All posts by recgolfer

practice

A Morning at the Range, A Morning at the Course

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Last week I played and I guess you could say I didn’t play so good. Time to go to the range and work a few things out.

I went Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and quite frankly I forgot what I did on Tuesday except work on my short game after I hit a few buckets.

Thursday, I remember. Our range sells tokens worth 33 balls, and I got three. With the first bucket, I hit my 8-iron, a lot of 5-irons, and a few drivers.

With the second bucket, I hit pitches between 40 and 95 yards.

With the third bucket, I rotated shots in this way:
Driver, 3-iron, 80-90 yard pitch
Driver, 5-iron, 60-80-yard pitch
Driver, 8-iron, 40-60-yard pitch
Repeat.

Every shot got real good. Then I went to the putting green and putted for an hour, emphasizing approach putts.

The next day, yesterday, I played. Shot an 81 from the forward tees (~5,900 yards). Hit lots of good shots, only left three on the course. No double bogeys!

Here’s a tip. Bring a notebook with  you the next time you play. When you notice something that will help you play better, or make a mistake that you want to correct later, write it down as it comes up. Otherwise, you will probably forget.

Here’s what I wrote down yesterday.
1. The green from close in looks foreshortened and difficult to pitch into. It’s really very deep. Fire away.
2. Have a feeling of calm confidence before you hit any shot. Make this a habit.
3. Swing thought — “center hit.”
4. If you think you have to be delicate on a short shot, choose another club or another shot.
5. Take no shot for granted. Give every one your full attention and best effort.
6. If you stand over a putt and think, “I don’t see how this will go in,” it probably won’t.

Can’t wait for Monday to roll around. I hope it isn’t raining too hard.

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

playing the game

My First 18 of the Year

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My first 18 where I had to turn in the score, I mean. That changes everything. No more do-overs, no more experiments. Straight golf. It wasn’t pretty. I shot an 86, and looking over the round, without much effort and a bit of clearer thinking, it could have been a 79.

Here’s how I broke it down. Skanked my drive (skanked, not shanked) on the first tee and tried to get to the green with a 4-iron. The trouble is, a creek runs across the fairway about 30 yards in front of the green. If you skank your 4-iron, you won’t clear the creek. I did, and the ball didn’t. From bad to worse gave me a triple on the first hole. A layup second would have given me an easy bogey.

I settled down and played the next six holes in two over, but on the eighth I made the classic double bogey: three shots on and a three-putt. The problem? I got too cute on the 35-yard chip and the ball checked up way too soon.

A swing flaw resulted in five topped irons overall, one of which went into a water hazard, and three others turned easy pars into unnecessary bogeys.

Throw away all the stats you keep about fairways hit, GIR, number of putts, and all that. Just go over your round and see where you lost strokes. If it’s bad thinking, note what it was and don’t make that error in judgement again. If there’s a swing flaw, fix it.

Most of the time you’ll find your errors came because your head wasn’t in the shot and your skills were thus prevented from coming out. When you learn to play with a calm mind that is clearly in tune with what you’re doing, you won’t dribble away shots that you know should be yours to keep. In the meantime,

visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

driver

Custom-Made Driver?

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Earlier this week I called a club fitter/maker to talk about having a new driver made for me. I had read a book about how important a personally fitted driver is, and I guess I drank the Kool-Aid. Made the call, set up the appointment, hung up, and began having second thoughts.

The first was the price. I won’t get specific, but this would have been a very expensive golf club. That made me think, how much bang for all those bucks would I be getting? Would it really let me hit the ball 20 yards farther? That much straighter? Does my low-90s swing speed really demand a tailor-made club? How many strokes would it take off my game?

That last question is the one. How many strokes would better driving take off my game? I keep track of these things. It takes me 38-39 strokes right now to get the ball green-high in a round of golf. The rest of them are used in getting the ball into the hole from there. My handicap is built on getting down in three instead of two. The driver isn’t going to help me one bit with that.

I had a lesson last fall to learn how to hit those 25-35-yard chips that you have so often on par 5s and sometimes long par 4s. And I’m getting good at that shot. One-putt good.

In addition, this year I added a gap wedge to my bag and started practicing. With my pitching wedge, the gap wedge, and a sand wedge, I’ve got pitches at 10-yard increment down pretty well. Soon I’ll be working in cutting those intervals in half. Now it doesn’t do you any good to be able to hit a pitch on demand 70 yards instead of 75 if you don’t know exactly how far away the pin is. Rangefinder.

