This months teaching zone has been written by professional Shamus Martin and explains how you can improve your ball striking with fairway woods.
As we are coming into spring/summer, the fairways will start to get firmer, the ball will start to run a lot more and fairway wood shots will be a highly utilised. Getting into position for approach shots, safety shots from the tee and shots into the long par 4’s and 5’s are all situations where you would want to be able to play an effective fairway wood shot.
One of the keys to hitting a good fairway wood shot is to have a shallow angle of approach when hitting the golf shot, just brushing the top of the ground where the ball lies. To help this the ball position for this shot needs to be forward of middle in the stance, just inside the lead heel or a golf balls width further back than a driver ball position. Once we have this setup position, the takeaway of the swing should be low to the ground while keeping the clubhead wide and away from the body. This will help to keep loft on the club stop us getting too “steep” early in the swing.
At setup, weight distribution should be even on each leg, roughly 50/50. This weight distribution helps with the takeaway and shallow angle of approach rather than having more weight on the lead leg like during an iron shot. While having this weight distribution at setup, the weight needs to move onto the lead side on the follow through
CHECK POINTS
. Ball Position
. Takeaway
. Weight Transfer
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