8020. So, all that the bounce on the wedge does is affect your setup. It doesn’t matter if you have 6 8 10 12, whatever. The more bounce you have, the more weight forward you have. The firmer the the the ground, no matter what club, more weight’s going to be forward. The softer the ground, more weight’s gonna be back. Okay, so I just wanted to address that really quick because I know that that keeps coming up. Like that’s an important thing. Now, what’s interesting is that the L wedge, this is a 60°ree wedge. Your basic L wedge is the only club in the bag that we do not set up square. Meaning, if you have a sixiron, you have an 8 iron, you set up with the face square. You have a pitching wedge, you set up with a face square. You have a 60°ree wedge from the fairway 80 yards, yeah, square face. But anywhere around the green, we’re laying it flat. We’re opening the face. We’re adding bounce more often than not. So the initial bounce is not the only thing that’s important because that’s what makes contact when you set up square. When you lay it flat, it’s the area behind the bounce that makes contact with the ground. So that area is more important. And we can talk about that more because we definitely want to have what I call back bounce or a second bounce, which is the degree of which the bounce goes away behind the initial bounce. When we start talking about some of these other shots, it is going to be important to have a high performance wedge. Now, we’re going to have to do some things to our to our wedge because a lot of the wedge makers don’t actually chip and, you know, use their their wedges and they end up putting too much heel and they end up having too much toe. It’s fine the initial balance, but we’ve got to get rid of the heel because when we lay it flat, if there’s too much heel, the heel’s off the ground and we can’t get underneath the ball and the ball comes out sideways with a sid spin. And we don’t want any toe bounce because when we’re going to get to a shot here soon where I talk about like the toe down chip off of bad lies, we’re we’re going to want to get that toe underneath the ball. And when we have bounce there, we’re not able to do it. So the the the initial bounce not important. The back bounce, the amount of heel, the amount of toe, those will be important as your level of performance and shot making increases. But for anybody that’s a scratch or worse, you don’t need to worry about it. But for tour pros, for highlevel performance players, we’ll have to we we’ll get into that uh in more detail later. I’m going to exaggerate one. Um basically when I hit a flop shot, I I’m just driving the club into the ground. And I feel like I I I’m going to lay this club flat and I’m going to feel like I’m just driving the back of the toe into the ground. I’m going to try to do that. Am I going to do that? No. That’s what I’m going to try to do. So, what I feel and what I’m actually doing are different. But I’m going to flip the club straight up and go right down behind it. and the ball’s just going to pop up. I I don’t make I wouldn’t make this swing per se. This is exaggerated, but I’m going to lay the club flat. I’m just going to pick it up as vertical as I can. Flop it right down in behind the ball and it just comes up high and soft. That’s handsy and flippy and what have you, but it just shows you that it’s not hard. It’s really not not that hard. I mean, we can we can uh have fun with these lies and shots as long as you understand what’s happening with the club and the ground interaction and how the ball’s popping up and so forth and why it’s important to kind of open the face. There are two there’s a a style of golf swing that’s being taught and it’s great. There’s nothing wrong with it where like I’m going to use DJ because he’s such a great player where he kind of bows his wrist and the face is shut and his rear elbow is bent and he rotates throughout the shot which holds the face square and he’s a beautiful ball striker. I on the other hand am trying to like straighten my elbow and I use hands and I’m trying to like straighten the shot and straighten my elbow which helps me get the club out wide and prevent too much of waiting to the end and then flipping. So, totally different swings. How that applies to chipping is this. When we have um more of a bowed wrist or a straighter wrist, like a lot of guys uh today, we’re just going to have more body rotation. That’s it. We’re just going to be rotating our body more where I tend to have more uh swinging of the club and my body kind of follows the club. They have their body lead and the club uh stays square behind it. So, when we bow our wrists a little bit more, we’re still doing the same thing, but we’re going to end up having more uh rotation in our body. And that’s just your personal swing. That’s great. But relative to our personal swing, you want the face to open a little bit. You don’t want to keep that face too shut because it’ll come out hot. Uh and the reason again is as the face rotates open a little bit, even if we’re bowed wrists, you can go back vertical and kind of let it rotate open. And as long as you keep your body turning, it’ll come out fine. For me, I just let the face open a little bit, rotate open, and let it just slide down and behind it. And that softens the impact so the ball doesn’t jet away from us. If we keep it too square, uh, too long, it’s too much of a a regular shot. Ball comes out hot, especially when we’re trying to come in steep. We’ve got to