Technology
Why you should set up differently in the rough
In this episode, we explore the nuances of executing a chip shot from deep rough, emphasizing the importance of proper setup and technique. Learn how to adopt a steeper swing path and adjust your weig...
Why you should set up differently in the rough
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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So, Druski, as we mentioned in the last episode, you do a ton of work with Mark Blackburn,
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bringing his ideas to life on the site.
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There's a ton of great ones, so everyone listening should go check it out.
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And I feel like when I saw this one, I feel like you love a cheeky flop shot.
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I know, I know, it's like the club under the ball and the rough kind of shot.
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I feel like we've talked about it in the past and kind of brought a smile to my face
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when you sent this one along because this is, it seems like a subject slightly near
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and dear to your heart.
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No, absolutely.
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And this, this specific shot, a chip from long rough, it's sort of the genesis of it,
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was I was talking with Mark and we were trying to identify the shots or the situations
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in which tour players play a slightly different shot than regular golfers.
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But that there's no reason regular golfers shouldn't play the correct shot, if that makes sense.
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So there's nothing physically preventing regular golfers from playing this shot
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or any of these shots that we've discussed.
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But they just don't know how or they choose not to.
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So we're just trying to help golfers play the proper shot at the proper time.
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And one of those is when you're in deep rough, long rough, not necessarily US open rough.
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But I mean, any, most of our courses have some substantial rough where if you get a lie
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and there's some grass behind the golf ball, you're trying to make a standard chipping motion
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around the greens, you're probably not going to have much luck.
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And a lot of it is to do with the sort of the variables that Mark and I were discussing.
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Yeah.
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And the key to those variables is helping you get a little steeper.
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And I think that's so important around the greens because, you know, a little anecdotal,
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but what I see more often than not is when golfers get in these situations,
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a little bit of gnarly, rough, uncomfortable.
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They tend to flub it.
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And that's because they're not being aggressive enough getting the club down into the ground, right?
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They're kind of babying it, maybe trying to scoop it in all of a sudden.
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Why I'm the flubbing it or was kissing our offending it?
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And yeah, it's just kind of a disaster.
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I love the image of V versus a U.
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So if you imagine the club head, let's say you're looking face on it, a golfer chipping,
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we're going for it.
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When you're in rough and you have a not great lie, you're going for more of a V look
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in which the club head comes kind of straight, more straight down vertically
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and comes back up on the other side of the ball fairly vertically,
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rather than a big U with a nice level bottom and then coming up.
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Maybe that does is a very suitable option when you're in the fairway, perhaps,
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and certainly is, but not when you're in the rough.
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Because what happens is the grass, the blades of grass grab the club head
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as you approach the ball if you are too shallow as they call it.
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If you have too much of that U motion.
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So what you need is to get a little steeper, get that V action where the club head
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is coming sort of right down on top of the ball or what feels like it.
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So you eliminate as much as possible the grass between the ball and the club face.
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Yeah, that's a great point and a fantastic visual to anybody who's out there listening.
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When you are further away from the green, like you're on the tee or back in the fairway,
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you want your swing to look more like a U, like a nice big Y U.
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But the closer and closer you get to the green, the more you want that U shaped swing
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to start looking like a V.
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And when you're right around the green, especially when you're in deep rough right around the green,
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that is the sharpest V that you can possibly get.
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That's what's going to help you get out of that rough, generate spin and all that good stuff.
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The problem a little amateur golfers have is that when they're back on the tee,
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their swings look like these.
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And then when they're close to the green, they start looking like you literally want the opposite of that, right?
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That's right.
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That's right off the tee of the motion creates the slice.
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But but anyways, let's say we have a bad lie.
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So in terms of the specifics of hitting the shot, Mark gives a few, a few variables.
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A lot of them are in the setup, Luke.
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I mean, you can nearly guarantee you're going to hit this shot properly if you have the proper setup.
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And in one of the strangest, if you don't, if you're not familiar with this shot,
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one of the strangest, one of the strangest ideas that Mark is explaining is almost all of your weight
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needs to be on your front leg and your head and your upper body should,
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should almost be in front of the golf ball.
