I’ve never bought into the idea that amateur and professional golfers who are stuck on their handicap or score average can’t significantly improve it. I’ve had many golfers tell me that it didn’t matter how many lessons they had, or how many top line instructors they went to, they couldn’t seem to find a way improve their golfing standard.

Based on this knowledge, it would be easy to assume that there are golfers who will never get better than they are, and quite frankly nothing could be further from the truth. Every golfer from amateur to tour professional CAN improve their golf skills and golf score with a carefully thought out and carefully actioned strategy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So if you want to really improve your performances on the golf course then the following question is the one you need to ask:

“What one skill if I performed it consistently and correctly would be the one most likely to improve my golf score?”

And your answer is?

This is your starting point for golf improvement; not to book in for a series of lessons to try and fix your golf swing. First, you need to begin by asking yourself which of your key golf skills is the weakest-most important skill for improving your score on the golf course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is a key golf skill? A key golf skill is any golf skill that has a significant influence on your golf score. A key golf skill is a sub-set of a general golf skill.  Putting is a general skill but a part of putting would be putting from 20 feet down-hill for instance. Chipping is not a key golf skill-but chipping from long grass to a pin that is close to the edge of the green might be for you.

Driving the ball from the tee isn’t a key skill unless you find it difficult to hit your driver into a fairway twenty five yards wide – seventy percent of the time. You see the problem is not the ability of golfers to learn and improve their golf skills; it is taking a general approach to golf improvement when really what you need to be is highly specific.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So the starting point for your golf improvement is for you to ask a good and highly specific question about the way you play. Pick one key skill that will definitely improve your golf score and start there.

Now go and see a competent golf instructor and find the best strategy for improving that key skill and between the two of you work out a suitable practice schedule that will help you to improve that skill and then move onto the next.

Do this and I guarantee that you will lower you golf score average and perform better on the golf course.

Until next time,

Lawrie Montague

“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

“Practice is the only way that you will ever come to understand what the Way of the warrior is about . . . Words can only bring you to the foot of the path.” – Musashi

“Practice hard and practice often son,”…“You won’t get anywhere without hard work,” or, “remember, practice makes perfect.” Or how about this one; “you’ll never make it because you don’t practice hard enough.” I heard statements like these throughout my teenage years and like the good disciple that I was, I followed the advice and went to the practice fairway nearly every day for years, and practiced and practiced, and guess what? I never played the game of golf as good as I wanted to, but I did hit the golf ball a lot better.

Does this sound familiar?…

Every day, the golf driving ranges and practice fairways at golf clubs everywhere have ambitious golfers toiling away at golf shot after golf shot striving to get better at golf. Possibly they have heard similar statements to those above that they should practice hard and often.

What’s interesting is that for many golfers these statements imply that you should practice your golf swing harder than any other skill set. I did, and many others do as well. There’s no doubt that practicing your golf swing often will make you more proficient at it. But does it make you better? Well, I guess that depends on what you think better is. If it means that you wish to possess a lower score average than you have right now then practicing your golf swing technique a lot more than any other skill will probably be the limiting factor in your game.

Also, can you keep getting better? This might be the most important question of all.

I’ve seen it too often, and the problem is that it doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon. The golf instruction industry has a preoccupation with golf swing technique and ‘how to’ golf instruction. Many golfers are getting so tied up in knots trying to improve their golf swing, that they do it at the expense of learning how to play golf better.

Give the customer what they want right? If they want a golf swing like Tiger Woods, then  give them one. Let’s keep in mind though, that Tiger is the product of thousands of hours of highly disciplined golf training. Notice I said golf training? Highly competent modern golfers have transcended ‘practicing the golf swing’ routine to ‘training the golf score’ routine.

My simple definition of practicing is that it’s the act of rehearsing a behavior until you improve it, or master it. Training on the other hand refers to the acquiring of knowledge, skills and capabilities that relate to achieving defined outcomes within a certain time frame.

For me golf practice is old vernacular, it’s the twentieth century’s approach to golf improvement. Training is twenty first century improvement technology. It’s not enough to go to a range and mindlessly repeat a golf swing action over and over and somehow expect that you will get continually better. You won’t!

If the old way was to go to the range for a few hours and hit some long shots, then chip and pitch a few, followed by some putting, then the new way is golf training designed to optimize improvement. In other words you don’t do it without a well thought out and constructed plan that takes into account your personal goals and the amount of time you can devote to your activity.

There are four factors in deliberate golf training that we need to look at that will help us to work at our craft more competently and successfully.

Performing a component of your skill in an excellent way
Isolating a component of your skill that needs attention and judiciously practicing that part of the skill until you have improved its value in the whole. A bent left wrist at the top of the back swing may result in a club face that is open to the plane you’re swinging on, which can lead to excessive slice in your shots. By flattening the left wrist position and squaring the club face in the process, this will reduce the excessive side spin on your golf shot.

Monitoring your ongoing performance
Vigilantly monitoring your progress through data collection that you completely understand will keep you close to the cutting edge of your skills development. You simply can’t improve something if you can’t measure its current position in relation to where you want it to be. For your score average to lower you need to collect data on a number of key skill areas to determine which of them has the most impact on improving your results.

