This is the best way to get out of a fairway bunker

Getting out of a fairway bunker looks as if it ought to be a simple ask. So why does it typically flip out to be so penal when you find yourself in a single?

The key to hitting a profitable fairway bunker shot, says Top 100 Teacher Brian Manzella, is hitting the ball first, and successfully choosing it off the sand with out taking a divot in entrance of the ball.

“The best fairway bunker players are sweepers,” Manzella says. “Tom Watson was a sweeper, a picker. He was a nice fairway bunker participant. David Toms isn’t banging down on the ball. He was a good fairway bunker participant.

“[Jack] Nicklaus was a sweeper, pretty much, with the longer clubs, and he was a phenomenal bunker player.”

There’s a lot we will be taught from the sport’s greats. Keep studying for Manzella’s best ideas for mastering fairway bunkers.

Brian Manzella’s keys to hitting it out of a fairway bunker

1. Choke up — however not an excessive amount of

“You need the club to play a little shorter,” Manzella says. “So just barely choke up on it.”

2. Don’t transfer round an excessive amount of

Get your self set to hit the ball with extra of an arm and shoulder swing, with minimal motion out of your backside half.

“Work your feet in,” says Manzella, “and then say to yourself: I’m going to mini-freeze everything from the chest down.”

3. Visualize

Manzella recommends utilizing a psychological picture that he says works for him to at the present time: take into consideration getting the forefront of your membership below the ball’s equator.

“You might think, that would seem almost like blading it. Yeah — and you’re gonna get out,” Manzella says. “If you possibly can get that membership two dimples below the equator of the ball, it’s a completely picked shot.

“I’ve used that a million times myself.”

Give Manzella’s ideas a strive to hold fairway bunkers from ruining your subsequent spherical. And for extra ideas from Manzella, click on right here.

Golf.com Editor

As a four-year member of Columbia’s inaugural class of feminine varsity golfers, Jessica can out-birdie everybody on the masthead. She can out-hustle them in the workplace, too, the place she’s primarily chargeable for producing each print and on-line options, and overseeing main particular tasks, corresponding to GOLF’s inaugural Style Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview collection, “A Round With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in each in the journal and in video kind on GOLF.com.