I guess I talked myself out of it. I can see the improvements in my short game, along with knowing exact distances, cutting 3-5 shots off my score. Can’t see that with the driver. I can with the rangefinder, though, and that’s where I feel justified in spending the money.

So I guess I’ll be calling to cancel the fitting appointment and hitting more short shots, just like you should.

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

grip

Lighten Up on the Golf Club

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I just got back from a day at the range. It’s been raining hard here for the last few days, so the putting green was closed. The only thing to do then was to hit balls off the practice tees. Sometimes I just go through the motions on the tees because I like the practice green better. Tees, beets. Green, chocolate pudding. Since the option of the green was taken away today, I focused a lot better than usual on my full swing. Here’s what I took home with me.

Lighten up your grip pressure. You hear this all the time. Don’t squeeze the handle. Relax your hands. Yet you don’t. Why? Because it doesn’t make sense that a grip that light can hang onto and control the club during such a violent act (more on that in a bit) as the golf swing. Well, it can.

Try this. Pick up the club and hold it so it sticks straight out in front of you. Relax your grip to where the club starts to fall out of your hands. Now tighten up your grip pressure again just to the point where that does not happen. That is how much pressure you should have on the club when you hold it. Any more pressure in your hands will start locking up muscles throughout your body, preventing them from moving freely to build up the clubhead speed that you want.

Then there’s that slash at the ball you call your swing that makes the ball go everywhere but straight and long. There might be nothing wrong with your swing, it’s just that you’re overdoing it.

Here’s another thing to try. Swing at your normal speed, but feel like you’re swinging in slow motion. Imagine that you’re watching yourself swing, from inside your head, and you want to go slow enough so you can see everything. That will feel slow, but it won’t be slow. The result will be a swing with all the clubhead speed you need.

Lighten up your grip pressure, lighten up your swing. Especially with your driver, but that’s another post. Do those two things and see what a difference it makes. A good difference. And in the meantime,

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

commentary

Opening Day

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Golf season started in Oregon yesterday. Here in the Willamette Valley, it was below 40, rainy, and windy. So I stayed at home in my warm, dry living room and read a book about how to play golf. I like to have fun when I play golf. Cold and wet isn’t fun.

The thing about golf that keeps many of us coming back is that we find a little thing to change in our swing that makes us think, “This time I’ve really got it!” I found one a few days ago.

I tend to hit left. The ball starts out fairly straight, but curves left. After trying this and that for years to correct it, I finally noticed that when I take the club back, my right elbow doesn’t bend right away. This jams my left hand, closing the clubface. So three feet into my backswing I’ve already set up my hook.

I’ve been practicing letting that right elbow start folding as soon as I take the club back. It feels good, and the clubface stays square. I can’t wait for the weather to get better so I can try it out.

Unfortunately, the weather forecast is along the lines of, “You thought it rained hard yesterday, you should see today!”

Maybe by Friday. I’ll keep you posted.

playing the game

Simple Golf Is Good Golf

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As the most popular recreational game in the country, golf is certainly the most difficult to play well. For us to enjoy playing golf, we need to take this complicated game and find a way to simplify it. That is easily done, as this article will show.

There are three basic playing skills in golf: hitting the ball straight, getting close-in shots on the green the first time, and accurate putting. We shouldn’t be too concerned about how pretty we look while doing it (pretty is as pretty does), nor should we be bothered by exactly how we get the job done.

Our only task as golfers is to keep advancing the ball closer to the hole. The quickest way to do that is to hit the ball straight, walk up to it, and hit it straight again, then knock it into the hole. So far, so obvious. But how to do that?

After you have learned a basic golf swing, or chip or putt, here’s what you should do with it: use it to hit the ball. Use your swing to hit the ball. You don’t hit the ball, your swing does. That’s a huge difference in approach.

Golfers who try to hit the ball with a golf club are thinking of the end result. They think hitting the tiny golf ball with a tiny clubhead is a fine motor skill, the golf club being an extension of their hand which can be guided finely into the ball to achieve a pure strike. This leads only to failure.

A golf ball is not something to be hit or hit at. It is an object to be swung through. When thinking changes from “hit the ball” to “swing the club,” the entire game becomes easier and you hit better shots.

One way to look at it is that you should be truly surprised when the club meets the ball. Not that you can’t believe you actually hit it, I don’t mean that. It’s rather than you should be so caught up in your swing that you don’t realize until after you have hit the ball that this was what was intended all along.

