Recently I was asked a very good question about how to change a golf swing stroke pattern where the golf club travels too quickly to inside on the backswing making the golf swing too flat. This golfer was challenged to find an effective way to change his golf swing pattern when he was attempting to hit a golf ball towards a target.
In a perfect world every golfer would learn the golf swing techniques first then learn how to use them to hit golf shots to a target, however this is not realistic for the majority of golfers who have already learned their golf swing techniques at the same time they are attempting to hit perfect shots to the target.
If you desire to change your stubborn golf stroke pattern this year once and for all you might like to try the following reprogramming technique.
You can make significant progress with a golf swing change by practicing your swing against a wall (carefully) using the Back to the Wall Golf Swing Reprogramming Drill.
The idea is to stand with your back to the wall with your rear end about 6 inches away from it in your address position with a 7 iron. (grip down on the iron if you’re limited for ceiling height)
Important: Put a head cover or something protective on the club head before you swing back very slowly to the top of your backswing. When you arrive at the top swing down very slowly through the bottom of the swing and back to the top of the finish position. This is the stroke pattern that you will ingrain over the next few months.
The idea is to change the pattern of your golf swing very deliberately at home initially, and ideally you would go about it just like this.
- Swing the golf club back and through at 25 percent of its normal speed being very careful not to hit the wall. Do this 50 times each day for consecutive 7 days.
- Swing the golf club back and through at 50 percent of its normal speed being very careful not to hit the wall. Do this 50 times each day for consecutive 7 days.
- Swing the golf club back and through at 75 percent of its normal speed being very careful not to hit the wall. Do this 50 times each day for 7 consecutive days.
Now that you have completed the golf swing reprogramming home segment you will go to the driving range to develop the new pattern with golf balls.
- Week 1. Go to the driving range and hit 75 shots with your seven iron at 50 percent of your normal speed 3 times each week for 2 weeks. (Do not worry about where the golf ball is going)
- Week 2. Go to the driving range and hit 75 shots with your seven iron at 75 percent of your normal speed 3 times each week for 2 weeks. (Do not worry about where the golf ball is going)
- Week 3. Go to the driving range and hit 100 shots with your seven iron at 75 percent your normal speed 3 times each week for 2 weeks. (Aim to hit your golf shots towards targets)
Now you have completed the golf range reprogramming segment you can go to the golf course to test the new stroke pattern in play.
- Week 4. Go to the golf course and test out your new technique. Swing the golf club at 75 percent of your normal swing speed and have someone video some of your golf swings to validate the changes you have made.
You will discover that you can change your golf stroke pattern if you go about it very deliberately and also improve your golf shot-making consistency.
Remember though, that you change the stroke pattern before your develop your shot-making consistency.
It is very important that you get the order right.
On the driving range before your play you hit golf shots at 75 percent of your normal speed. This is important as your old program operates at 100 percent and if you increase the speed of your golf swing pattern to 100 percent it is likely that your old pattern will start to manifest itself.
This reprogramming technique will work if you follow the program just as it is written.
Let me know how you go once you have completed the program.
Until next time,
Lawrie Montague
Hale Irwin played some great golf on the 2011 Champions Tour in his mid sixties and shows us all the importance of maintaining our health and fitness and a strong, competitive drive so we can continue to tap into our awesome potential.
In 2011 he played in 21 tournaments and made the cut in every event. He had 7 top ten finishes and earnings of $624,811. I believe that Hale Irwin has been a consistent and competitive professional golfer for a long time because his golf swing and approach to the playing the game has been kept simple. His technique hasn’t got shorter or changed much in forty years and he has kept his short-game sharp.
He never overpowers his golf swing and his timing and tempo has remained consistent. His basic shot-shape is the fade and this ball flight allows him to control the direction and distance of his shots with precision and consistency.
Hale Irwin had 20 victories on the PGA Tour beginning with the 1971 Sea Pines Heritage Classic and finishing with the 1994 MCI Heritage Golf Classic, and won prize money of just under six million dollars. His 1994 Heritage win at the age of nearly 49 made him one of the oldest winners in Tour history.
He also won two Piccadilly World Match Play Championships at Wentworth in the 1970s. His successes kept him ranked high among his peers – he was ranked among the top five in Official World Golf Rankings for a few weeks in 1991.
Irwin qualified to play on the over-50 Champions Tour (formerly the Senior PGA Tour) in 1995 and has enjoyed even greater success at this level than he did on the PGA Tour.
He has won 45 Champions Tour titles and tops the all-time Champions Tour money list with earnings of over USD $23 million. He was the winner of the U.S. Senior Open in 1998 and 2000. Irwin was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992.
