When you’re learning a foreign language, they’ll tell you that fifteen minutes every day is better that two hours on Sunday. It’s that periodic repetition that keeps the ball in the air which does the trick.

Golf is the same way. If you can practice fifteen minutes a day, you can keep your game in tune even if you can’t play.

Putt across the carpet. Step up to each stroke like it’s a putt on the green–go through your whole routine. Practice three- and four-footers by rolling the ball over a tin can lid. Practice 30-footers in the same way, using a pillow for a backstop. The important thing here is that in making your 30-foot stroke, you hit the ball on the sweet spot and still roll the ball over the lid.

Get a carpet remnant and chip off that with plastic balls into the pillow you used for approach putts. Ball first, ground second. Rotate through all your chipping clubs over a period of days.

Hang a mattress pad or a blanket over a curtain rod in front of one of your windows and hit pitches into it (use plastic balls, please, and hit off a carpet remnant to save wear and tear on your flooring.)

Full swing? You can swing under an 8-foot ceiling with a 7-iron or less, but for a longer, club, step outside. If you have a back yard, you can hit plastic balls into a net or against that mattress pad. If you’re an apartment dweller, well, just swing. Before very swing, go through your entire pre-swing routine.

Just do something, every day.

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The rain has come and it won’t let up until March, if that. Time for the Winter Tune-up.

What I want to do in the next few weeks is go over a things you could do to improve your golf for the 2013 season. We all say we want to do that. We play around with a few things we read in the golf magazines, and before we know it, it’s time for the new season and we haven’t made the progress we intended.

So, I’m going to lay it all out for you. What to do, and in this order. Every Thursday, you’ll get something new to do and a week to practice it. Hopefully, by the time the series ends, you have built a number of improvements into your game. Let’s get started with the setup.

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If you were going to hang a door, you would ensure that the frame is square, the door is the right size, the hinges are on straight, and that the latch lines up with the strike plate. Any one thing that isn’t quite right and you’ll have a door you have to wrestle with every time you open or close it.

Your golf swing is the same way. When your setup is right, your swing naturally falls out of it. When something is wrong, your body gets carried off in directions that make hitting the ball harder to do well or in the same way consistently.

One of the things I will be doing from time to time in this series is suggesting you get a lesson. There are times you can’t learn from reading what it is you’re supposed to do, and get it right. Now is one of those times.

Sign up for a lesson in the setup: grip, stance, posture, aim. I’m not kidding. Get a lesson for just this. It can take a full half hour, and it is a lot of stuff. You might want to bring a notebook to write down the important points.

When you get home, practice your grip, stance, and posture in a full-length mirror, looking at yourself face-on and down the line. You can buy a mirror on a stand for less than a round of golf.

Take your grip and set up to a ball, step by step, 30 times a day, starting over completely every time — let go of the club, walk away from the ball and start over. If you’re learning new habits, you have to repeat them. Knowing what to do isn’t enough.

Practice your aim on the practice tee, since you really need to have a distant target to aim at. This bit is more important than you know. Any pro will tell you the number one cause of bad shots is poor aim.

None of this is very sexy, and practicing it can get kind of boring. There are, however, so many ways you can ruin a shot before you’ve even moved the club. Eliminate those ways and then you can worry about your swing. Accomplished musicians practice their scales. Golfers practice their setup. Enough said.

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A teaching pro once told me that when he was getting ready to play in a tournament, he did nothing but putt and hit wedges. Lots of wedges. He explained why, but I didn’t really get the point until about two years ago.

For a long time, I didn’t have a very good pitching stroke. Those 50- to 100-yard shots were pretty tough. So I finally decided that whenever I hit a bucket, half the bucket would be devoted to hitting pitches. In just a few months, I got the stroke down and the results were magnificent. Each shot was crisply struck, took off with authority, went straight, arched high, and stopped near where it landed.

Then I put two and two together. Why not build the swing I use for pitching into the swing I use for full shots? This is what the pro was talking about. He was bringing all the right elements of striking the ball—-tempo, releasing the club through impact—-into the full swing. The full swing is just a longer pitch.

I want you to try this. Start working hard on your pitching game with your sand wedge. Get a lesson if you have to. When you’re hitting pitches that fly high, straight, and bite when they hit, you’re ready to learn how to extend that same swing into your full shots.

Now go through the bag one club at a time. Learn to hit your pitching wedge this way. Hit some pitches with your SW, then hit your PW. Keep going back and forth until your SW and PW swings feel the same. Then move on to your 9-iron, and again alternate between your SW and 9-iron. When that’s successful, move on to your 8-iron, same process.