have an open face, uh, to offset the steeper angle of attack. So, it’s just a a subtle little feeling and I don’t think it matters which swing style you have. Uh, just it’s relative to your swing style. Okay. So, that’s just a little tidbit. It prevents balls from getting off hot. And we talked also about shoulders because as we get to an uphill lie like right here where I have a slight uphill lie, rather than adjust my body with my feet, I want to do it more with my upper body. So I I don’t want to go 40 60 to adjust for this uphill lie. I want to have 6040 but use my upper body to adjust with the lie. And that way it shallows out, it swings along the ground, but I’m using my upper body, not my lower body to make that adjustment. So people ask, well on an uphill lie, you know, how do I want my weight? And as I move over here, I don’t want to adjust with my weight in my feet. I want to keep the weight of my feet forward. I want my sternum forward, but I just want to tilt a little more with my upper body along the slope so that I can hit a nice shot along the slope. So, I want to use my upper body to adjust with that, not my feet. My feet will get my upper body to do it, but it’s moved the center back gravity back. It’s made contact. a great way to practice. Not a lot, but we have four balls here. Let’s hit four shots. If I am set up correctly, I’m set up for success. If I’m set up poorly, I’m set up for failure. If I’m set up for failure, I have to make some kind of weird swing to try to offset that. And it’s it’s just not likely to happen. If I’m set up for success, my swing should happen pretty naturally without me fighting it. And the way I can tell is if I can chip one-handed because I don’t have the ability to really manipulate the weight and the momentum of the club kind of swings itself. If my weight is back, it’s going to want to flip and go up naturally. I’m going to have a hard time fighting that. If my weight is forward, it’s going to slide down underneath the ball. You see John Dailyaly chip with one hand quite a bit. He does it all all the time. And it’s a great way to test and see like where you’re at. So if I have a basic chip, if I’m set up correct, I have it off the front foot. I’m going to go somewhat soft, not too high. I’ve got kind of a square face, maybe slightly open. Hands are forward, my weight is forward, and the club should just go up vertically because my weight’s forward. And we talked about how our setup and weight determines the the path. My weight is forward. So, the club’s going to go up somewhat vertically and slide under the ball. And I didn’t have to fight to do anything on that shot. The club just naturally wants to flow and do what it should. So, I have my weight forward, my hands are forward, straight line, the face is slightly open. This is going to cause it to go up vertically, and it should slide right underneath the ball. Now, what if I want to hit a lob shot? Oh, one-handed lob shot. Come on. It’s the same thing. I’m just letting the club do the work. So, I’m going to end up putting all my weight on my front foot. I have the ball slightly ahead of my toe, actually. I still have a straight line and I’m just going to let the club go a little longer and drive down into the ground. I don’t have to force it. The club will do the work and it slides right underneath the ball. So, if you’re set up for success, you don’t have to fight the club. It just naturally wants to do that. It wants to keep the leading edge down. It’ll take a little while to trust it because we have a tendency to kind of like fight it. And that’s why chipping with one hand helps let yourself get out of your own way. It helps letting the club do the work, right? We put that second hand on the on the club. It kind of like we we get a little flinchy. We get a little we want to fight it. But if you can develop the feel of just letting the club go down and through naturally, that’s the sensation you want to create. So, I have all my weight forward, the club is forward. I’m going to uh go a little bit higher with this. So, I’m just going to take a longer swing, drive, let it fall into the ball. and just let it go right down and through the shot. And so I’m not fighting myself or the club. It’s naturally wanting to do that because we’ve set up for success. Let’s talk about some other shots. Let me pick these up and we want to talk about a few more shots that you’re going to face. Okay. Okay. So, I’m going to take you through some of the shots that that we’re going to hit and and you’re going to see you’ll see how all the things that we talk about go back to our initial three points of our weight forward, our ball position back or front, our hands forward, and then do we open the face and do you know what angle do we come in and and so forth? All those all it is is a v variance off of that. So, I’m hitting to this first pin. Very easy shot it looks like. Now, when the grain is into you and the club will not slide, it digs. That grain grabs it. I don’t hit off my front foot. I only go off my back foot. So, if I have to go high, if I have to hit it over something, I need the ball to come in soft and the grain is into me, I’ll play it off the front foot, but I will only play a flop shot with it. I will not try to catch it clean and hit it high and soft when it’s in the grain. There’s there’s just no margin of error. You can’t get the club under the ball because it’s too tight and the grain digs the club down under. So just play for it to be