Practicing Tough Lies and Fat Shots in Your Golf Sim

If you play a lot of simulator golf but rarely get out to a real course, you've probably felt the disconnect. The sim gives you a perfectly flat, perfectly forgiving lie every single time — and then you tee it up outside and every shot is above or below your feet, the grass grabs your club, and a slightly fat contact costs you thirty yards.

The good news is you can prepare for a lot of that reality without leaving your garage. A few cheap props and some deliberate drills go a long way toward building the feedback and confidence you need for the transition to grass.

Golf Hitting Strip Mat

The Towel Drill for Fat Shots

Fat shots are far more forgiving on a mat than they are on real grass. The mat lets you slide the club through and still send the ball flying, so you never feel the punishment. That's a problem when you're trying to groove clean contact.

The fix is simple: lay a towel down just behind the ball. Move it closer as your confidence grows. When you catch the ball clean, you'll strike it without touching the towel. When you hit it fat, you'll clip the towel first — and the visual feedback is immediate and obvious, even when the contact might feel fine through your hands.

It won't show you how that fat shot would actually behave on the course, but it tells you instantly that you caught it heavy. That awareness is the whole point.

Building Uphill and Downhill Lies

On the sim you're always hitting a flat, level shot. On the course, it feels like every ball is either above your feet or below them. A thick hitting strip — a couple of inches of foam padding with a grass layer on top — is a surprisingly good way to recreate that.

• Stand on the hitting strip and hit a ball off the mat to simulate a ball below your feet.
• Put the strip under the ball and stand off it to create an uphill lie with the ball above your feet.

It's a small change in geometry, but it forces you to make the setup and balance adjustments those slopes demand — the ones the flat mat never asks of you.

The Sticky Fringe Chip

One of the hardest shots to practice indoors is the short greenside chip out of thick, sticky fringe grass — the kind that grabs your club and refuses to let it slide through. A silicone project mat (this one is from Rockler, a woodworking store) does a shockingly good job of mimicking it.

Any silicone will work — a baking sheet, an oven mitt, whatever you have. Drop it down and take a little chip. Hit it fat and the silicone just bunches up and stops your club dead, so the ball goes nowhere. Catch it clean and the ball jumps off the face while the club grabs the silicone and stops.

That feeling of the club not sliding through the turf, but just kind of stopping — I think it's a pretty good representation of the real thing.

Bunker Practice

Finally, there's the bunker shot. A small bunker simulator mat from Amazon can help build confidence in where to strike the ground behind the ball, which is genuinely useful for training your low point.

The limitation is that it gives you no resistance — none of the drag and feel that real sand provides. So treat it as a low-point drill rather than a true sand simulation. It teaches you where to enter; it can't teach you how to power through the sand.

SkyTrak Launch Monitor