Evaluating your success through a feedback system
Meaningful feedback is the breakfast of champions. Every successful sporting team or workplace team has a useful feedback system in place to guide the direction of the momentum that’s being created from effort. The type of feedback I’m talking about isn’t a motivating speech which might psych you up in the short term but won’t change the way you do something in the long term. The type of feedback I’m talking about is that of an expert teacher or instructor, someone who can, and has done it at a very high level in their own right, and can show you exactly what to do.

Determining how to do it better
The whole purpose of deliberate golf training is to continually get better at the game of golf. By now you will understand that practicing on a consistent basis won’t necessarily improve what you do. You really need to think about it carefully and thoughtfully before you apply yourself physically to the demands of the game. Many of the golfers I’ve worked with over the years have a strong desire to get better at the game, but they don’t really know how to. Information is useless until you understand how it can help you.

When you go out to work on your game next time, take the time to think about what you would like to gain from the experience. If you want to keep improving your golf, you need to find out exactly how to do that. It isn’t enough to just put effort into your game, you need to understand where you wish to go; what you need to practice; and you have to have the desire to keep at it continually until you can see and feel the difference.

Isn’t it worth a try…or two.

Until next time.

Lawrie Montague

“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene V

I bet you would love to know why the majority of golfers playing this great game aren’t improving in-line with improvements in golf club and golf ball technology. How is it that we humans, as capable as we are, can’t seem to swing a golf club in such a way that the end result is lower golf scores? Over the past few years many golf books and golf magazines have been asking similar questions, and the results of these articles and discussions tend to point to problems in these five areas.

• Golf swing technique
• Golf performance psychology
• Golf course strategy and management
• Golf health and fitness
• Golf practice and training

There is an enormous amount of literature dedicated to the first and second areas, and in particular, golf swing technique. In my golf library I have golf instruction books that go back more than one hundred years which describe in detail how to swing the golf club; and yet to this day something seems to be missing from the equation. In this article I will shed some light on what it is and more importantly what you can do about it.

Dr Karl Anders Ericsson of the University of Miami has spent the past twenty five years looking into how our culture has always recognized outstanding individuals, whose performance in sports, science and the arts is greatly superior to that of the rest of the population.

Dr Ericsson’s work focused on the differences between expert performers and everyone else.  He discovered that one primary distinction between expert performers and the rest of us is a day to day dedication to the deliberate effort to improve their performance in a specific domain or field of expertise.

Practicing in a highly deliberate way is a very demanding activity that requires that our attention be completely and specifically focused whilst we’re honing our skills. I believe that this is the missing factor in golf performance improvement.

Here are three excellent questions to ask yourself prior to practicing your golf in a deliberate way.

What exactly do I need to practice to improve?
To determine exactly what you need to practice I suggest that you pay close attention to your results over the next five rounds of golf you play. Look for particular weaknesses in your skills that lead to higher score averages. The skills that I find most golfers need to work more on are the chipping, pitching, sand and putting skills. I’m sure you realise that more than sixty four percent of your score is played from within sixty yards of the green so it makes good sense to identify the skills that would make the most difference to your score.

You will more than likely identify more than one weak skill area, so rate each skill based on its relationship to your score goal, and practice the skills in order of most important skill to the least important. You will find that you increase your scoring potential by developing all your weak skills during your practice sessions, which will develop an increased capability for a wider range of expertise on the golf course.

Exactly how should I practice this skill to improve?
Here’s a new rule to apply to your practice sessions from now on. Design to improve. Every time you go to practice your golf skills, begin by designing a program that would lead you towards improvement in your skills, and ultimately your scores. Your golf skill practice should be programmed, understandable and focused which will reduce boredom and the opportunity to procrastinate. If you’re working on your full swing mechanics, concentrate on executing each and every stroke in an excellent way. Do not get slack with your work, practice on the very edge of your current capability. Boring repetition is based upon a foundation of goal-less and mindless duplication. Deliberate practice is exactly the opposite; deliberate practice is consistent directed effort that leads to improved performance.

What resources and attributes do I need to help me to practice correctly to improve?
I’ve never known anybody who improved their golf game, or anything else for that matter that didn’t begin with the passion to improve. Yes it’s nice to have a first class facility to develop your skills, but it matters little compared to a strong desire for self improvement. If deliberate practice drives improved performance, then your inner drive should be the force to drive your deliberate golf practice.

Constant feedback is a must in deliberate practice as well. Correctly assessing your results and then continually adjusting how you practice will move you towards your improvement more rapidly. If you are going to dedicate yourself to practicing deliberately then it makes good sense to find a qualified golf instructor capable of providing you with constructive feedback, which should be central to your continued improvement program. Each day of golf practice should move you forward against an ever changing benchmark.

Remember that the goal isn’t just repeating the golf swing over and over again, but to realize that you can achieve higher levels of control over every aspect of your golf performance. You will never find practice boring if in every practice session you strive to do it as well as it can be done, every single time you do it.

Until next time.

Lawrie Montague