fat. If you have to hit that shot, that’s what I do. Or nine times out of 10, I play it off my back foot and I try to hit a back foot shot if I if I can. Now here I have my lie is fine. I’m going to this first pin. It’s elevated, but it’s uphill. It’s not fast. So I, as we said, am always trying to play it off my back foot. Can I hit this shot off my back foot and get it to stop by the hole? It’s close. It’s close because it’s so elevated that it might be coming in even if I add loft too hot. Let me try it. I think maybe if I went extreme. So, one of the shots that I like to play is called back foot restore. It’s where I play it off my back foot. I open the loft the face of the loft and I try to restore the loft. Like I actually because my weight is forward, my hands are forward. I’m not going to be able to flip it under even though I’m trying to because I start in a position that won’t allow that. But at impact, as I restore the loft, it goes to square and then it slowly slowly passes. So it’s back foot restore restores the loft basically to square at impact as opposed to holding this angle too long which makes it hotter. So on back foot restore, I open up the face. I try to restore the loft. Oh, okay. So I can stop it. So that worked out and that was probably the right decision. But if not, I’ll go off my front foot. So now I’m off my front foot. I don’t need to give it too much loft. That’s going to make the ball go higher. I don’t need to give it too much loft because I kind of need to release it up the hill. So now I’m off my front foot and instead of an open face, it’s square, maybe a touch open. I just opened it a touch and that also worked out. Okay. Went a little long. That was more just contact rather than the style. But let me just open the face a little more. So, I’ll try to make the same shot a little more open face, little higher, softer. Oh, okay. That ended up out by the hole. That’s how we practice. That’s how we develop touch. We’re making those subtle little variables, those subtle little adjustments. But I liked how back foot restore worked there. So, I’m going to try it again. I’m going to play it off my back foot. I’m going to open up the face quite a bit. Weights forward, hands are forward, and I’m going to try to restore the loft as much as I can. Okay. Yeah, those ended about right. So, that’s what I’m playing with when I’m deciding on what kind of shots. When I’m practicing, I’m changing it up, trying those different shots. Let’s go hit a few more. Okay. So, so what I’ve done here is I’ve given myself three shots to this tight pin and the green is going away. Now, I got to stop it. But here, I have an uphill lie. So, we’re going to take those principles that we talked about. I’m going to have my weight I’m going to have the ball up my front foot. I’m going to open the face. My weight’s on my front foot, but I’m going to level my upper body with the hill. Fly it just on and it stops. Much easier shot. Now I move back to a level eye. Well, now I got to get it a little softer. So, it’s a little bit more of a a flop shot. This is going to be extreme. That’s pretty basic chip. Now, I’ve got my weight forward. I lay the club flat. Hands are forward. Shoulders are just kind of level with the ground. They’re not tilted up. They’re not tilted down. Level with the ground. I just kind of let the face just kind of flow open and hit down into the ground. The ball pops up and stops few feet past the hole. I’m taking this lob shot going to extreme. I’ve got all my weight forward. Ball forward. laying the club flat. My hands are forward and I’m going to drive this as I go vertical and let the face kind of rotate open. I’m just driving it down into the ground and ball pops up and settles pin high little left. Probably need to adjust my setup a touch, but that’s it. It’s the same motion on all three, just different setup, more extreme. So now I’m going to hit this soft little shot to this pin that’s tucked just over this bunker. Now two different lies. This one lie slightly uphill and the ball’s sitting beautifully. Okay, so my ball position is going to go forward. My upper body is going to tilt with the slope and shallow out impact. I’m going to lay it flat still. My hands straight line. I still let the face just kind of flow open. And it’s not as vertical cuz my weight’s not as forward. It’s forward but not 100%. It’s like it’s still on my front foot, but it’s more like 6535. My upper body tilts with the slope. I let the face rotate open. It slides under this beautiful lie and hits a soft shot. Really not that hard because I had such a good lie. But this lies tighter. Ball’s sitting more down and flat. I can’t get the leading uh edge under it and it’s not as vertical. It goes up a little bit here. So, I had more uphill lie. Now, it’s less. And the ball’s not sitting as high. So, same thing. Ball’s forward, weights forward. Lay the club flat. My hands are forward. A little more weight forward. Okay. Shoulders not as tilted back. Shoulders more with the ground. And I’m letting it as I let it go open. Because I have more weight forward, the swing is going to be more vertical. I let the faces kind of rotate open a little bit and go down into the ground. the ball pops up high and soft. So, we’re using the same technique and we’re just varying the setup a little bit to hit different shots or hit the shot that we want based on what we have in the lie. And so, uh, this is how I like to practice so that we’re challenging ourselves to determine