“How would you like to practice your golf skills so that there was a very high chance that you would significantly improve? It has been my experience that the majority of golfers practicing at their game do not know how to practice effectively.”

In this article I’m going to explain how to practice your golf skills for improvement. I’ll explain the key factors that influence behavioural change and the common mistakes that golfers make when practicing their golf. I’ll also describe golf ‘best practice’ techniques that you can adopt and implement into your game to improve any aspect of your performance.

So what is golf practice? Golf practice is the procedure you use for learning, developing and acquiring golf experience. We engage golf practice routines to develop, improve and master our golf skills and we do this by repeating a highly specific behaviour many times until we have a very high degree of competency and trust in it.

We do this to be able to perform a particular golf skill when it matters to us; for example hitting a high, soft pitch shot from a tight lie over a bunker to a tightly tucked pin position would require a very specific golf stroke technique that travels on a very shallow and slightly outside to inside swing path to slice the ball from its lie.

Golf practice therefore is simply the reinforcement of particular actions that help to create a specific type of result or set of results that we desire and by improving the nature of the way that you go about practicing your skills, you can in turn generate the results you seek sooner.

Regrettably when we practice golf skills incorrectly we are setting ourselves up for failure. In other words when we really need to produce a result, this will be the time that the particular shot you’re attempting to play will more than likely not come off as planned.

An example of practicing incorrectly would be to practice golf skills that you are already very competent at. Many golfers will go to the practice range with the same golf clubs and practice with them rather than practicing with clubs that they find more difficult to use and also golf shots they find difficult to play.

Best Practice
Golf ‘best practice’ can be defined as the most efficient practice method that you can use that requires the least amount of effort and is the most effective way to achieve exceptional results when performing the skill-set, based on repeatable well defined procedures that have proven themselves over time by large numbers of golfers.

Proven Practice Performance Platform
So before you begin your practice session start by deciding on the best approach for improving your golf skills. The best way to go about this is to initiate a testing and measuring protocol to accurately assess the relative performance of your golf skills currently.

Track and Measure

If you were lost somewhere you would logically look for some point of reference to help you to determine where you are relative to where you want to be. Tracking and measuring your golf skills helps you to gain the necessary clarity you need to help you to know where your skills are at the present moment so you can determine where you wish to go with them.

There is a relatively easy way to do this. Track a minimum of six rounds of golf and measure results in at least the following six categories.

1)      What is your score average against par

2)      How many tee-shots you hit into the fairway

3)      How many greens you hit with your approach shot in regulation (e.g. Hit a par 4 in two shots or a par 3 in one shot)

4)      How many putts you had for 18 holes

5)      How many bunker shots you hit onto the green and made one putt

6)      How many chip and pitch shots you hit onto the green and made one putt

Now of course you can measure many more categories with much greater detail if you like, and this will be dependent primarily on your golf skill ability. Low handicapped amateurs and professionals will measure many more categories with much greater detail to extract the information they need to develop a suitable plan for improvement.

If you are a high handicapped amateur then the abovementioned categories are a good beginning.

Forecast and Estimate

Forecasting the amount of improvement you desire is essential for developing a planned approach to your golf improvement as well as fuelling your focus and desire to improve.

Every successful golfer is motivated by performance goals and forecasting your future performances just helps you to stay on track with your improvement as well and also helps you to determine how you should get there.

Once you’ve tracked and measured the different skills that make-up a round of golf you need to estimate the amount of improvement you desire sometime in the future. If after six rounds you discovered that you hit thirty eight percent of fairways and that seventy percent of those tee-shots missed to the right, and you forecast that within six months you will hit at least forty eight percent of fairways or ten percent improvement in your tee-shot accuracy, your next step would be to decide what you need to do next.

Isolate and Prescribe

Ok here’s where the rubber meets the road. Now you need to isolate the critical element in your technique that would help you to achieve better results. Of the categories you tested and measured, and using the driving accuracy example from earlier, what specifically will you do to improve your driving accuracy?

Remember you’re looking for ten percent improvement over six months which equates to around one and half percent improvement per month.

So you need to find a method for making the golf ball travel more down the target line so you can hit more fairways.

