Whose Game is it Anyway?

Are you competitive? In golf, just like in life, a lot of us have competitive tendencies. We want to be the best, to beat the best, to win. This can be a great motivator, and can drive people to do great things. But, sometimes it hurts us. The golf course can be one of those times.

Have you ever played with a guy you thought you “should” beat, who beat you instead? A tendency I’ve fought in my own game is to get caught up in the games of my playing partners, rather than focusing on my own. This is a no-win situation. Think about it: If your partner is playing well, the tendency is to start pushing to keep up, taking you away from your game plan. If your partner is playing poorly, sometimes you take your foot off the gas and get complacent.

Recently, I came across this great footage of Davis Love III playing a practice round at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, NC. Take a look:

What do you notice? Yes, DL3 has a great swing, blah blah blah. But notice the utter lack of interest that he takes in the shot of his playing partner. DL3 has placed his focus purely on his own game, his own process, his own shot. In this way, he has removed a source of distraction.

Take a tip from Davis and try to put this focus into your own game. Whether your buddies are having a hot round or a poor one, keep the focus the same: Your game, your process, your shot. You may find that this helps you to play your best more often.

5 Steps to Make Your Resolution Count

In a few hours (depending on where you live) it will be 2011. A new year with new possibilities, new goals, and the same old golf game.

Over the next couple days, people throw around resolutions for the new year, resolving to improve their lives in many ways. Most won’t stick to these resolutions, and will experience little change. Resolutions for your golf game are no different. One of the major reasons that these resolutions fail is that most have no plan for their goal.

A great acronym that will help you to build a solid plan for your goal is illustrated to the right: SMART. Setting SMART goals will create a plan that you can follow to reach your goal. Lets break it down in golfing terms:

S is for Specific: Specific goals are far more effective than vague ones, simply for the reason that you know what you’re working towards far more clearly. Here’s a common vague goal: “I’m going to get more consistent.” What does that mean? The more clearly defined your goals are the easier it is to stay focused working toward them.

M is for Measurable: Creating a measurable goal allows you to check your progress, and to evaluate when it’s time to set a new goal. In the example goal of “getting more consistent,” how do you know if you are? How do you know when you’ve achieved your goal? A measurable goal would be: “I want to average 12 greens hit in regulation.” This is quantifiable, in that its pretty clear when you’ve been successful (and when you haven’t).

A is for Attainable: Attainable goals are a must. As much as we’ve been told to “reach for the stars,” sometimes it just won’t happen. If you’re a 20 handicap now, its not attainable to set a goal of reaching the PGA Tour this year. Take the time to think about all the variables: how much practice time you’ll have, what the other demands of your life are, your current level, etc. Then set a reachable goal that you can proudly accomplish in 2011.

R is for Relevant: Relevant goals tie together with attainable goals, but are slightly different. This requires you to answer the question, “Why do I play golf?” then tailor your goal to the answer. If you play golf for fun, set a goal that will allow you to have more fun. If you play to compete, set a goal that helps you to improve in competition. Your goal should match your reasons for playing, otherwise you’ll struggle to stick to it.

T is for Time-Bound: Finally, create a time frame for completing your goal. Mark your calendar with the end date, as well as checkup dates where you measure your progress against your goal. Golf isn’t a game where you can procrastinate and then do all your practice right before your goal deadline. Build a timeline for your improvement.

Following these steps (or at least keeping them in mind) as you create your goals for 2011 will help you to stay on track. Hopefully when you make your goals for 2012 you won’t be making the same ones!

If you need a hand creating your goals for the year, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Please, No More Drills!

You know what I’m talking about: swing drills, repetitive movements that mimic parts of a golf swing. Golf Digest is full of them, golf professionals love to prescribe them, and we all hate doing them. Even if we take the time, they arent doing us much good. So stop. Please.

In the learning process, there aren’t many absolutes. But one of them is that to improve at a skill (such as golf), you have to practice that skill itself. This allows your brain to produce myelin to insulate those connections in your brain, making you more efficient at that skill. (See previous posts for more on that.) When you spend 3 hours hitting balls off your left toe with one hand, for example, you aren’t really practicing the golf swing as you want to perform it. Therefore you aren’t getting any better, except at trick shots.

When it comes down to it, most golfers are feel players. We have to be able to feel the move we’re trying to make before we perform it. Thats where the value in drills lies, in creating a feeling that you can carry over into your actual golf swing. Thats the key piece, performing the movement as part of a full golf swing. When you practice, rehearse a swing with the feeling you’re looking for. This is a much better way to learn, as you are actually practicing the movements you’d like to make.

So if you must perform drills, try to use them in that fashion, to create a feel for your actual golf swing. Your days of pounding hundreds of balls with no improvement will be over.