what the lie is going to do, what the ball’s going to do, how to set up, and you now have the tools to hit all of these shots. Let’s talk about a few other shots that we haven’t discussed yet. Okay, while we’re here at the this bunker, I’m going to talk to you about our bunker play. There are two kinds of bunker shots we’re going to hit. And one of them is an extension of what we just talked about, which is that lob shot. It’s just an extension of that. So, our first bunker shot here, we’ll hit a lob shot to a tight pin. And all this is is the extension of the flop shot that we just hit. Okay. ball position off our front toe. All of our weight forward. Okay, hands are forward. Same setup as a flop shot. We’re going to let the face rotate open and we’re going to drive it hard down into the ground. We got to use speed. Now, it goes back to what we talked about. Hands have to pass the hip. Um, we have to, you know, hit our exit our front pocket. We have to keep our our hands up into the finish. Whatever. The hands have to keep moving. when they stop and this flips, that’s where this this goes ary. That’s a natural tendency for for people out of a bunker. It might be for our second shot I’ll show you. But right now, this is just that flop shot. So, I’ve got ball off my front foot, face is wide open, straight line. I’m going to I have 100% weight front foot. I’m going to drive it down into the sand. And we hit it high and soft. It’s nothing tricky. It’s the exact same thing that we just uh we’ve been doing. It’s just an extension of that. All my weight’s forward. Club is flat, straight line. Drive it right down into the sand. Ball comes out high and soft. Okay. Shot number two. Some call it chunk and run. All it is is a fat bunker shot that releases. Okay. But we’re not going to do it in the swing. We’re going to do it in the setup. Okay. So, we talked about how we don’t want a wide stance because it pulls our center of gravity back. It levels out the bottom of our arc, and we don’t want to hit shots from the middle of our stance. Never. Except for now. Now, we do. So, to hit the fat runner, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put the ball in the middle of our stance because now we can’t go too high. We can’t go too low with it. So, I’ll get my feet set. I actually, whether you like this or not, I point my toes out because I want it shallower. I still have my weight forward, but it’s nowhere near up here, right? As I move my foot back and make it wide, a wide stance, I have to come in shallow. I’m going to hit this fat. Like, I can try to come in as steep as I want, but I am not far enough forward. The ball’s too far back. It’s going to come out running. So, I have it right in the middle of my stance. My feet are kind of angled out. That’s a personal preference. That’s not a must. I just kind of like it because it gets me a little bit wider. And then from there, I don’t have to do anything different. Like, I just have to swing. And because it’s in the middle of my stance, the club will pass a little bit because my weight is 60/40 and not a lot forward. It will pass. It does hit it heavy. And look, the ball runs like I’m I I did it in my setup. I didn’t do it in my in my swing. I’m not trying to do anything with my hands. This the club is going to do this naturally in my setup. Ball’s in the middle of my stance. weight is 5545. It’s not back for sure. It’s just a little forward, but it’s still going to come in flat and level no matter how steep I want it to come in. And it always comes out hot. Like it comes out fast, right? Because it’s level. You’re coming in level. So again, we can make adjustments off of that. Like we can come we can open up the face a little bit more. We can maybe move it an inch forward of center and just have it come out a little less less heat like that, but we can make adjustments off of that. I don’t hit this shot a lot because it just doesn’t feel good. It but it it feels like the club’s traveling too fast. It comes out hot, but when we have a lot of green to work with or we have an uphill or we have a pin on an elevated tier and I need to get that ball releasing, that’s how I do it. Like it’s not I don’t do it with my hands. is my hands do it naturally because of the way I set up. I set up to succeed. I can also hit this shot, you know, my my preferred way, which is with the ball forward in my normal chipping style. Now I have the ball back up on my front foot. My weight is forward. The face is open, but it’s not way open and I just hit normal shot. It’s higher. It’s softer. It’s kind of what I prefer. Um, but those are the two bunker shots that we’ll end up hitting. The first one, the high soft one, is just an extension of what we talked about chipping. And I like keeping things simple. I like keeping things the same. Now, when we’re in softer sand, we will have less weight forward. We’ll kind of level our weight. I still keep the ball forward and still hit that shot. When the sand is firm or when it’s wet or when there’s not a lot of sand or if it’s muddy or claylike, 100% weight forward. Ball up off your front foot. 100%. Just like the lob shot off the tight lie. and we’re driving it harder down into the ground. And the harder we drive it into the ground and the firmer it is, the more it pops into the ball and the higher it’ll go. So, we actually want firmer sand much easier. If we get soft sand, and I’ve done this a few times at tournaments where if we have soft sand and I have too much weight