How do you do that? It’s obvious you’re standing up the ball to hit it. How do you surprise yourself? Simple. By fooling yourself. By learning to ignore the ball even when it is right there in front of your eyes. By forgetting all about the fact that your goal is to hit the ball, and concentrating on making the best stroke that you have trained yourself to make.

This thinking goes for every shot, from two-foot putt to swinging a driver. What it leads to is minimizing or even eliminating tension in your swing. Tension, caused by trying to hit the ball to get a result, pulls our stroke out of line or off plane, rushes it, just plain gets in the way of us doing what we taught ourselves to do.

You swing, the club hits, and the ball flies. Keep the game that simple in your head, and you will play better.

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

distance

Hit It Hard by Having Good Balance

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I played 18 last Friday, and on the 17th hole I hit the shot of my life. The result wasn’t much, it was just a 7-iron into the green. It went straight and as far as a 7-iron usually goes for me. What made the shot special was the feeling I had when I was hitting it.

Just before I took the club away, I had a real good feeling, like there was nothing to it, if I just take the club away there is nothing to worry about. I remember getting to the top of my backswing, and starting down. I remember hearing a gentle click, but the next thing I was aware of was standing facing the target, watching the ball, in a textbook finish, with perfect balance, and no feeling of expended effort.

I have never felt that way before, and it was wonderful. How did it happen? What made that shot so easy? Balance.

In balance from address to the finish, a golfer finds that all effort is directed toward the task, hitting the ball, and none toward keeping the body under control. A balanced body is in control.

A powerlifter once told me that the key to lifting greater weights is to lift the weight absolutely straight up. If the barbell wavers a bit forward or back as it’s coming up, then energy must be expended to stay balanced, energy that could be used instead to lift the weight must be redirected to another purpose.

Do you want to know how to get maximum swing speed and the most accurate hit? Keep your body under control by maintaining it in balance throughout the swing. You don’t have to hit the ball hard. Just don’t waste energy on things that don’t have to do with hitting the ball and you will hit the ball hard and far.

Do you ever see an LPGA player with less than perfect balance? Of course not. That’s one reason they hit the ball so much farther than you do. There is no wasted energy in their swing, and it’s all because of their balance.

Do you want to improve your balance? Here’s how. Hit wedges, lots of wedges from 40 to 80 yards. Go to the range and hit pitches with your first 30 balls. Use your gap wedge. use your sand wedge. Make easy swings with each club, thinking only of good contact.

After you’ve hit those 30 balls, hit one with your driver. You will go, Wow.

But forget about the ball did. Remember what that swing felt like, and how it ended up. It was effortless and you hit the drive of the year. Those 30 wedges put balance into your brain and you stayed balanced when you hit the driver.

Let’s repeat the lesson. To hit the ball well, you have to hit it hard. To hit it hard, you have to use all of your energy to hit the ball, none for other purposes. The way to do that is be in balance from start to finish.

Now go and hit those wedges. Go!

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

short game

The Golf Scoring Zone Is Twenty-Five Yards and In

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You hear a lot about the scoring zone in golf, the place where your score really gets made (or not). Some people say it’s from 100 yards and in, there are books written about 60 yards and in. For the recreational golfer, it’s 25 yards and in.

If you play once a week and can only practice that often or even less, your scoring expectations from too far away from the hole can’t be too great. There isn’t enough time for you to learn how to get up and down from 50-100 yards consistently.

Apply yourself instead to learning how to get up and down from 25 paces from the pin or less. This, you can do. Those are the up-and-downs that can take bunches of strokes off your score. Here’s how to make them.

Let’s say you’re just off the green on the fringe. The grass is cut shorter than the fairway, but longer than the green, and the lie is tight (there isn’t much of a cushion of grass beneath the ball). The club to pull is your putter. Forget your 6-iron or your sand wedge, or whatever you chip with. It’s the putter that will put the ball tap-in close.

Arnold Palmer said that your best chip is as good as your worst putt. It’s true. Spend some time on the practice green finding out how much harder you have to hit the ball to get it through the fringe. Find out how much fringe you can reliably putt through before you do have to reach for that sand wedge.

Say you’re about 60 feet from the hole and too far off the green to putt. The club to use is the one that will get the ball about six feet onto the green and run the rest of the way. Spend a few practice sessions learning which clubs to hit with different ball-fringe and fringe-hole distance combinations. This is a better shot than flying the ball to the hole, since a rolling ball has a much better chance of going in the cup.

