Make Your Golf Practice Count
Most golfers, regardless of their ability level, are guilty of wasting their practice time. How many times have you been at a driving range and witnessed stall after stall filled with tired looking golfers endlessly beating balls. Most have selected the large bucket and think only of launching all those little pellets with the big stick.
Most of these people would have been better off if they had just stayed home and mowed the lawn. Why? They are practicing without a purpose.
PLAN YOUR GOLF PRACTICE
The first step in improving your golf is learning more about the swing. If you do not want to take lessons, there is a wealth of information available in books, magazines and on the web. Find some information related to a part of your game you are struggling with. You’ll likely find many articles related to any and every golf sin you could possibly commit. Focus on the cause and effect. Try to understand not only what you need to do to improve, but the causes of your problem. There are likely to be multiple possible causes and solutions.
HIT THE DRIVING RANGE? NOT YET
Instead of running to hit that next large bucket, take those golf tips you learned and apply them in front of a full-length mirror. This is especially effective if you are working on your stance or setup. You can easily compare your body position with those of the pros in the magazines. Take your backswing in slow motion, stopping at various points to again compare your position with the pro. This exercise will help you picture and feel a good golf swing.
SMALL BUCKET PLEASE
When you finally get to the range, your mind is no doubt full of energy and excitement as you prepare to apply your new thoughts. That is good. But, remember that it is quality golf practice, not quantity, which counts. Get the small bucket and take your time. Rest between shots. Resolve in your mind to think about what you are working on before each shot. Apply one swing thought before each practice shot. Too many thoughts will result in “paralysis of analysis”. After each shot, reflect on not only the result, but how the swing felt. What did you do wrong? What did you do right?
PRACTICE WITH A FRIEND
You can triple the effectiveness of your golf practice if you bring a friend with you. Buy one large bucket and share a stall. Take turns hitting a few shots each. Tell your friend what you are working on and ask him to describe how it looks. Watch one another from the side and behind to get different angles. Ask your partner to focus on different elements of the swing: the grip, setup, plane, top of back swing, lower body position, shoulder turn, etc.
IMPROVEMENT TAKES TIME
Remember to keep focused on improving your weaknesses. It makes little sense to spend 75% of your golf practice time working on your strong points. Don’t get impatient. Realize that improvement takes time! Nobody goes from a twenty-handicap down to a single-digit overnight. However, if you apply these tips, you’ll be building your knowledge of the game as you practice. This can only help improve your game in the long run.
Handling Tee Box Pressure in Golf
If you’ve played golf for any length of time, you have undoubtedly encountered a situation or two which made you nervous. This phenomena is called ‘tee box pressure’, or TBP for short.
Perhaps it’s happened when you were getting ready to hit your tee shot off #1 with a dozen people watching. Maybe it was when you were paired with the top golfer in your club championship. Whatever the situation, one thing is sure: every golfer will find themselves dealing with TBP sooner or later!
WHY THE NERVES?
What is it about golf that gets us feeling this way in the first place? After all, when you step onto the golf course, there usually aren’t any lives at stake. In addition, whether you perform well or not on any given day, there are a billion people in China who will not care!
This is a complicated question which will have different answers for different people. Often times, we have too much of our egos wrapped up in the game. The more we invest in something (and we all know that golf can be all-consuming), the more we expect in return. When the ‘game is on’, we fear failure. With this fear in our mind, our muscles tighten. This, in turn, makes it harder to have the free-flowing swing and effective touch game that is needed to score well.
Here are a few tips which will help you the next time you are getting ready to play a pressure round.
1. PREPARE MENTALLY
During the days leading up to the big game, prepare yourself mentally for the atmosphere you will be facing. You know you are going to be nervous. Being nervous, however, does not mean you cannot hit good golf shots. Think of all the times you have hit good shots under pressure before.
Picture yourself dealing with various situations that will occur during the upcoming round. Think of the feeling as you prepare to hit your first tee shot. Your heart is beating out of control. Then, you swing under control, in good tempo, and strike a solid one right down the middle of the fairway.
Next, imagine hitting one into trouble. You’re confronted with the options and weigh the risks of punching a miracle shot through the trees. Instead, you calm yourself and ‘take your medicine’ by chipping back out to the fairway. This type of clear thinking will help you to avoid those double and triple bogeys which ruin rounds.
2. CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY – CONFIDENT SWING
The term ‘choke’ is applied to people who don’t perform well under pressure. Who can forget poor Greg Norman losing that 6-shot lead to Nick Faldo at the Masters tournament? The main reason people choke is simply because their thought processes become illogical. They start thinking negatively as if they have never hit a solid golf shot. Or, they start to take unnecessary chances and over-swing in the process.
Before the round, make up your mind that you will not beat yourself. Let the other players beat you. Hit shots that you know you can hit. One top amateur player used this strategy in the Minnesota State Amateur qualifying round at the Lake City Golf Club. He wasn’t playing very well on the front nine and was tempted several times to ‘go for broke’. On the eighth hole, a par five, his second shot left him about 110 yards out in some gnarly rough. He had a good angle at the pin, but if the shot went long, it was obviously going down an embankment leading to a difficult chip with little green to work with. However, he felt like he needed a ‘make something happen’. So, he debated whether to try to finesse a full wedge, or to take a full swing with his gap wedge. He had more confidence in the gap wedge because he knew this club would never put him in the big trouble which was over the green. He selected the gap wedge (conservative strategy) and made a confident swing which left the ball 30 feet below the hole. He two-putted and took his par.
This strategy paid off as he made birdie on the next hole. All of a sudden, his marginal round was heading in the right direction! This may not have been possible if he had taken the aggressive route on the previous hole and gone over the green.
3. LET GO OF THE HANDLE BARS!
A player recently quipped, “You’ve got to let go of the handle bars!” How descriptive of the golfer who, when under pressure, holds onto the club as if it had “handle bars”. Unlike riding a bicycle, holding onto the handle bars is a bad thing in golf!
In other words, you’ve got to let the club swing to be effective. Holding on and trying to steer the ball down the fairway will produce less distance and less accuracy. A golfer has to feel like they are ‘giving up control’ of the swing. In other words, the golfer must trust that what he has trained will work when the pressure is on. This is called ‘muscle memory’.
Giving up control gets progressively harder as the round progresses. The tendency is to start counting your score as you try to figure out how you’re faring compared to everyone else. You must counteract that tendency by consciously trying to swing looser and freer as the round goes on. Stay focused on what you’re trying to do – forget about everyone else. You can’t control them anyway.
Keep the game simple. Pick your target, go through your pre-shot routine and let your swing go! Stay within yourself and you won’t be a victim of that TBP!
Is There Any Cure For Golf Putting Problems?
It is perhaps the supreme irony in golf that the simplest shot in the book seems to cause the biggest problem to the largest number of golfers.
Let's face it, the putt is the only golf shot that it is really possible to execute flawlessly without any tuition at all. We all start off doing this as kids. Some of us are even superb at it at this young age. It is this shot that is often the spur that leads to a lifelong addiction to this wonderful game of golf.
What then, goes wrong? How can this easiest of golf shots become the absolute bane of an adult golfer's life? Sorry to say, there is no easy answer. Experts are just as baffled as inexperienced amateurs over this one. The saying 'it's all in the mind' was probably never more true than in this golfing case.
Several years ago, an American company developed a golf putting machine. They carried out tests in optimum putting conditions and were gob-smacked to discover that their pride and joy couldn't hole every putt. They took that machine apart and tweaked every element of it until they were certain that it was in perfect working order. And, guess what? It still failed to hole some putts. If this doesn't go to prove that there is at least an element of 'black art' about golf putting, then nothing will.
The best lesson to take from the above is that you really never are going to achieve putting perfection. If a machine in perfect working under operating under perfect putting conditions fails to hole every golf putt, then a human being with all his or her imperfections never is.
So, the first rule is, stop giving yourself such a hard time whenever you miss a few putts. It happens to even top professional golfers. In fact, any problem you have with putting is much more likely to be psychological than physical, so the very last thing you should be doing is getting down on yourself mentally; this can only make matters worse.
Is there anything you can do if you really do have severe, regular putting problems? Well, apart from working on the mental side of things to inculcate strong belief that you really can putt (try some self-hypnosis tapes etc.) the best advice is to see if a change of putter will do the trick. Take your lead from the professionals. So many professional golfers who've suffered terribly from the 'yips' on the putting green, such as Bernhard Langer, found their salvation in the broom handle putter - maybe you should give one a try.