forward, I go underneath it. I don’t It doesn’t shallow out enough. Uh, and sometimes when we get new bunkers, new sand or or more sand than we’re used to or I misjudge how much sand there is and I have too much weight forward and I drive it in the sand, I could easily go underneath it. So that’s our key on how much weight forward we want, we have to judge by by how much sand there is. And what our lie dictates, just like out of the rough, when the ball’s sitting up out of the rough, we have to level our weight a little bit. When it’s sitting down in the rough, we got to really have our weight forward and drive it down in the ground. So we’re assessing the lie. It changes our setup, which is just a variable of our foundation for what we talked about about hitting all shots. Okay, here’s a shot that we haven’t talked about yet. You may have seen me talk about it before on Instagram. I’ve done it a time or two. It’s a towown shot. It’s where we hit it off the toe of our eight iron for a bump and run, our L wedge, our 60, 55, whatever. And what the idea of this shot is to do is to make solid contact and not have the ball get away from us. Have it be a consistent distance. And there’s this is what I mean by that. Let’s imagine that this shaft is the leading edge of our club and we’re trying to get this entire leading edge under the ball. It’s very difficult to do. But if I tilt it to where just the toe is making contact with the ground, I don’t have to get the entire club under the ball. Just the toe under the ground. Very easy to do. So, if I have uh whatever lie around the green, if I want to hit a um shot and make solid contact, a running shot, what I’m going to do is I’m going to try to get the shaft as vertical as I can so that the heel and the center come off the ground and just the toe makes contact with the ground. So, I get the ball right off my back foot. Now, we’ve already decided we’re running. We’re trying to get the ball to run. So, we go right off our back foot and we get our shaft as vertical as we can. and we get it right off our toe and our hands are then high here and we lock them in kind of like a putt. So now I’ve locked in my wrist. There’s really no wrist play here. I’ve broken my wrist. It’s a straight line already and I just make a putting stroke right off the toe. So that’s the that’s the idea. Now if you try to hit it square, it’s hot. You hit the sweet spot, it’s hot. You hit it thin, it’s not hot. You hit it high in the face, it’s not it’s not hot. You hit it a little bit off the toe or a little bit off the heel, it’s not hot. You hit the sweet spot, ball takes off on you. So, guess what? The toe has no sweet spot. So, it’s all dead and it’s all the same distance. It’ll all come off the same, which is another reason why we want to use it. But, if I were to get it in a hole and you can see I can’t get the leading edge under the ball, but I can get the toe under the ball and make solid contact. So, again, it’s very easy shot. I get the ball right off the back foot, my shaft as vertical as I can. My hands are locked in and they’re up in front. And then it’s just a putting stroke from there. And it comes out very consistent because it’s making no matter how low or high on the on the toe it hits, it’s all dead. Okay. So now I’m going to do the same towown shot with a 60. I have a little bit, let’s say, more carry. I have less green to work with. Uh if I hit an eight or nine iron, I fly it on the green, it’s going to take off past a hole. I’ve got a 60 here. Same thing. Toe down, shaft vertical. The toe is down into the ground. My hands are ahead, kind of locked in. And it’s a putting stroke. And the toe slides under the ball very easily. A lot of times I come up short when I do this with a 60 because in my head it takes this much energy, let’s say, to hit it a certain distance. Like I just know because I’ve been doing this for so long. and the ball now is hitting a dead spot off the toe and it comes up short. So, I either have to like really commit to hit it hard or another thing I’ll do is I’ll actually drop down a club to the 55 and I’ll just use my 55 and I’ll put the ball, you know, in a dead spot or in a in a low point. I’ll step down on it so I can’t get the leading edge under it. And I just imagine this club as my 60 because when I hit it off the toe on this club with the less loft and the dead toe, it seems to go about the same distance as I would hit my normal 60. So rather than in my head having to really commit to hit it harder or whatever, I just trick myself into pretending this is the 60 and I use that same shot. So I’ve got that toe down, the ball’s right by my back back toe, the toe of the club is down, my hands are as high and forward. I lock it in and then it’s just a putting stroke and it just comes out a little bit more consistent for me uh with the 55. Like I don’t have to hit it as hard. It doesn’t have as much spin I feel. So in my head I’m chipping with a 60 even though I drop down to my 55. So again I have a bad lie sitting down. Put the ball right off my actual toe and then the club’s toe I stick straight down. My hands are ahead and forward and it’s a putting stroke. And you can see how consistent it’s going underneath under getting underneath even on bad lies. It just makes very And you can see there’s just a little bit of grass on the toe. There’s nothing in the the middle or the heel. So that’s a very effective shot to learn and it’s very simple. It’s very simple. It’s a it’s one of the running