It’s OK to Goof Off at the Golf Course

For the schools in the Victoria, BC area, this week is spring break. For me, that means kids golf lessons. I’m fortunate to have some great kids in my camps this year, I’ve been having almost as much fun as them!

The nice thing about hanging out with kids is that it reminds you to goof around once in a while. A lot of us take this wonderful game really seriously, and forget that it is, in fact, a game. Kids never forget that. They marvel over the ball that curves between the range flags. They ooh and aah at the pitch shot that goes up over head height. And they challenge themselves to hit these shots, not because they’re trying to save par or win a tournament, but because they’re fun!

One of my golf buddies exemplifies this concept perfectly. He’s a competitive player, playing for a local college in regional and national events, with good success. His practice plan is a little bit unconventional. He’ll go through block practice like a regular guy, but towards the end of his practice, the focus switches to goofing around. He’ll hit 100 yard hooks from one side of the range to the other, 60 yard slices with his driver, 80 yard flop shots with his 7-iron. The likelihood of him needing to play any of these shots in a tournament is slim, but he’s having way more fun than most people on the range. This keeps him fresh and excited about golf and about his practice.

Try to find that sense of fun next time you’re at the range or the golf course. You’ll stay fresher, and you may even develop shots and talents that you never knew you had. Pretty soon you’ll be having as much fun as a 9 year-old!

Do you understand your golf clubs?

A new student of mine recently reminded me how important it is to understand how the club works during the golf swing. He has taken golf lessons before, from a number of teachers, with mixed results. At first glance, his swing looks pretty good, right? Analyse it a little more closely and you’ll see that he rises up out of his posture as the club gets close to impact. Why? He’s trying to get the club under the ball and lift the ball up into the air.

One of my previous posts covered the specifics of how an iron club works, you can read it here. Not understanding how to use the club as a tool can create some pretty dramatic shots. Despite an otherwise good swing, the student above couldn’t put club on ball. He would hit fat shots, thin shots, and would occasionally top the ball.

After he understood his goal, (to have the low point of the swing bottom out in front of the ball) he dramatically improved very quickly. The tendency to lose his posture toward impact was greatly reduced (not eliminated as he has some physical fitness issues as well) and his contact with the ball improved quickly.

The moral of the story: Its important to understand the concepts behind the golf swing before worrying about swing technique. In the above example, I could have worked with him all day on retaining his posture, but if he was still trying to work the club underneath the ball, it would have been a complete waste of time. Find a coach who will help you understand the concepts at the heart of the game and you will improve quickly.

Sean O’Hair/Sean Foley: Technique in practice rounds?

I’m not an expert in coaching elite competitive golfers by any means, but this video struck me as a bit strange. In it, Sean O’Hair’s coach, Sean Foley, interrupts O’Hair’s preshot routine midway through a practice round to remind him of a technical change. This is PGA Championship week, the Wednesday before the tournament begins. It truly surprised me that a coach of this caliber would be focused on technique to this degree less than 24 hours before a major championship.

My own priorities for practice rounds go something like this:

1. Preview the green complexes for the best places to miss, the quadrants where flags might be located, and the contouring of the greens
2. Find the best spots in the fairway or rough from which to approach each green
3. Choose the club, shot, and line from each tee that will set up those approaches with minimal risk
4. Gain an overall comfort level with the flow of the course

On that list, technique is nowhere to be found. Sean Foley’s priorities for practice rounds are clearly a bit different from mine. I can’t help but wonder: Is this intervention so close before a major tournament really helping his player? Or is it taking Sean’s focus away from the more important elements of a practice round? As a tour player, are Sean’s course assessment and mental skills so good that he can do both the day before the PGA? It should be noted that Sean finished 75th, including a third round 82. What are your thoughts on this?

The Stack and Tilt Golf Swing: Why you shouldn’t write it off

There is one absolute in any discipline: People are quick to be critical of things that they don’t understand.

Swing technique is commonly discussed in 19th hole grill rooms around the world. Golf swings are analyzed in minute detail on every PGA Tour broadcast. Teachers and golf instructors make a living describing techniques. Players live and die by their swing planes, postures, and grips. Current conventional technique is beaten to death by golf magazines, dvds, and tv programs. And because conventional ideas of the swing are so widespread, many golfers understand the things that they are supposed to do: shift your weight, stay behind the ball, take the club back low and slow, etc. The question is: Who decided that these were the things that help you to hit a golf ball efficiently?

Stack and Tilt is a technique espoused by Andy Plummer and Mike Bennett, two former tour players turned golf coaches, who have devised a simpler way to hit the ball. Their technique contradicts almost every commonly held idea of how the golf swing should work. Key pieces of the S&T swing involve keeping the weight on the front foot and swinging your arms in a circle behind you. The technique works. And they have been blasted for it. Prominent teachers have spoken out against the technique, and have been unceremoniously derisive. Why? Two reasons: 1) The swing taught by Plummer and Bennett shakes their belief systems and causes them to doubt their teachings. 2) They simply do not know enough about the technique.