A truly great golfer Hale Irwin inspires us all to keep working hard at our golf and at the same time keeping it simple and fundamentally consistent.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Irwin
Until next time,
Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro
If you asked one hundred regular amateur golfers to honestly rate the quality of their mental game on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being highly competent at managing their mental/emotional state on the golf course and one being totally incompetent on the golf course what do you think the majority of golfers would say?
I bet they would say that they rank too low on the scale, probably about a 2 or a 3.
If you then ask them what they need to do to raise their score most would have very little idea about what they need to do.
Some will say that they have read popular authors like Bob Rotella and other popular golf psychologists who write about the mental game and golf.
The truth is that very few golfers ever spend any time developing their mental skills and there’s no doubt that it is holding you back from hitting better and more consistent golf shots and shooting lower golf scores.
How much easier would it be if you knew what your unique personality style was for learning and performing on the golf course?
If you knew that your particular style meant that you needed to take instruction a certain way as well as the way you play on the golf course?
If you were oblivious to your performance style could it mean that every time you play you are no better off than the last time you played?
That in fact you would never get better at golf because you don’t know what you need to do.
Golf is a game of gross generalisations.
Golf books, golf magazines and other forms of media try to persuade you to go with a popular style that may not be even close to being the best way for you.
This has been a challenge for me for many years up until recently when I came across a golf personality profile that actually got it right.
Someone finally developed a golf personality profile for every golfer that helps you to understand why YOU play golf the way YOU do and how YOU can get better at it by following some simple guidelines.
The profile was developed by Bobby Foster, a management consultant headquartered in Columbia, SC. Bobby is a former teaching professional and golf coach at the University of South Carolina where he coached several All-Americans including four players who played on The PGA Tour.
He is a Certified Behavioral Analyst specializing in the D.I.S.C Behavioral Style Model. He explains the purpose behind the development of the mental golf profile -
“Our company has had great success using DISC profiles in work language to help people improve performance in all types of working environments.
Over the years, I’ve often thought about how much better I would have been as a player, instructor and coach if I’d known about the DISC System during that stage of my life.
We built this profile in golf language so that players, instructors and coaches could enjoy the same benefits I’ve seen countless experience with DISC profiles in the workplace.”
The system generates personalized information for working on your mental game just as video and launch monitors produce personalized information for working on your swing and customizing your equipment. The profile works great for self-coaching as well as for collaborating with your instructor or coach.
It’s Quick…It’s Accurate…It’s Comprehensive… “The beauty of this system is that our players get an accurate and comprehensive report without having to spend hours completing a laborious questionnaire. You sure get a lot for the time and money you invest in this process.”
– Dr. Greg Rose, Co-Founder, Titleist Performance Institute
Following is the 5 step outline of the Mental Golf Workshop™ profile process -
- Log in to www.mentalgolfworkshop.com with my access code procollege (all one word).
- Pay US $65.00 (worth every penny too!)
- Spend about ten minutes answering the multiple-choice questionnaire.
- Your answers go through the proprietary scoring system to produce a 20 plus page report.
- Review the detailed descriptions of your mental golf tendencies and customized strategies for these areas of your game – Golf Temperament
- Pre-Round Preparation
- Mental Tendencies When Playing Shots
- Course Management
- Working With Your Instructors
- Mental Tendencies Toward Golf Fitness
Your report is produced in a “workshop” format, with space provided to make notes as you work through your report. This format makes it easy to self-coach yourself or to review with your instructor or coach.
I know that this great tool will be the tool you need to make the New Year your best year ever to play golf the way you have always wanted to.
Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro
Top Professional golfers who play golf on tour are unique individuals who passionately pursue their dream of achieving success on the PGA and LPGA tour’s with drive, energy and determination. They allow us to see what lies within; the potential to be a lot better than we currently are.
To improve your golf you need a strong passion to constantly fuel your motivation. Passion comes from your desire to be excellent at what you do, and golf is one game where you have to work very hard over a long period of time to gain a high measure of control over your golf shots and ultimately your golf scores.
By removing the “quick fix” mentality from your thinking and working hard on your weakest, most important skills you can make progress with your golf. Your passion to improve will keep you focused on the task, and in the weeks and months from now you will reap the rewards of your dedication with better golf shots and lower golf scores.
It’s so easy to get sucked into the illusion that the golfers you watch on TV who are a gazillion under par in a tournament somehow play like that all the time and have a special talent that other golfers do not have. In my opinion nothing could be further from the truth.