You’ve isolated the problem that your tee-shots are travelling too often to the right of the fairway and now you need to prescribe a specific drill or training technique that will alter that situation and move you towards your ten percent improvement goal.

This is where a series of lessons with a competent and experienced golf teaching professional would make good sense as you can isolate the problem in your golf swing technique faster so you can get on with the job of improving your tee-shot accuracy.

Manage and Monitor

The final step in the process is to determine how much work (effort) you will put into your golf practice to improve your performance by around 1.5 percent each month. You will need to manage your effort and also monitor your progress continually to ensure that you remain on track with your improvement.

Managing your effort means to develop practice routines that incorporate the specific skills that you need to learn, modify or improve. When you practice your skills you will have to involve the following four practice dynamics in each practice session to influence how much improvement you will make each month.

Volume:

This is the exact amount of golf balls you will hit during each golf training session. Ideally you will break your practice volume into manageable sets of golf balls and hitting sets of ten or twenty golf shots per set makes it easy for you to stay focused, and it’s also easy to measure and manage.

Frequency:

This is the rate of recurrence of practicing a particular skill. How often do you need to practice certain skills, and when is the best time to perform the skill? Should you practice putting after hitting three sets of driver shots – probably not? Managing the frequency of your practice helps you to manage energy expenditure and focus and is critical when developing an effective practice plan.

Duration:

This is the period of time you actually invest in hitting your golf shots. The time it takes to hit sets of golf shots will vary depending on whether you’re practicing using a pre-shot routine or not. Technique practice doesn’t usually require that you use a pre-shot routine where practicing targeting skills does.

So practice duration helps you to manage the different skills you will practice and fit them into your total plan. If you know that it takes you four minutes and thirty seconds to hit ten pitch shots to a target then you can easily work out how long it will take to hit ten sets of ten pitch shots to a target which will help you to plan your practice program more carefully and effectively.

Intensity:

This is the level of focus or concentration you involve in your practice in practicing each skill. When you break your practice volume down into sets of ten golf shots and you practice the right skills at the best time, and you have worked out how many sets of shots you need to hit you will find it easier to focus on your skills and get the most out of yourself.

Focus varies depending on the importance of the practice routine however by practicing correctly you give yourself the best opportunity to practice efficiently and effectively. When you practice a skill set the key is to control what you’re paying attention to. Your responsibility is to control your eye gaze and maintain it for each and every shot.

Practicing your golf skills correctly means building a platform of strategies that support and enhance your effort to improve. It’s easy to just go out to the range and hit golf balls and hope that you will do something that makes you improve. It’s much more challenging to perform practice skills correctly by planning your strategy carefully and implementing it into your program so that the effort you put in actually leads to outcomes that you expect.

Remember to always begin with the end in mind. Decide what you want to achieve from your golf game and notice where you are with it right now. Then go to work building a bridge from where you are to where you wish to go. Take your time, really think it through and in the days, weeks and months you’ll discover the other side of improvement.

 

Until next time,

Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro

“I’ve always made a total effort, even when the odds seemed entirely against me. I never quit trying; I never felt that I didn’t have a chance to win.” - Arnold Palmer

“I can do it, I can hit this eight iron onto that green, after all its only 132 yards and I’ve hit the ball that far plenty of times.” “Here goes nothing”

Imagine standing on the tee at the 132 yard 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass just about to walk into your shot to play it, what would go through your mind? You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel a little challenged as you contemplated playing this shot across the water.

It’s one of those situations where regardless of your playing ability you have to commit totally to the shot as you’re not offered any other ‘bail out’ option.

 

“I rode up behind the tee one day and watched a man pull out a dozen new Titleists and promptly hit every one of them in the water. He didn’t give it a second thought.” - TPC Sawgrass Superintendent Fred Klauk

Here’s a good question for you to consider; “how would you swing the golf club if you didn’t have the fear of hitting poor golf shots?”

Would you play better and more consistently if you could just walk up to the ball and swing the golf club with a care-free attitude? I bet you would. I’m sure you’d agree that your level of competence is greatly determined by how much belief you have in your ability to just hit your shot and not worry about the consequences.

Think about it; how much time do you spend thinking about what you don’t want from your game compared to what you do want?

