Mastering Bunker Shots: A Beginner’s Guide to Consistently Escaping the Sand

Most high handicap golfers have a difficult time executing correct bunker shots. They either don’t know any reliable means of getting out of the sand no matter the lie, or they don’t know which type of shot to play in which condition.

In fact, no type of golf shot further separates a beginner from a skilled player more than bunker shots. You can almost bet that the worse the golfer, the worse they’ll be out of the sand specifically. And, conversely, the lower the handicap a player carries, the more they actually welcome bunker shots because it gives them a better lie than they’d find in the rough.

If you struggle with bunker shots, it simply doesn’t have to be that way. You absolutely can overcome those stroke-multiplying sand trap disasters.

I’m not saying it’ll be easy. Just like every other skill in golf, getting better at bunker shots is going to require a fair amount of work. But maybe not as much as you might fear.

Bunker Shots for High Handicappers

Let me say what you most certainly already understand about this crazy game: There is no such thing as a one-size-fits all solution in golf, including with bunker shots. Set up, ball position, posture, swing speed, they all factor in in a way that makes it impossible to prescribe a catch-all technique for hitting bunker shots.

The point is that you’d likely benefit from some individual hands-on instruction. And as you get better, you’ll want to learn more than one way to escape the sand.

Still, there are some basic principles and age-old bunker shots for beginners that should do you some good. That’s what we’re going to focus on here.

But before we get into how to play bunker shots, let’s establish a clear understanding of what we’re facing.

What Is a Golf Course Bunker?

Bunker, sand trap, trap, sand—by whatever name you call it, a golf bunker is a pit or hole of varying size, shape, and depth that is filled with sand of varying amounts and coarseness.

For most of us, playing bunker golf is an unpleasant experience we try hard to avoid.

They are, after all, considered hazards for a reason.

The problem is, of course, the sand. Our golf clubs don’t interact with sand the same way they do with turf. So, hitting bunker shots means employing techniques different from what we’d use on the rest of the golf course.

Many of us are so inept out of the sand that if our ball finds a bunker, we immediately open up the potential to add two or more extra strokes to our score. Talk about a true hazard!

Bunkers can appear almost anywhere on a golf course. You won’t find them on a tee box, but pretty much anywhere else throughout the hole is fair game and up to the course architect whose aim is to make the hole challenging but fair.

The most common type of golf bunker is the greenside bunker. And it’s the shot that usually gives beginners the most trouble.

Would you believe that professional golfers often purposefully aim for bunkers? Of course, they are always trying to get the ball on the fairway and green, but a greenside bunker regularly is their best option for landing a shot that won’t reach the putting surface.

That’s because they know how to hit bunker shots so well that they can get a more predictable result than if they had to play from the uneven, wildcard, potentially deep rough where getting a good result is more of a crapshoot.

You might not become Seve Ballesteros, an all-time bunker magician, but you definitely can go from bad to at least competent, which is going to make golf a lot more fun.

How To Play Bunker Shots

First things first: Get out of the bunker in one shot. Every single time.

That is job number one. Everything else is a bonus that we don’t even want to think about unless we’re taking care of job number one.

When we do get into that bonus territory, we’re talking about things like distance control, consistency of strike, and even spin control.

But first, get out of the bunker in just one shot. Every time.

How are we gonna do that?

How To Hit Bunker Shots

When it comes to greenside bunker shots, one of the most important principles to understand is that you’ve got to hit the sand before the golf ball.

It’s counterintuitive to every other shot we play in golf. We work so hard on the driving range to learn to hit the ball and then the turf.

Now we’ve got to hit the ground and then the ball??

But in order to get the ball to pop up into the air, out of the bunker, and onto the green, it’s sand then ball.

Here’s how to learn.

1. Choose your sand wedge or a high-lofted wedge like a 56 degree and find a practice bunker.
2. Using your golf club, draw a long line in the sand that is parallel to the green. In other words, you want to be able to set up as if you were going to hit a golf shot onto the green with the line in the sand running between your feet and legs.
3. Take your golf posture with a nice knee bend and athletic setup, and take your grip with the clubface slightly open. Position your body so that the line in the sand is forward in your stance.
4. Without a golf ball, practice hitting the line in the sand. Keep moving down the line. Your goal is precision. You want to learn to hit the precise point in the sand that is the line. No golf ball at this stage! If you need to shorten your swing to increase your precision, do that. Keep practicing until you can repeatedly hit the line.
5. Now, rake the bunker and re-draw the line in the sand.
6. This time, place five golf balls 2 to 3 inches in front of the line in the sand (in between the line and the green). Each ball should be a couple of feet apart from the next so it doesn’t interfere with the shot you’re hitting.
7. Just as before, practice hitting the line, which is now directly behind the golf ball. If you’re precise in hitting the line before the ball, you should start to see the ball pop up out of the sand and propelled forward.
8. Don’t slow down your swing! You do not want to decelerate in the bunker. Maintain your swing speed through the strike. Because you’re going to hit the sand first, go ahead and be aggressive. Accelerate through the sand. As long as you’re precise and hit that line, you’ve got some margin for error.
9. Practice moving the ball closer to and further from the line. With the same setup as before, experiment with the relationship between the line in the sand and the ball. Your job is still to hit the line first. But you’ll start to see the differences in how far the ball travels based on how close it is to the line.
10. Practice without the line. Out on the golf course, you are not allowed to draw a line in the sand. You’ll just have to imagine it. So practice just as you’d play. Set up in the bunker and picture where that line in the sand behind the ball would be. Then hit that spot in the sand, making sure that you’re hitting the sand before the ball.