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It's going to feel like you're fairly significantly in front of the golf ball.
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That's, that's really the most important setup key.
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And man, people don't think enough about their setup.
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Torpros do, but the rest of us don't.
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And and this is such a fantastic example.
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Why?
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Because you can control 100% of what you do in your setup.
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And when you make an adjustment like this, suddenly that's going to influence everything.
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And then you can get to stop thinking about it.
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And bam, your swing is going to be different than it used to be.
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And think about this shot.
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I mean, we're talking about a 5, 10, 15-yard chip at most.
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There isn't enough time in this swing for you to make a bunch of changes.
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I mean, you got to make a lot of those changes at the setup or else you're just going to get the same darn swing.
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And so true, I wrote about this a few months ago, where basically like our brains can only be in the same position.
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And the only thing so fast, basically the amount of time it takes you to blink is the amount of processing time your brain needs.
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And the downswing is actually quicker than that for in a lot of cases.
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So if you're trying to think about something that's happening mid downswing,
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your brain is just not really going to have enough time to do it between the top of the backswing and mid downswing.
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But the setup again, you solve this problem immediately because you can just
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calibrate your body into a slightly different position and your swing is going to be different.
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And you know, one quick note on this, I feel like people don't understand how much weight they actually do need forward to your point.
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It feels crazy when you actually try to get 80, 90% of your weight onto your left leg.
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I had one coach in college described this shot to me and he was a really great player.
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Bob Heintz, he played on a PJ tour for many years.
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He was one of the best short game players on tour when he was there.
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And he would hit chip shots out of the rough only on his front leg.
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So his back leg would be behind him because he was simulating exactly the feel that he needed where virtually all of his weight was on the front leg.
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You can't really overdo it if you have a poor lie around the green.
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Yeah. And just try it.
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Just try hitting wedge shots with on the tip of your toes on your right leg and all your weight then on your left leg.
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I guarantee you you're going to be like, wow, I thought I had my weight forward before, but this is what it actually feels like.
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One other setup key loop that I should probably met certainly should mention is the club face needs to be open pretty significantly when you have a bad lie.
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And the reason in the reason that is is because the leading edge of the club that sharp leading edge will dig too much if you keep it square.
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It'll dig into the grass. It'll get all caught.
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So you kind of need to expose the bounce or the bottom of the club.
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So open it up a good, you know, I don't 15, 20, 30 degrees a little more than you think you should.
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It'll just help. It'll just help at the bottom of the swing.
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It's a great point. So okay.
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So we're opening our club face.
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We're loading up weight on to our left leg.
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What are we? What are we doing next?
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On the backswing. I know we talked about this in a previous episode for a different type of shot, but you want to feel more
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hinge in your wrists more caulking as you take it back.
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It might feel like you're taking the club to the outside a little bit, you know, not whipping it in close to your body.
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You're kind of taking it out a little bit and hinging your wrists pretty significantly, which is what is going to create more of that V motion as you go back.
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And that naturally after you create that more of that hinge, the club will come straight down on the ball.
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And that's really what you want to feel like you're kind of just dropping the club head straight on the back of the ball or right behind the ball.
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Frankly, because this is kind of like a bunker shot as Mark was was telling me he is it's more a bunker shot than a chip when you have a bad lie in the rough.
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And we talked about in the last episode.
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We were talking about distance wedges and how to alter your wrist set here.
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But now we're closer to the green.
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And this is one of those high wrist set shots should you still be thinking about turning as much as you were with a wedge or is this more handsy.
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Yeah, it is certainly more handsy.
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I don't think you need much turn at all in the backswing just because the power you don't need an extreme amount of power to hit this shot.
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You don't need to, you know, what the turn does is it helps you hit the ball from the inside so you can get a nice penetrating flight.
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So you're not wiping across it.
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No, frankly, on this shot, you kind of do want to wipe across a little bit.
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Yeah, you're just like chopping chopping wood a little bit, right?
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Yeah, just hint back and one thing I really liked that you guys wrote was the feeling of so as you're hinging back, you loaded up your weight first club face
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nice and open you hinge back.
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And instead that it's a it feels like you're sitting into your left leg.
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I thought that was a really cool visual.