Critics point to two things: Flaws in the technique, and to the mixed success of prominent tour players who have tried to implement the technique. The arguments vs. the technique are typically not well researched, and are in some cases, fundamentally incorrect (see Mike Bender’s argument here). This is because the critics have not researched the topic before judging. Success at a tour level is also not an accurate judgement, because the players that are successful on tour are successful for many reasons, not just swing technique (mental game, short game, fitness, and practice habits come to mind). Just because a player makes a technical change, it is unfair to expect them to immediately show massive improvement (although this has been the case for some). So how can you come to a decision? There’s really only one way: Try it!

For the everyday golfer, the lesson is simple: When you read something, see something, or are told something, do not immediately take it as gospel. I don’t care if Butch Harmon says it, or it comes from the Pope, Mother Teresa, or Gandi. It may not be true, and it especially may not be true for you. Take the time to gather some information, evaluate it, and make an objective decision based on what you think, not another person’s opinion. This should be your process whether you are evaluating Stack and Tilt, or whether to vacation in Puerto Rico, or whether to purchase a new type of breakfast cereal. Make your own decisions based on complete information.

An added bonus of thinking for yourself? It engages the intellectual part of your brain, building more myelin (see my last post) and helping you to improve faster. And really, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This Before…

“I hit it great on the range, but when I get to the course I can’t hit the ball!”

I know, you’ve heard it. This common golfer’s lament echoes through clubhouses across the globe. Here’s why. The fact is that most golfers focus almost entirely on their technique. They blame their swings for every poor shot and diligently pour over the latest issue of Golf Digest, searching for the answer to perfect technique. Each new tip is tried and tested, then inevitably discarded. This trial and error process is important for learning, but won’t produce good results on the golf course.

Take the example of a forced carry over water. Many golfers approach this situation with fear and anxiety, even though most possess the skill to successfully hit the shot. Usually, this anxiety causes a poor shot. And the swing technique gets the blame. But if you’ve hit the same shot many times to landlocked greens, then what changed when the water appeared?

The answer is confidence. Because golfers are constantly searching for “the secret,” they never develop any confidence in their abilities. This shows itself in situations that take a player outside their comfort zone, such as hitting over water, or from uneven lies. So if you hit poor shots in those situations, is it your technique at fault, or your confidence?

The first step is to identify the situations that take you outside your comfort zone. Is there a pattern to your poor shots? Do you frequently hit a bad tee shot on the first tee? Do you struggle on certain holes? Is it that downhill sidehill shot on 17 that gets you every time? Once you establish a pattern, you can identify your problem and take steps toward fixing it. And I’ll give you good odds that the problem does not lie in you technique!

Are You Ruining Golf for Yourself?

From an early age, we’re taught to set high goals, to expect the best, to reach for the stars. Admirable, to be sure. But are your expectations for your golf game a little bit unreasonable? I recently played a quick nine, the first time I’d played in about a month. Not surprisingly, I struggled in a couple of instances. And I got mad at myself. Then I realized, I was expecting too much from myself considering how little I’d played. After that I just let the bad shots go and focused on having a good time being on the course. And my day was much more fun for it!

The lesson? Don’t allow your expectations to get in the way of your enjoyment. We all have an expectation of how we’ll play when we get to the course, whether we play once a week or once a year. The trick to playing your best golf is to let go of those expectations so that they don’t affect your emotions.

One of the most common areas of unrealistic expectations is on the putting green. Many weekend golfers expect to make every putt that looks makeable, inside 20 feet or so. They allow themselves to get genuinely upset when they miss a 10 or 15 footer! But lets examine the chances of converting these putts. Some statistics from Tiger Wood’s 2009 season are listed below:

• From 5-10 feet, Tiger converted only 62% of his putts
• From 10-15 feet, his chances dropped to about 32%
• From 15-20 feet, that number is even lower, about 16%

The most telling stat here is the second in the list. From 10-15 feet, Tiger makes only about a third of the putts he attempts. Granted, PGA Tour greens are a little more difficult than the ones you and I play everyday, but we’re talking about the #1 player on the planet here! If Tiger only converts one in three putts from 10-15 feet, then it is likely that our chances are a little less, to say the least. And it’s not fair to ourselves to expect to make every one!

Next time you play, remember that your goal on putts outside of 10 feet is to get down in two putts, because that’s what Tiger does most of the time. If the ball happens to drop in, so much the better. You’ll save yourself a whole heck of a lot of frustration, and enjoy yourself a lot more. For a little help setting better goals for your golf in 2010, email me here.