This is by no means the only way to hit a greenside bunker shot. But it’s a great place to start. If you consistently practice this drill and get to the point where you can hit that line every time, you’ll start to see improvements.

From there, you can experiment with opening or squaring your clubface, altering the length of your swing, opening your stance, weight distribution, coming into that line in the sand from a steeper or shallower angle, and so on.

In other words, you’ll learn to start factoring in all of the variables that make every bunker shot unique. You’ll begin to intuitively understand how to make tweaks to fit a specific shot.

But first things first: Learn how to hit the sand before the ball, and learn how to hit a very precise point in the sand.

Fairway Bunker Shots

After greenside bunkers, the next most common type are fairway traps. These are bunkers that are further away from the green.

Fairway bunker shots require their own set of skills to successfully navigate. And because you’re often trying to hit them with a lower-lofted club meant to travel a further distance, the height of the lip of the bunker may factor in, inviting potential disaster.

When it comes to the golf club used in bunker shots around the green, we’re almost always choosing a very high-lofted wedge. We want to pop the ball up into the air for a soft landing on the nearby green.

But for fairway bunker shots, our club selection depends on two things:

1. The distance to the green.
2. The height of the lip of the bunker.

Ideally, we want to choose a club that, if we hit it correctly, is going to result in the ball landing on or near the green. Because of factors like choking down and less leg engagement, which we’ll discuss below, you can expect the shot to go about a half club to a full club shorter than normal. So, expect the shot to play longer.

But remember our first rule of bunker shots? Get out of the bunker in one shot. Every time.

That means that we can’t get too greedy with club selection. The last thing we want is to choose a club that may be enough to reach the green but that isn’t lofted enough to get over the front lip of the bunker. That’s going to result in a shot that hits the lip and rolls right back down into the sand. No bueno!

So, in terms of balancing the factors of having enough club to reach the green and having enough loft to clear the lip, always favor more loft.

A good rule of thumb is to choose slightly more loft than you think you need. So, if you think a 6 iron would safely get the ball above the lip, go ahead and hit a 7 iron.

Also, hit your fairway bunker shots with an iron. Woods, especially for beginners, don’t typically work too well out of the sand.

After you’ve made your club selection, here are some techniques for hitting fairway bunker shots:

1. Build a very stable base. Twist your feet in the sand until you are dug in, comfortable, athletic, and stable.
2. Choke down slightly. By choking down, you can better guarantee a clean strike.
3. Keep your legs still and quiet. While you’re going to set up to the ball as you would for a normal full shot, in the fairway bunker, you don’t want to overly engage your legs. Instead, they should remain as anchor points. Let your shoulders and arms do the work. Your stable legs will lead to a more consistent and precise strike.
4. Hit the ball first. With greenside bunker shots, we talked about how you want to hit the sand and then the ball. Well, it’s the opposite with fairway bunker shots. In this case, we want to clip that ball cleanly, without hitting any sand before the ball.

Bunker Shots for Beginners: Practice Makes Perfect

Hitting bunker shots successfully takes a lot of practice. If you don’t spend any time preparing, you can’t realistically expect a good result out on the course.

Conversely, if you learn how to hit bunker shots and then put in the work to master your technique, you can expect favorable results.

A golf course bunker doesn’t have to be cause for panic. You might even get to the point where you welcome the predictability of bunker shots. You’ll know exactly what to do.

Start with these basics, continue to refine your techniques, and don’t stop practicing. Even once you’ve got your bunker game solid, you’ll always need to keep it maintained.

About PlayBetter Golf Reviewer Marc Sheforgen

Marc "Shef" Sheforgen is a golf writer whose passion for the game far exceeds his ability to play it well. Marc covers all things golf, from product reviews and equipment recommendations to event coverage and tournament analysis. When he’s not playing, watching, or writing about golf, he enjoys traveling (often golf-related), youth sports coaching, volunteering, and record collecting.