shots around the green. What if I have a great lie? Like what if the ball’s sitting up beautifully? Okay. I I can still use this shot and I oftentimes I will and I will still use the 55 even off of a good lie because it’s dead across the entire toe. And I do the exact same thing. It’ll come out the same way. So I have it the ball right off my back back toe. I have the toe of the club down on the ground. My hands are high and ahead. I lock it in like a putt. And it just comes out the exact same way as it did off of a bad lie. I didn’t quite hit that one hard enough. Let me do it again. there. So, it’s a very consistent, easy shot to learn around the greens. Like, it’s a nice weapon to have. It’s great when we play these courses where uh we have Bermuda, like when the when it’s into the grain, tow down. Into the grain shots, like I always try to tow down. You play piners. You play the courses with the grainy, tight, sandy lies that are just terrible. Tow down shot is a way to go. You’ll see most guys on tour using this shot. Uh but it’s a great one to learn. And those are a couple of the little tricks. I go from the 60 to the 55 and the uh 8 iron, 9 iron, runner, they’re all the same whether it’s a a bad lie or sitting up because it’s coming off the dead spot off the toe. So, you don’t have to make that adjustment. Just little tricks. All right, let’s move on to some other shots. We talked about how the 60 is the only club that we open up or lay flat. Every other club in our bag, we sit square. And so when I sit the 60 square and I make a swing, the initial bounce makes contact. See that? That’s where that’s what’s making contact with the ground. So that’s what that’s what it looks like there. Like you can see it’s scratched up right here on the bounce. That’s where the main main contact is. Now when I open up the face and hit a shot, now look what makes contact. See, there’s no new mark here in the bounce, but it’s all behind the bounce. And that’s what’s making that’s what’s interacting with the ground. This back bounce is what’s important when we lay the club flat. It’s what causes the club to glide through the sand and kick it through. Otherwise, we have to use our hands. If we don’t have this there, we have to use our hands and kind of flip it. I don’t have to do that. I just let this do the work. I just drive into the sand and this back bounce kicks it through. And this back bounce is what kicks it through on the lob shot. So, we want that. So, here’s the towown chip on a little more extreme situation. You we’re on a cart path. Like, we’re not going to be able to get underneath that shot, underneath this ball. So, we really have to clip ball first. Now, what you probably caught throughout a lot of this is that because we are keeping the leading edge down and the face and the leading edge and the bounce are staying at a very consistent angle through most of our shots. You can catch them a little heavy. You can catch ball first. You can catch an inch behind. But either way, no matter what contact feels like, the ball tends to go pretty good. When you’re doing this impact, the the the degree of the bounce and the leading edge and and the club relative to the ground is changing so fast that your margin of error is zero. You like you have to make perfect contact. Okay? So, we have a big margin of error. Now, on this, we we really don’t because it’s it’s uh we’re not going to be going underneath it. It’s it’s cart path. We have to hit ball first. And that’s this is just a more extreme towown shot. And I want you to know or see how it’s no different like than the shot we just hit and how the ball comes off the exact same. So I have again the toe down and you can actually see a little bit easier how none of the center or the heel of the club is making contact with the ground. It’s just the toe. And so I get it right by my my foot. My hands are high and they’re ahead. And it’s just like a little uh like a like a putt. And you can see it just makes solid contact. Now, this is a great example of how the 60 comes up a little short. So, I felt like I hit a good shot. I’m gonna do it again. And the 60 comes up a little short on these longer shots for me. Like, I hit that pretty good. But now, if you watch that swing, let me put one more ball down here. I’m going to make the same swing with my 55. So, now I have my 55. I’m going to make the exact same swing. And in my head, those 260s were were right on, but they come up a little short because I’m hitting them off the toe. They don’t have the heat. And because the the car path is irrelevant because we’re getting the toe down underneath it just fine through impact, it’s not having any adverse effect. So again, same exact swing that I just made. And then when I go to my 55, it just has that little extra heat uh to get it past and end up closer to the hole. So, I’ll do that one more time. You can see it’s the same chip. And that’s that’s why I say uh I just wanted you to see like because the first shot we were doing was so short that as we get longer, the 60 starts coming up shorter and the 55 tends to be spot-on. And they come off so consistent uh and so nice and just a little bit of contact on the toe. We have a couple more shots that we need to go through uh that we haven’t discussed yet. So, let’s do that. Never ever chip with the ball in between your stance and your hands back. Ever. Unless you want to hit a hook. What? Okay. Most of our shots as we’re swinging through, we have an open face. It creates cut spin. But a lot of times a green is angled in a slice. And if we slice spin it with that slice green, the ball takes off. And a lot of times we don’t have the lie to be able to do it. But if we have the lie, we can hit a hook spin shot. Here’s how we do it here. The lie sitting fine. It’s nice fairway. It’s sitting up. I can easily get the leading edge underneath the ball. Okay. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to sit the I’m going to put the ball in the middle of my stance. I’m going to sit my hands back and I’m going to drop them low. So, now I got the lie wanting to hook it. I’m getting my hands back. And then what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take it back and I’m gonna try to flip it like this and try to get hook spin on it. Okay. So now I’ve got the hands set low and back. And all I’m going to do is just try to get a little hook spin. So I take it back, I cast it, and I let it flip. And you can see it like kicks a little right. And so when the green is sitting cut, it will kind of hold straighter. It won’t tear away. Very hard shot to hit. I don’t recommend it. I don’t think it’s great. It’s hard to judge the distance because you get all this flip and the club is traveling faster, right? When we’re when we have the arm and the club traveling at the same speed, so much easier to control distance because they’re traveling at the same speed. But as soon as the club accelerates and starts moving faster than the arm, you have the leading edge coming up. You have the bounce interaction with the ground changing constantly, but you have the speed of the club traveling so fast that a lot of times it’ll just get away from us. So, it’s very hard to control distance as well. It’s not a great shot to hit, but at least you know how to hit it. Takes a lot of practice and it’s not like you use it a lot, but it is nice to have. It is fun to mess around with. You can see I have the heel way down. So now it’s the lie is wanting to hook it and I try to cast it out here and try to get it to hook that way as well. Hands are back and I try to like flip it that way. Uh the green is taking that. It has just a little bit of hook spin. So normally my face has cut spin because I’m opening the face. The face is open. I’m coming in steeper and it’s just it’s creating a cut spin as well uh to backspin and so uh and I feel very comfortable hitting this shot and I want to hit that shot and you can see it’s like straight straight straight straight straight and then it’s just working a little right where the other ones were working more right. So just that little hook spin, it help. It’s just a subtlety to help get it close or stop it from running away like when we get to Augusta Greens and there’s just so fast if you don’t work it into the hill just a little bit. Uh it’ll be 15 feet instead of like two or three like we’re seeing. So uh it’s just something to go over. And again, it’s it’s just I just wanted you to see that although I say never don’t never do this, there are times you need to do it. In part two, we’ll we’ll touch more on shots out of the rough and how to get the ball to stop or move forward and so forth. But the basic two things to know out of the rough is that when the grain is downgrain, the ball comes out a little faster and you grip it a little better. And when the grain is into the grain, it comes out dead. So just like the grain in Bermuda, you tend to hit it kind of heavy and the ball comes out kind of dead. Out of the rough, when the grain is in, it will come out short of your distance. And when it’s down grain, it’ll come out faster and closer to your distance. Now, when we hit flop shots and lo soft shots and lob shots and so forth, the lie dictates so much and we’ve seen that. Now, what I’ve done is I’ve gone to a spot where I have a very fluffy lie. You can see it’s like first cut where I could easily go underneath that ball. Like, I’m laying that club flat. It easily fits underneath it. So, I have a very good lie. If I use our technique of driving it down into the ground, I’ll probably go underneath it. So, if I’m going to go to this tight pin, I just want to hit a nice soft shot. I have to level my weight even on this flop shot. Now, it won’t jump up as vertical as it will off of a high one. But what I’ll do is I’ll still keep my my um weight forward. I still have my um hands forward and the face is flat. But again, the only dis difference I’m going to do to level impact is I’m going to have not as much weight forward, a little bit still forward. But I’m going to use my upper body again to shallow out the bottom. So I just tilt my shoulders back. Even though you can see most of my weight is on my front foot, I’d have to go this way to get to be able to lift up my front foot. So, I have most of my weight forward and I just let my upper body kind of go with it to flip it up like that. And you can see I’m just kind of and I actually I’m kind of letting it pass like my hand. I start with a straight line, but I’m kind of letting it pass. I’m kind of like letting the adding the loft to get it up because I’m going with the lie. So when I say, you know, you never want to flip underneath it, like I mean like you never want to flip it underneath it except for this time. Like so it’s uh I I just want you to have build your foundation first before you start doing the things that are are harder to do because if you start using this as your foundation, then you can’t hit any of those other shots as the lies