Before you pick a club or think about technique around the green, I want you to answer one question: how good is your lie, really?
Paul Runyan — one of the great short-game minds in golf history — broke lie quality into five categories, and I use his exact framework with every student:
- Perfect
- Good
- Bad
- Terrible
- "I wish it was someone else's lie."
That last one always gets a laugh in a lesson. It also happens to be the most useful category, because it forces you to be honest about a lie instead of pretending it's better than it is.
The Rule I Never Break
Here's where I hold a hard line, and it's the same rule I apply everywhere else in the short game: never push the shaft forward to compensate for a bad lie.
It's tempting. A tough lie makes you want to lean the shaft forward, take loft off, and try to muscle the ball out. But adjusting your stance at address already changes your effective loft on its own. So instead of leaning the shaft — which digs the leading edge in and kills your margin for error — you compensate by opening the face. What Runyan called a "cut shot."
I teach the amount of face-opening using a clock face on the toe of the club: think of it as 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, or fully open toward 3 o'clock, depending on how much the lie demands.
Why This Matters More Than Technique
Most players think a tough lie calls for a different swing. It doesn't. It calls for a different setup decision, made honestly, before the club ever moves. If you get the lie assessment right — and resist the urge to lean that shaft forward — the same motion you've already built handles almost every situation you'll face around the green.
This is the same philosophy running through everything I teach, whether it's a full swing or a bunker shot: fix the setup, and the swing usually takes care of itself. Fight the setup with the swing, and you're compensating for a compensation, all the way down.
A Quick Gut Check
Next time you're standing over a greenside shot, run Runyan's five categories before you do anything else. Be honest — especially about landing in category five. Then ask: am I about to lean this shaft forward to bail myself out? If the answer's yes, stop. Open the face instead, pick your spot on the clock, and let the setup do the work the swing shouldn't have to.
It's a small habit. It saves more strokes than almost any technical tip I could give you.
Explore In-2-It Golf's short-game training aids, built around this exact lie-and-setup system.