Monthly Archives: July 2011

practice

A Recreational Golfer’s Weekly Practice Plan

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There’s no way around it. To get better, or even to maintain skills, a golfer has to practice. What to practice depends on how much time you have available. We’ll start with the essentials, and show you how to find time that you didn’t think you had to get even more practice.

At home:
Putting. This is the easiest stroke to practice. All you need is a putter, a ball, and a smooth carpet. The lid from a 28-oz. can of whole tomatoes makes the perfect target, since it’s just ¼” smaller than the regulation hole.

Practice your setup and your stroke. Put two tees on the ground, cup side down, so they stand up on the carpet. Place them just far enough apart so you can swing your putter through the gap without knocking the down. Now put a ball in the middle of the gap and make your stroke. This drill smooths you out in a hurry.

Chipping. Here again is a stroke you can practice at home in a few spare moments. Hit some balls off the carpet into a backstop like a couch cushion or a pillow. Like putting, the point of your practice is to perfect the stroke. The goal is to hit every ball cleanly, no hitting fat, and keeping your hands relaxed as they bring the club through the ball.

Pitching. You can actually practice this at home, inside. I hook a mattress pad over a window curtain rod and hit plastic balls into the pad. It helps to hit the balls off a carpet remnant so you don’t scuff a hole in your good floor carpet. Like with chipping, you’re practicing the stroke, making clean contact and not concerning yourself with the result of the shot. How could you, anyway? The ball won’t go more than ten feet!

At the range:
If you can get out once a week, here are two practice plans:

One-hour plan

Two-hour plan

If you don’t even have time for that, practice after your round is over. I know that’s socializing time, so pay your respects to your friends at the 19th hole, then buy your bucket and go out to the range. Start by hitting a few of the shots you played well today, so you can solidify that feeling of how to hit them.

Spend most of your time on the shots that gave you problems during the day’s round. Take lots of practice swings before you hit a ball. Hit one only when you feel that your swing for this particular shot is where you want it.

Spend some time hitting pitches. Now you can practice hitting the shot to a target. Go the practice green and chip to a target, and hit some approach putts. All you had a chance to do at home is practice your stroke. Now you can practice the shot.

If you can practice at home daily, just a bit, and get live practice of some kind during the week, that will be all you need to maintain your skills and play golf that you can be proud of.

To step it up a bit, here is a professional practice plan.

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

drills

Hitting the Ball Off the Ground

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In this world, you have to give a little to get a little. Baseball and tennis are difficult sports because the ball we have to hit is moving so fast. Let’s slow the ball down a little, like to a complete stop, waiting for us to hit it at our leisure. Welcome to the ground, welcome to golf.

What we gave up to get a stationary ball is the freedom to hit a little above or below the ball, and now a second dimension, behind the ball, is added. The spot the clubhead has to hit is about the size of a dime, and the clubhead will be moving at about 80 miles per hour at the time. The margin for error is gone.

Learning how to pick the ball cleanly off the ground is the hardest problem new golfers have to solve. It will haunt them well into advanced golf, and may be an issue for their entire playing career.

There’s an easy way to learn this, and if you’re willing to put in the time, you can move on from wondering if you’ll hit the ball to planning exactly where you’re going to hit it.

Get a 9-iron, drop a ball in front of you, and take a stance with your feet about six inches apart. Now just chip the ball with a backswing that is no more than two feet long. The ball doesn’t have to go anywhere, you just want to focus on clean, ball first-ground second contact.

You’ll soon be able to tell if you hit the ground first, even by just a little, and also if you missed the ground completely, even though you hit the ball reasonably well. You’ll learn, too, what the perfect strike feels like, where the ball, ground, and club all come together at just the right moment. That’s your ball striking goal.

Do this exercise for a few minutes every day. Make short swings, get clean contact. You can’t get too good at it. Once you have mastered the two-foot swing, and I truly mean mastered it, lengthen your swing, maybe by about a foot. If you have problems making clean contact, go back to the two-foot swing and gradually work back to the longer swing. This is the Madsen Rule in practice.

Keep lengthening you swing, but only when you feel you are ready to. There’s no need to rush, and there are no short-cuts. This exercise builds a lifelong habit that will produce effective golf shots to the degree that you develop your skill with it. Six months of dedicated practice will get you to where you want to go.

If you have taken your time with this exercise, working in a controlled way through longer swings, being thoroughly prepared for the the time you move up, by the time you get to your full swing, you will be the ball-striker you had hoped you would be.

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

chipping, ten rules

Ten Rules For Better Chipping

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[Commentary added January 2018.]

No one hits every green. Getting your ball one-putt close from just off the green is not that hard to do if you know how. Here are ten rules that will help you get your ball tight to the hole and prevent a missed green from costing you an extra shot.

1. Read the green. The ball will roll for a considerable ways across the green, and behave just as if you had hit an approach putt. Plan a chip with all the care you give to a putt, because the objectives of each shot are the same–leaving the ball close or even sinking it.

2. Chip with the least-lofted club you can. Your bread-and-butter club would be something like a 6-iron. Use more lofted clubs only under special circumstances. Chipping with a lob wedge is a professional technique.

[I have changed my mind on this. See My Chipping Formula.]

3. Relax your mind. This is a simple shot. You are trying to save yourself a stroke, but don’t get so careful that you get too delicate and muff the shot.

4. Do not break your left wrist as you swing through impact. This leads to consistent contact and predictable distance control. A breaking left wrist is the leading cause of poor chipping by recreational golfers.

5. Hit the ball with a descending strike. The bane of golfers everywhere, from beginner to winner, is hitting the ground behind the ball on one of these simple shots. When the club comes into the ball from above, you ensure that clean, ball first-ground second contact.