What they do have that week is the ability to make a lot of birdies and not a lot of bogeys. Skilful yes, talented no. Great golfers are made not born. It’s convenient for commentators to use the word “talented” or “talent” to describe someone’s exceptional performance on the golf course, and golf commentators use this superlative all the time.
Here’s an important point to consider. You can call anyone talented when it’s after the fact!
For instance; pro tour guy hit’s a five iron from two hundred yards next to the hole with a tight pin placement and the commentator say’s “wow look at that shot, this guy’s talented.”
One exceptional golf shot next to the hole and he earns the elevated status of “talented.”
Have a good look at the competitive score average of a top tour golfer for a full season and you’ll discover a sobering reality. Their scoring average is nowhere near their best weeks score average.
Don’t get me wrong these guys and gals are really good golfers. They couldn’t make it to the PGA or LPGA tour if they weren’t. They do score exceptionally well most of the time and beyond that sometimes.
But the facts are that if a tour pro’s competitive score average is 71.0 for the year and he’s 12 under par standing on the eighteenth tee in the fourth round you can be absolutely sure that he doesn’t do that every week. Based on his average he should shoot around four under par for four rounds.
So once, maybe twice in a year pro tour golfers “play their heads off” and play a lot better than their score average and make it to your TV screen. Remember TV people are not showing you the guys and gals who are ten or more shots from the lead.
These golfers are playing really well too, but closer to their score average and not at the stratospheric levels of the leaders, so they don’t make the grade and make it to your TV.
They’re not exciting enough and not making enough birdies this week.
The fantasy that many golfers are sucked into is that only a select few can play like these “golfing immortals” that are somehow blessed with a special low scoring “talent.”
Wrong, wrong and wrong!
It’s true that to win on pretty much any professional golf tour you will have to play well under par for four rounds. However it’s not a special talent that you need to possess but an exceptional set of highly practiced and developed golf skills (that any amateur or professional golfer can learn) that allow you to set up lower golf scores.
These skills are known to virtually everyone playing the game of golf, and are mentioned in countless golf books, golf magazines and yes even on TV; and yet they are not practiced nearly as much as they should be because the ambitious golfers (who are failing to make the grade) tend to be more concerned with whether their golf swing looks and functions correctly.
Sad as it is to say, many of these ambitious golfers don’t spend nearly enough time practicing these low score “money making” skills. In pro golf the approach wedges from twenty metres to one hundred metres from the green (22 yards to 110 yards) and all the shots within twenty metres (22 yards) of the green like chip shots, pitch shots, lob shots, bunker shots and trouble shots are the low score skills.
On the putting green the most important putts are from four metres and closer (13 to15 feet) and the long putts from fifteen metres to thirty metres (50 to 100 feet). Any ambitious golfer mastering these specific skills can become an exceptional golfer.
Strangely what’s difficult to understand is that in my experience these golfers know how important these skills are and that improvement in them would significantly improve their performances on the golf course but they choose to practice and take lessons on their full swing much more often?
Why? I believe the answer underpinning this question is that the culture of golf still tends to equate great golf performance to a great golf swing. That’s right; the majority of commentary about exceptional golf performances is focused on the quality of a golfer’s technique more than how many putts they’re having, or how many of their approach wedges they hit to within six feet of the hole.
Short-game skills simply aren’t sexy compared to a golf stars golf swing technique. It’s almost like golfers are addicted to discovering the soul of the golf swing so they can have it too.
The sad reality is that a golfer’s swing style rates much higher than how skilful a golfer is around the greens. A golfer who possesses a great golf swing and ball striking ability (in the eyes of the experts) is described by commentators as a talented ball striker.
If he hits a shot close to the hole the commentator links the shot to the word talent and if he wins or performs well that week he will probably end up with a full swing sequence in a leading golf magazine the next month.
This version of golf isn’t consistent with what the raft of research by Benjamin Bloom, Karl Anders Ericsson and others have discovered about what it takes to become an exceptional performer at golf.
The research suggests that outstanding performers without exception have practiced intensively under highly experienced and knowledgeable golf instructors, and that the quality and quantity of their practice over a long time were critical factors in how much success they experienced.
Great golfers are made, and outstanding performers in golf are the product of literally thousands of hours of highly specific golf training with exceptional coaching support over many years.
Contrary to expert (and popular) opinion it’s not because a golfer is more “talented” or “gifted” than someone else that is the reason they shoot very low golf scores, it’s a special kind of hard work beyond your normal level of comfort and competence that makes you exceptional at golf.
So how about we give the word talent a rest and call it what it really is.
Until Next Time,
Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro
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