Slopes and Lies Overview

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Welcome back golfers. Hopefully you're having some success with your basic

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shots. This is

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roughly going to help you cover some of the slopes and lives and we will do

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some scenario

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videos to kind of go through some of these in a little bit more detail. In

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general, what

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you want to do is you want to get the club to interact with the ground mostly

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the same

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way regardless of the slope. So that means you're going to be matching the

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shape of the

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slope with your stance and your setup and you'll adjust the ball position to

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get the

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club to contact the ground in a similar way. Oftentimes, this is going to

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involve putting

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more weight on your front foot and then making some type of spine angle change

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in order to

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account for the slope. In general, you've got your four slopes of ball above

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your feet,

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ball below your feet, uphill or downhill. When you have downhill or ball below

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your feet,

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it's an advantage to be a little bit steeper or even a little bit outside in.

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This can come

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more from a little bit of a vertical or more tilt in your backswing or

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potentially standing

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a little bit closer to the ball. Also getting on that front foot can help. When

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the ball

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is uphill or ball above your feet, being a little bit more shallow can be

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helpful. And

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so that's where potentially standing up a little bit taller or standing

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slightly further

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away from it, erring more on that higher shot can be helpful. So we'll work

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through adjusting

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your loft and ball position for those. On hard pan, one of the big

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considerations

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is looking at the bounce of your club. So looking at the shape here and how

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that's going

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to interact for shots. If you have a lot of bounce, especially in the heel,

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then you really

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have to be careful on hard pan. In general, if it's really hard pan, then you

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have to

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have the club coming in or it's easier to have the club coming in on a shallow

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angle,

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but having the bottom of swing ahead of the golf ball or at least even with it.

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This is

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not the time where we're trying to hit a couple inches behind the ball and the

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club

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slide on the ground because the club tends to bounce or kind of dig into

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depending on

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the firmness of the ground on hard pan. So watch out for that bounce angle. For

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hard

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pan, your lower bounce option is probably the best. Now there are some swing

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styles

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where trying to feel like you hit a little bit more down, but with a square

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face tends

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to work better. So we'll talk about how to kind of play around with that. I

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think the

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more common the slope, the hard pan shows up some courses more than others, but

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knowing

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how to handle your slopes and rough is kind of one of the big secrets for being

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good around

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the green. When it comes to assessing the rough, you want to assess the

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thickness and

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the length of the grass is the ball sitting on the bottom, in the middle or in

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the top.

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So where is the ball sitting in the height of that grass? Which direction is

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the grass

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growing? Is it growing into me or away from me or all over the place? And then

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directly

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behind my ball, is there any extra clump of grass? All of these are basically

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helping

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you figure out compared to my normal shot, am I going to have to swing harder

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or softer?

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The thicker the grass, the more the ball sitting down, the more the grass is

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growing into me,

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and the more there's a clump behind the ball, the more that I'm going to have

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to swing harder

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and put more energy into the club. And so when I put more energy in the club,

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out of

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the rough I'm going to get a little less spin. There's a risk of the ball going

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too far,

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so then I'm going to open the club face to balance that out and take that extra

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speed

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and turn it into some height. The more that the grass is thin, the ball is

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sitting up on

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top, the grass is growing with me, and there's nothing behind the ball, the

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more that the

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ball is going to come out kind of fast. It's still not going to get as much

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spin as it

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would out of the fairway, so in that case I actually have to swing a little

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softer than

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I would on the same length fairway shot. In general, the medium to high bounce

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is best

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for the majority of rough styles, but having a little versatility can help. A

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lot of videos

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over here on the right where we can take a look at each one of these concepts.

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In the

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next video, we're going to cover designing your practice plan so that you can

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build not

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just good technique, but also good skills.