Make Short Game Practice Sessions Short

The more practice the better. Who can argue with that? But I would suggest that when it comes to the short game, that means frequency, not duration.

The more times you go out to practice your short game, the better. That’s more times you’re exposing yourself to those shots anew, teaching yourself to get into the short game mode at will, as needed. Because you don’t know when you will be hitting short shots on the course.

Driver? By now you know exactly on which holes of your home course you’ll be using a driver. No surprises there. You know that on every green you’ll be putting.

You know you’ll be hitting an iron from the fairway. You have lots of time ahead of these shots to prepare your mind for hitting them. (And you should, by the way. As soon as you putt out, for example, you should be thinking “Driver swing,” and have your mind start giving your body the directions it needs to hit a good drive.)

The short game, though, is entirely unpredictable. You have no idea until it happens that you’ll have to chip onto the green. And then, you have no idea just what kind of shot you’ll have to hit until you finally get up to the ball.

That means you have much less time to gear your mind toward chipping in comparison to the other types of shots you hit. And that means you have to be able to turn on your short game mind on a moment’s notice.

So practice doing that. Drop a ball beside the practice green, chip it to the cup, putt it out, then go do something else. The ideal way to practice a short shot would be, if your practice facility is laid out like this, to hit a few long shots then walk over to the green, chip a ball , putt out, then walk back to the range. Just do that back and forth–range, green; range, green.

Give yourself one chance to hit that chip next to the hole. Hitting a dozen chips from the same place might teach you the technical aspects of the shot, but that doesn’t teach you the mind set you need to get that one shot close when you’re on the course.

Basic short game shots are easy to learn. Once you can hit them reasonably well, it all comes down to the state of your mind on the course when you have that one chance. Being comfortable and confident in that condition is what you need to practice to become a short game wizard.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

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