Never move to the next club until you are completely confident with the one you’re working on. This carries confidence over to the next club. Otherwise, you carry over doubt, and the program beaks down. It might take you a week or more to get it right for one club. Keep at it, one club at a time, until you’re hitting your driver with this same, smooth swing. When in doubt, go back to the wedge. In fact, never leave the wedge. That club is your foundation.

Let me assure you that I don’t mean for you to swing your 5-iron or your driver with the identical swing that you use with a sand wedge—-short, small, and without much clubhead speed. As you move up to longer clubs, the swing feeling you carry over from the sand wedge will naturally adjust to swinging a longer-shafted and straighter-faced club as it was designed to be swung, but with the same light feeling that you use with the sand wedge. The result will be a shot that goes straight, and you won’t lose a yard from what you had been getting.

I cannot overstate how easy it is to learn how to hit the ball straight if you use this approach. If you are willing to throw out your old swing and its bad habits, such as lurching into the ball, guiding the club into the ball, swinging with a tempo that is far too fast, etc., you can become the accurate and consistent ball-striker you long to be. Commit to this program and you’ll improve so much it will be like you’re a different golfer.

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One reason why the golf swing is so difficult is that many golfers do not have a good idea from one day to the next just exactly how they swing the club. They often rely on the groove they got into last time at the range, but the move they thought was The Difference can’t be found the next time out. Now what?

You would have to have daily lessons and daily practice to remember every detail in your golf swing and know just what to do to correct yourself when something goes wrong. The best bet for a recreational golfer is to remember how to perform five critical parts of the swing and just work on performing them the same way every time. If so, what happens in between has to be happening the same way, too.

The five parts of the swing to remember are: the takeaway, the end of the backswing, the start of the downswing, impact, and the finish.

Takeaway defines your club path and the plane of your backswing. The end of the backswing is the furthest limit of your being able to feel that the clubhead is still connected to the ball. The start of the downswing can be led in many ways, but never with your hands. Impact is, of course, impact, but it is a dynamic position, one of moving through, not of arriving at, a spot. The finish is where this all leads to. When the finish is right, likely everything that came before it was, too.

You can practice each one of these positions separately. The task is to memorize what each one feels like, installing the feeling into our subconscious awareness so that the movements in between will automatically seek the next position. When you play, you could take a slow practice swing to rehearse hitting all the right feelings.

Good golf is not played by having a great swing. It’s played by making your best swing more often. Learning these five basic positions, given a fundamentally sound grip, stance, posture, and alignment, will take care of that.

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Unless you live south of the 35th parallel, you aren’t playing a lot of golf right now. That’s good. It means you can take the time to practice three shots which, if you get really good at, are going to cut strokes off your game by the relative fistful.

These shots are the 7-iron approach, the chip from 10-25 yards, and the 30-foot approach putt. If you can hit the first one well, then all you have to do is get the ball past the 150-yard marker and your next shot will put the ball on the green. The second shot covers the chips you hit more often than the greenside chip, and is the shot that I would guess loses you more strokes in your short game than any other. Get 30-foot putts close and you will cut way down on three-putt greens and become a better putter from everywhere else, too.

When you go to the range, take a 7-iron, a sand wedge, and a putter. Practice these three shots only. In a one-hour visit to the range, spend twenty minutes on each one. These are not the only areas where you lose strokes regularly, but they are the easiest places to get lost strokes back with dedicated practice.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about the driver. You do have to get the ball in the fairway or what you do next to the green won’t count for much. So hit a fairway wood or long iron off the tee with your 7-iron swing. Keep the ball in play and make some putts. It’s a simple game.

When I practice, I spend almost half the time with my driver or 7-iron, almost the other half with my putter, and the remainder, not as much as the first two in comparison, on my short game.

I figure it like this. The better my swing is, the fewer times I’ll need to use my short game. And, I’ll always be putting. My short game is good, not great. I just need it to be good enough to give my putting a chance.

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On The Golf Channel’s 7 Nights at the Academy shows that were broadcast last week, Raymond Floyd said the best thing about putting. It went something like, “The Tour is full of wonderful ball-strikers, but a lot of them never win anything because they’re mediocre putters.”

Byron Nelson said, on one of the old Challenge Golf shows,  “If you can drive and you can putt, you can play this game.”

See A Paean to Putting for my thoughts.