The 17th at Sawgrass is a great example of a golf hole where you have to completely commit to the process of just hitting your shot. No frills, no fanfare, just hit the golf shot the correct distance.

This is a great way to think about every golf shot you make. Just hit your golf shot and couple it with the belief that it will be successful.

The Power of Positive Commitment
When a PGA tour professional plays a shot to the 17th during the Tournament Players Championship he knows that there are consequences if the shot he hits doesn’t come off, but he plays the shot with the confidence that the shot will come off just the way he wants it to. This is the power of positive commitment. He knows he can hit the ball 132 yards and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s uphill, downhill, across the water or anywhere else, he justs plays the shot 132 yards.

When a golfer stands on the tee at 17 telling himself that he can play the shot across the water and onto the green but knows that its more likely that the ball will end up in the water then this is the opposite of positive commitment, this is a negative commitment. The golfer is positive that the experience will be negative.

You see its not enough to tell yourself that you can hit your golf shot onto the green, you have to really know that you can.

So many of the golfers who hit the ball into the water on 17 know that they can hit a golf shot with a short iron 132 yards (120 meters). The only thing that has changed is that they are asked to commit completely to the golf shot. This is where the problems begins for many because it now gets down to how much you trust your ability to pull off the shot.

“He who lacks trust, also lacks commitment.”

The next time you face a golf shot and you start telling yourself that you can’t do it, stop yourself, take a couple of deep breaths and focus your mental energy on imagining your golf shot behaving exactly the way you want it to. Your muscles that swing the golf club don’t understand your words, they only understand your images which is where your commitment lives.

Knowing you can do something is communicated to your muscles positively so that they can respond and commit perfectly to the message.

Telling yourself that you can hit the golf shot will not help you unless you can translate the words into a positive image.

Positive talking with a positive commitment is the difference that will make the difference when you hit a shot 132 yards across the water to an island green.

If you’re not sure whether you think in images, then let me ask you this simple question “what color is your car?”….if you said its red…”How did you know?”

 

Until next time.

 

Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro

“He’s probably the best in the world in the short game at the moment” – Martin Kaymer Commenting on Luke Donald’s Short Game Skills after his victory in the 2011 Accenture Matchplay Championship

Englishman Luke Donald won the Accenture Matchplay Championship playing just 89 holes during his six matches for the week. He was never behind at any time and never had to play the 18th hole, and in-fact only had to play the 17th hole once.

He amassed 32 birdies for the week – an average of more than five per round, which was also seven more than anybody else in the field. He seemed to be a golfer in complete control of his game and was rarely threatened even when the challenge was taken to him he had the answer.

Luke Donald is not a long hitter of the golf ball (277 yards or around 250 meters) and in-fact actually went through the process of trying to increase his distance off the tee to be more competitive with the longer hitters which turned out to be a bad decision for him.

Fortunately though he went back to what he knows and trusts and this victory has propelled him from 9th place in the Sony World Rankings to number three.

Luke Donalds weapon – his competitive advantage is his supreme confidence in his shortgame. His consistent chipping, pitching, sand and putting skills gives him a decided advantage on the PGA tour because whenever he misses a green in regulation there is a very high probability that he will get the ball onto the green and into the hole for par or better most of the time.

This is very typical for the top ranked players on the PGA tours.

Have a look at some of the key performance statistics of Luke Donald from last season (2010) on the PGA tour and you’ll see what I mean.

Score Average – 70.25 / rank 31st
Top 10 Finishes – 7 / rank 6th
Putts Per Greens Hit in Regulation – 1.751 / rank 17th
Total Putts – 28.46 / rank 8th
3 Putt Avoidance – 1.63 % / rank 5th (3 putts or more divided by total holes played)
Sand Saves – 66.39 % / rank 1st
Proximity to Hole from Sand (Greenside) Average 7 feet from the hole / rank 2
Greenside Scrambling – 65.41 % / rank 4th
Putting Inside 5 Feet – 98.22 % / rank 3rd
Putting 5 to 15 Feet – 51.45 % / rank 2nd
Putting 3 to 5 Feet – 92.68 % / rank 7th
Scrambling From the Greenside Rough – 67.41 % / rank 4th

If you want to see where great golf is really played, study the statistics of Luke Donald and start looking at these key performance statistics in your game.