[I have changed my mind on this, too. See Stop Chunking Chip Shots.]

6. Keep a light grip pressure. You want no hit in the stroke. It is hard to have a hit when you are holding the club very lightly.

7. Hit the ball off the toe of the club. This deadens the strike, leading to minimum backspin and pure roll. When the ball is hit on the sweet spot of the clubface, it can come off hot and roll too far.

[Please ignore that.]

8. Keep the club low to the ground in the follow-through with the clubface still aligned to the target. There is no forearm rotation.

9. Land the ball on the green. Regardless of how far away from the green the ball is, its first bounce must be on the green so it can start rolling. A ball that lands short can get grabbed by high grass or soft ground and stop dead, or take an odd bounce.

10. Practice from every kind of lie, from and into every kind of slope, and to every combination of ball-to-green-to-pin distances. You will never hit the same chip twice on a golf course. The more scenarios you practice, the more you will be able to handle the real scenarios the course hands you.

If there is one shot to get real good at, this is it. Being able to get up and down from anywhere builds confidence into every other part of your game, because you know you can erase your mistakes. It drives your opponents nuts, too, because a good chipper is never out of the hole.

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

brilliant ideas

Fixing the Out-of-Bounds Rule

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There are few rules golfers hate more than the stroke and distance penalty incurred for hitting a ball out of bounds. For a shot that was perhaps two feet away from leaving you with a playable next shot, golf assigns you its toughest playing penalty.

Harvey Penick says as much in his Little Red Book under the heading, Strange Penalty:

“The most embarrassing thing you can do in golf is swing your driver on the tee and completely miss the ball.
“For this humiliation, the penalty is one stroke.
“However, if you smash a drive a long way but the ball lands an inch out of bounds, the penalty is stroke and distance–in effect, a two-shot punishment for what was nearly a good drive.”

Golf (with a capital “G”) understands this. Few rules have been tweaked as often.

The problem is a neat one, as Tom Watson explains in his book about the rules of golf. He says if the penalty were distance only, as it was for a brief time, the next stroke from the same spot would be essentially a mulligan. Watson supposes hitting the tee shot on a par 3 out of bounds, teeing up the second shot, knocking it stiff, and tapping in for a par. That bothers him. It bothers me, too.

Where his argument breaks down is when he goes on to say, “…common sense demands that the procedures be the same for balls lost or out of bounds.” No, it doesn’t. We make a distinction between a ball found and lying out of bounds, and a ball that could be out of bounds, but is not found.

In the first case, it is a fact that the ball is out of bounds. The ball would be dropped in-bounds, two club-lengths from the nearest in-bounds point, but not nearer to the hole, with a one-stroke penalty. If that were not possible, or would result in an unplayable lie, the player could choose to hit another ball from the spot where this ball was hit, and take a one-stroke penalty. This was the rule from 1964 to 1968.

I know that second option is stroke and distance, but that is an option that exists in the unplayable lie rule and the water hazard rule. No reason why the OB should not have it as an option, either.

In the second case, where it is not an ascertainable fact that the ball lies out of bounds, the ball would be treated like a lost ball, and that current rule would apply.

In short, if you find your ball, a penalty less severe than stroke and distance should apply. Only if you can’t find your ball, should the stroke and distance penalty apply.

Problem solved. Now all I have to do is get rules officials from the USGA and R&A to start reading my blog, and rescue golf from this strange penalty.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

playing the game

Two Clubs and a Putter

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I’ve been going out with my grandson the past month to play golf with him at local nine-holer. I decided these rounds weren’t that big of a deal for me, so I would just take a few clubs to knock the ball around the course, and so I could carry my bag instead of using my pull cart.

I pack a 7-iron, a gap wedge, and a putter. After three rounds of this, let me tell you. You can put up a pretty good score just that set. One of the reasons I’m only taking those clubs is that I’m undergoing a difficult swing change. A 7-iron is the longest club I can reliably hit right now.

We play from the red tees, since he isn’t hitting the ball all that far yet. Still, there’s distance to be covered. The red tees don’t turn it into a pitch-and-putt layout. I tee off with the 7 and hit it from the fairway, of course, hit 7-iron punches into greens, chip with it. It makes me feel like a regular Seve Ballesteros the way I have to create shots with this club.

And you know what? They work! Last time out I started bogey, bogey, bogey, then finished par, par, par, birdie, bogey, par. Not bad.

We have a three clubs and a putter day every year at the men’s club of the course where I normally play. The first time I tried it, I took a 2-hybrid, a 7-iron, a sand wedge, and my putter. Shot a 39 from the white tees measuring 3,150 yards.

There’s something about having a limited set of clubs that frees you up, even relaxes you as you stand over a shot that is clearly not suited for the club you’re holding, about to use it not as it would “normally” be used. Now your creativity has to save the day, and this is where golf starts to get fun. “If I do a little of this and play it like that, it just might work.”

If the shot doesn’t come off, it’s no big deal, since it wasn’t supposed to anyway. But if it does, you have added a great positive experience to your mental skill set that is quite liberating. Instead of playing golf the way everybody else does, the way your pro says to, the way you see on TV, you’re playing it your way. Once you get the hang of having to create, you’ll be in touch with a skill you didn’t know you had.

Try playing a round or two from the red tees with just three clubs and see what I mean. Then move on to playing a course you normally play, from the tees you normally play, with six clubs and a putter. Francis Ouimet won the U.S. Open in 1913 with just seven clubs.

I would pack a driver, a 3-hybrid, a 5- and 7-iron, a pitching wedge, a sand wedge, and a putter. I’ll bet I could shoot a decent score, too. I’ll bet you could, too.

Golf is supposed to be fun. Do fun things with it. This is one of them.

For tips in how to hit the full set of clubs, visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com