Bunker Shots for Beginners: Why You Should Never Hit the Ball

Why you should never hit the ball in a bunker

Stop trying to hit the ball. In a greenside bunker you hit the sand about two inches behind the ball, and the sand lifts the ball out for you. Open the clubface before you take your grip, dig your feet in, pick a spot in the sand to hit, and accelerate all the way through to a full finish.

That's the whole thing. The club never touches the ball, and once that clicks, bunkers stop being frightening.

Most golfers do the opposite. They look at the ball, aim at the ball, try to pick it cleanly off the surface, and get one of two results: a thin strike that fires the ball into the bunker face, or a nervous deceleration that buries the club in the sand and moves nothing at all. Then they do it again from the same spot.

The key insight: the sand does the work

A greenside bunker shot is the only shot in golf where missing the ball on purpose is the correct technique.

Here's the mechanism. You swing the club into the sand behind the ball. The club displaces a shallow slice of sand, and the ball sits on top of that sand. The sand gets thrown out of the bunker and the ball rides out with it. You are splashing a cushion of sand onto the green, and the ball comes along for free.

Which means the quality of your bunker shot has nothing to do with striking the ball. It depends entirely on where your club enters the sand and whether it keeps moving.

Why the clubface has to be open

Look at the sole of your sand wedge. The back edge sits lower than the leading edge. That angle is called bounce, and it is designed to make the club skid through sand like a skimming stone rather than dig in like a spade.

Bounce only works if you present it. Open the face and the sole is exposed, so the club glides. Keep the face square or close it, and the sharp leading edge goes in first, digs, and stops dead about three inches into the sand. That's the shot that goes nowhere.

Open the face before you grip the club, not after. This is the single most common mistake. If you take your normal grip and then twist your hands to open the face, your hands will rotate straight back to square during the swing and you'll close it again. Set the face open first, then wrap your hands around the handle as it sits.

The set-up, step by step

1. Open the clubface so it points slightly right of your target, then take your grip.
2. Dig your feet in. Shuffle them into the sand until you feel stable. This also tells you how deep and firm the sand is underneath, which is free information.
3. Open your stance. Aim your feet, hips and shoulders slightly left of the target to compensate for the open face. The ball will come out somewhere between where your body points and where the face points.
4. Ball forward. Play it off your lead heel, further forward than a normal wedge shot. This encourages the club to enter the sand behind the ball rather than at it.
5. Weight slightly forward, around 60% on your lead side, and keep it there. Hanging back is how you catch it thin.
6. Stand slightly closer and grip down a touch, since your feet are now below the level of the ball.

Set up like this and the club is already doing most of the job before you've moved.

The swing

Pick your entry point and look at it

Draw an imaginary line in the sand about two inches behind the ball. That line is your target now. Look at it, not at the ball.

This one adjustment fixes more bunker shots than anything else, because your eyes largely decide where the club bottoms out. Stare at the ball and you'll hit the ball.

Swing longer than feels reasonable

You're moving a wedge full of sand as well as a golf ball, and sand is heavy. A fifteen-yard bunker shot needs roughly the swing you'd make for a forty-yard pitch off grass.

Almost every beginner under-swings here, then panics halfway down and decelerates. The club loses speed exactly when it needs most, and the sand wins.

Accelerate through to a finish

Non-negotiable. Keep the club moving and finish with your hands high and your chest facing the target. If you can hold a proper finish position, you accelerated. If you've stopped at waist height with the club buried, you didn't.

A good checkpoint: a correct bunker shot throws a visible spray of sand onto the green past the ball. No sand on the green means you dug rather than splashed.

Know when not to take it on

This is the part that saves most shots, and it is pure course management.

Not every bunker lie allows a greenside escape. If your ball is plugged at the base of a steep lip, or the face is above your shoulder, or you simply have no room to swing, the attacking shot is a bad bet.

Play sideways or backwards to flat ground. You will drop one shot. Attempting the hero line and leaving it in the sand twice costs you three, and your confidence for the next four holes.

The same thinking applies before you ever reach the sand:

• Aim away from greenside bunkers. Most are positioned on one side of a green. Playing to the open side turns a potential bunker shot into a straightforward chip.
• Know your carry distances. Fairway bunkers catch golfers who assume they hit it further than they do. If a bunker starts at 210 yards and your driver carries 195, it is irrelevant. If it carries 215, it isn't.

What indoor practice can and cannot do

Straight answer first: there's no sand at either of our studios, so you cannot hit actual bunker shots at Grip. Anyone telling you a simulator replicates a greenside bunker is selling you something.

What indoor practice does genuinely well is the skill underneath the shot, plus the course management that keeps you out of the sand in the first place.

Low point control. A bunker shot is a deliberate fat shot. You are telling the club to bottom out two inches behind the ball, on purpose, repeatably. That is exactly the skill every bay at both our studios measures. Trackman gives you attack angle and strike data on every shot, so you can learn to move your low point forwards and backwards on command. Golfers who can do that find bunkers far less random, because they are no longer guessing where the club will land.

Carry distances you can trust. Fairway bunkers are a distance problem, not a technique problem. One session building a full gapping chart tells you precisely which bunkers are in play off each tee and which are decoration. That's several shots a year for the cost of an hour.

The set-up, learned properly. The open-face-before-grip sequence, the stance, the ball position: all of that can be coached indoors and taken straight to sand. Our coaches work at Deptford Park in SE8 and at Tower Bridge, and can get the positions right before you ever step into a bunker, which makes your sand practice at the club far more productive.

Book a session

Bunkers punish hesitation more than bad technique. Open the face first, dig in, pick a spot two inches behind the ball, look at that spot, and swing through to a finish. When the lie is genuinely bad, take your medicine sideways.

Want to build the low point control that makes bunker shots predictable? Book a free trial at Tower Bridge or Deptford Park, or work through it with one of our coaches. Clubs included if you need them.