You will quickly realize that improvement in any of these shortgame skills will definitely lower your score average faster and make you a lot more competitive on the golf course sooner.

Until next time.

Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro

The PGA tours have another young star in the making with Jhonattan (Jonnie) Vegas a young rookie golfer from Venezuela already with a victory under his belt this year winning the Bob Hope Desert Classic in Palm Springs earlier this year.

Jhonattan Vegas is playing some great golf on tour this year and this young South American has one of the silkiest golf swings you’ll ever see.

The following golf video shows you his fundamentally sound golf swing technique in slow motion and also broken down into stages so you can see what he does which will help you to appreciate why he plays so well.

Mind you, his statistics accross the board are pretty solid in all the right area’s:

• Current Scoring average under 69
• Driving distance more than 290 yards
• Driving accuracy is 54 percent
• Greens in regulation 72 percent
• Scrambling around the greens 68 percent

Until next time,

Lawrie Montague – Golf Confidence Pro

“It’s a sad fact that too many aspiring tour golfers will fail in their attempts to make it onto one of the professional golf tours through a tour qualifying school, and of the individuals who do make it onto a golf tour, very few will play consistently well enough to climb up the PGA money list, and we firmly believe that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

David Milne and Lawrie Montague are highly regarded and successful golf instructors who have spent many years training elite amateur and professional golfers in Australia with many of their students going on to play and win on one of the men’s and women’s professional golf tours.

“Unfortunately golf as a game is still a long way behind other sports in the way it develops talent. We still struggle to break free from a ‘perfect golf swing culture’ that continues to pressure outstanding golfers to spend too much of their time perfecting their golf swing technique instead of developing the skills that lead to a low scoring capability in golf tournaments.”

According to Mr Montague, many young golf instructors are using video and computer graphics programs to analyse and compare their student’s golf swing with those of leading tour golfers. Unknowingly the student focuses too much of their energy trying to swing the golf club perfectly at the expense of developing their short-game skills, particularly in their formative years.

“It doesn’t help that on virtually every golf broadcast the attention of commentators is focused on a tour player’s golf swing mechanics. Even sports scientists have fallen victim to the perfect golf swing culture and are developing hi-tech golf swing software programs to break the golf swing down to minute levels.”

“We really want to change this perfect golf swing culture to a low golf score culture. Golf is not like gymnastics or ballet where your result is directly attributed to how perfectly you perform a particular routine. Golf has always been a game of score, and the lowest score still wins golf tournaments. The best golfers in the game are not the best tee to green golfers, but they are the most capable at producing lower competitive golf scores. Tiger Woods and Phil Michelson, in-fact every top level golfer playing on one of the PGA tours is much better at their short game than they are at their long game.”

Milne and Montague believe that this preoccupation with teaching perfect golf swings is leading to a massive rate of failure amongst exceptional male and female golfers attempting to play on one of the PGA tours. The problem this fixation for perfecting golf swings has created is that struggling tour golfers who hit any form of roadblock in their performances on the golf course usually look straight to their golf swing as being the source of the problem.

“The golf swing in most cases is not usually the problem. What they need is an experienced coach that can lead them to different options for improving their performances on the golf course, which was our primary motivation in establishing Pro Tour Golf College. We wanted to help aspiring tour golfers to smash through their limiting self-beliefs and help them onto the path to success on one of the PGA tours. After all, their success is our success.”

“We developed Pro Tour Golf College around a simple and realistic performance formula; “success on tour equals your competitive score average.” A lower score average in professional tournaments will equal more and more success on tour.”

Milne and Montague’s ‘Tour Player Program’ is a unique score focused golf training program designed specifically to train aspiring male and female golfers to become more competitive in golf tournaments by improving their high pay-off golf skills so they can lower their competitive score average and compete successfully on a professional golf tour.

The Pro Tour Golf College is a full-time golf college for tour golfers and those who want to be based at the Joondalup Resort in Perth Western Australia. Interested golfers can gain access to more information on their programs at www.protourgolfcollege.com