change. So we let’s get our foundation and we never do this and that until we get to this situation. All right. So now again, that lie is way up. I got my weight forward. My upper body is setting with the lie now. It’s actually more up from the hill because I want it try to get it up a little bit. And I just let the face rotate open. And I just flip it up like that. Now those kit went a little left on me. So I’m just going to make a slight adjustment in my setup. I’m just going to turn a little bit more. Let my upper body sit there. Rotate the face open. Let it kind of like come underneath. That was more on line. And I’ll do one more here. Nice high lie. Get it really up there. There we go. This is where people like to hit lob shots from. I actually don’t because I got to time it too much. It’s not as easy. I got to use more hands and stuff and and try to time that speed to get the ball to go the right distance. It’s it’s it’s harder. I actually like it when I have a firmer lie because I don’t have to time it as much. I just drive the club in the ground and the ground and the club doesn’t work and it’s just a lot easier for me. So now all I have to do is assess how firm is it? If it’s pretty firm, I’m going to have more weight forward. Okay, great. Let me just put more weight forward. Lay the club flat. Hands are forward. I just drive it into the ground. Oh, look how much higher that ball pops up when the ground is firmer because it gets underneath and pops it up. So, let me do that again. And I’m like, all right, that ball took off on me a little bit, but I got a nice firm firm lie. So, I I just don’t I’m gonna have to drive actually when that club when the ball takes off like that, what do I the adjustment I have to make? I have to drive it harder into the ground so it gets more under the ball, not easier. Our tendency is, oh, that ball took took away got away from me, took off. So, I kind of ease into it. Makes it worse because now it hits the ground and bounces quicker into the ball. I have to drive it harder to get it under more. So, same thing. Weight forward. I’m going to drive it harder into the ground. You see me like go firmer, more aggressive, ball goes more more dead because it gets underneath. So, our instincts when the ball takes off, which is to slow down, they’re wrong. You got to drive it harder to make sure you get under it more so it doesn’t bounce as fast. The first one bounced too fast into the ball. I needed to go more aggressive into the ground. We’ve touched on about 90% of the shots that you’re going to see. And 99% of the time, we are building off of the reference from the start, which are the three fundamentals of our weight forward, our hands forward, and our ball front or back. And then we’re making adjustments off of that. Even our bunker play, we’re working off of that with the exception of the fat runner. But all of our chips, we’re working off that with the exception of the one we want to try to try to hook. So, there are shots that we’ll create, but almost everyone, I should say almost everyone because when I say never or ever, it hasn’t really worked out. Almost every shot will be off of that foundation that we started in the beginning, which is why it’s so important and why those little tricks are so important about turning your your feet towards a target on those little shots, about having your feet closer together, not pulling your center of gravity back, and all those details. What I want you to do is like go practice it. There’s going to be a few things that stick and then go back and re relisten to this and learn those other shots because there’s I threw a lot at you today. You will be able to hit over 90% of all the shots you’re faced with by using the stuff that we talked about in this video. The other 10% we’ll discuss in part two, but I’m going to wait a while before we bring that out because there’s a lot to decipher right here. There’s a lot to work on before you’re ready to move on. No matter what skill level you are, there’s a lot that we threw at you. And you’ve got to get those f those fundamentals and those basics down. You’ve got to go out and practice and get your touch your touch on how much do I open the face? Do I go low back foot or or front foot? How much uh do I open the face? How aggressive into the ground? How’s the lie looking and so forth? And so, uh how’s the toe down chip coming? You know, getting that down bunker shots and all that stuff. So, you got a lot to work on. And when you’re when when you’re ready, and I’ll I’ll I’ll wait a little while. We’ll throw up part two and we’ll touch on all the other shots, whether it’s uh the shots out of the rough, when the rough is deep, when it’s not. When the ground under the rough is firm or when it’s soft, when the grain is in or when it’s down, uh shots off the cart path, shots off of um sandy lies and grass, grain in or down grain, or we we’ll touch on the other stuff that you really you don’t see, but more sparingly, this is what you’re going to see 90% of the time. like let’s perfect this to be great at short game. You need to be exceptional at the basic stuff. You don’t need to be great at the exceptional stuff. You don’t need to be great with the ridiculous lob shots and the tough stuff. Yeah, it’s cool. Oh, it’s cool. It looks cool. It’s sexy. It’s awesome. But it’s not really going to lower your score that much. This will lower your score being great, being exceptional at the simple stuff. So, let’s do that. [Music] [Music]