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So as you're making your hinge backswing, you're sitting into your left leg.
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That's a pretty handy visual at least for me.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, it's a very stable move.
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If you sort of, you know, butt back, your left butt a little back, your your left knee's bent a little bit.
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You're kind of sitting into that, that lead leg.
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It's just further ensures that you've got that weight forward and that you've got a nice stable, you know, sort of center to hit around for sure.
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Another thing Luke to add is hitting the ball twice as hard as you think.
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I think that's what you're probably going to get into is you really got to swing harder than you think.
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Because what's happening is you're not necessarily making direct contact with the golf ball.
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It's kind of muted because the grass is still getting between the club head and the ball.
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You've got a seriously, Mark was telling me, I like guys to folks to hit twice as hard as they think.
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It's a really good point in that.
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Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because when you're opening the club face, that's taking distance off.
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You're chopping down on the ball.
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So you're going to just be piling that club head into the ground.
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That's going to take off speed of the club.
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I bought the time it hits the golf ball too.
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Sure, you're adding wrist hinge to help with that.
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But when you look at these kind of chop down on the ball, rough high wedge recovery shots,
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they're not baby in these.
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These are these are aggressive swings.
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And because of that, it takes a little practice.
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And I'm, you know, I'm not saying you have to sit out there for hours and practice this shot.
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But but certainly, you know, take what we've talked about.
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Take what Mark is focusing on and hit a few practice shots to sort of get the feel
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because it takes full commitment to hit this and during a round of golf.
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Because, you know, like we said, if you're going to swing twice as hard,
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you better be darn sure that that's balls going to come out half the distance you think
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and not actually what you think, you know, and it's going to sail over the green.
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So it definitely takes a little bit of practice to have that commitment.
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Yeah. And you know, one quick kind of course strategy note on this is that let's say you're in a shot
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and the balls sitting down in the rough a little bit.
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Now you got your technique. You know, you know what to do technique wise.
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Load up the left leg, open the face, hinge the wrist, chop down hard.
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It's worth remembering that for most golfers, any shot on the green is a good one.
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So if the if the pin is over to the right, let's say, and maybe God forbid,
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there's a bunker between you and them all tons of rough between you and the pin,
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you may just default to aiming straight at that pin.
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But I think by strokes gained if I'm not mistaken, that anything within 30 feet,
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you're gaining strokes on your competition.
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And for most golfers, like a 10 handy cup and a bottle of Molinari Tommy,
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this any shot on the green is not losing strokes to your peers.
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So this is worth just keeping in mind when you're in these chop out rough situations.
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You know what to do now, but where to go, you should be thinking, I don't need to necessarily go
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on this green. I don't need to go out this pin. I just need to get on this green and chop it
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into the middle of the green. May save you some headaches. No, totally. It's so interesting.
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And I could hear someone hearing what you're saying, Luke, and then say, well,
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why don't I just have my standard chipping motion and chip it into the middle of the green.
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But the reality is that that motion won't physically work on this shot.
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You'll smother it into the bunker. You won't actually, the ball will not get above the grass.
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You'll chunk it. You'll duff it. So what we're teaching you with the shot and what Mark is
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explaining is a shot that helps you get onto the green somewhere, not necessarily a specialty shot
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or a sort of really risky shot you're taking on or sort of the hero shot. No, we're just
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teaching you the way to get on the green. Even though you just want to find somewhere on the green,
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it doesn't mean your standard chip motion is going to be able to do that.
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It's a really good point of clarification there because what I feel like happens,
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if you're like, I'm just going to take my standard chip shot to the middle of the green,
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that might work. But more often out of these ruffy kind of situations, you're just not going to
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generate anywhere near enough spin. So you may get clean contact, but the ball's just going to land
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and run maybe even through the green. And that's no good. Like you're going to need this type of shot
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in order to actually get the ball to stop.
Topics Covered
golf tips
chip shot technique
deep rough recovery
golf swing mechanics
weight distribution in golf
open club face
golf setup fundamentals
proper chipping motion
tour player strategies
golf shot visualization
aggressive swing approach
golf practice techniques
short game improvement
golf shot execution
golf coaching advice