The third shot you should practice is a shot out of the rough. Use your sand wedge. The key here is to know where the bottom of the ball is, and make sure the sole of the club gets down to that point. When the ball is sitting well down in the rough, you have to go down and get it. But sometimes the ball sits up in the grass, and your club has to stay up where the ball is so that you don’t slide the club underneath it.

If you have these three shots down, you will start making pars right and left. There’s one other greenside shot I didn’t talk about isn’t there? The bunker shot. But since everyone says that’s the easiest shot in golf, you already know how to hit that one don’t you?

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

playing the game

Golf’s Scoring Shots and Anti-Scoring Shots

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In another post, I talked about which clubs are the most important for you to be able to hit. (See The three most important clubs) Now I want to talk about the most important shots, which is not quite the same thing.

We’ll break this down into two parts: the good shots to hit, and the bad shots to avoid. First, the good shots.

The tee shot. Getting the ball into the fairway off the tee is a critical scoring shot for recreational golfers. My advice is this: do not tee off with a club that has fewer degrees of loft than your average score over par.

If you aren’t breaking 100, the 5-iron (28° of loft) is your big gun. A 6-iron might be a better choice. Break 90 regularly and you can move up to a 19-degree hybrid iron, which should get you 190-200 yards off the tee. Drivers in this scheme are for golfers who break 80.

The 7-iron. Play from tees that let you hit lots of 7-irons (or less) into the green. Then get very good with this club.

The approach putt. Go to the practice green and develop a stroke that hits the ball 30 feet, every time. This shot is two-putt insurance.

Sand. Can you just get the ball out and onto the green? For recreational golfers, sand saves are accidental without volumes of practice, but down in four, you shouldn’t be doing.

Now for the bad shots you want to avoid, which, quite frankly, are not that hard to avoid. I see golfers wasting strokes all the time on these shots.

Hitting your fairway metal when you can’t reach the green with it. 260 yards away in the fairway on a par 5? That’s two 8-irons. (See The mathematics of club selection.)

Hitting your fairway metal out of hairy lies just because you’re a long way from the green. Instead, chip out to the fairway and play on from there.

Hitting over water when you don’t have to. Or if you have to hit over water, using a club that you have to swing just right to get the ball in the air.

Flying the ball to the pin when you could run there. The first shot is much more risky than the second, and seldom more successful even if you pull it off.

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

playing the game

Do You Play From the Right Set of Tees?

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[Note: This post has been superceded by Do You Play From the Right Set of Tees-Part 4]

Golf is a difficult game. Regardless of the better clubs and balls we get to play with, you still have to hit the ball straight. And then there’s distance. Even though everyone is hitting the ball farther than they did twenty years ago, most golfers play a course that is too long for their ability.

Think back a bit. On your home course, how many greens do you hit short irons into? 7-iron on down. My home course is 6,402 yards from the white tees. I hit a short iron into three greens on average, five on a good day. How about you? Think about it, write it down. If the answer is just a few, you’re playing from tees that are too long. You’re making the game harder for yourself than it should be.

How long should a course be that you play on? Let’s find out by looking at courses the pros play on. On the PGA tour, 7,200 yards is a representative length of a tournament course. PGA pros average 290 yards off the tee. If you divide 7,200 by 290, you get 24.8. We’ll call it 25, to make the math easier.

Now, the LPGA. The average driving distance on that tour is about 260 yards. 260 yards times 25 equals 6,500 yards. Sure enough, the women play on courses measuring from 6,400 to 6,600 yards, which is just where they should be.

How about you? Multiply your average driving distance by 25. Say it’s 235 yards, carry plus roll. 235 yards times 25 is 5,875 yards. If you were to play from the whites on my home course, that’s a course almost 9 percent longer.

Nine percent doesn’t sound like much, does it? Yet it’s equivalent to the men on tour playing courses averaging 7,850 yards. Or the women on tour playing courses measuring 7,100 yards, and that’s the handicap you’re giving yourself right now.

Ladies, what if your average driving distance is 190 yards? Well you’re kind of stuck. The shortest set of tees on any of the golf courses I play regularly is 5,400 yards. Most of them are over 5,600 yards. That’s an 18 percent increase in distance, twice what we calculated above, over the 4,750-yard course that you should get to play on! No wonder so few women play golf. How much harder can it be made for you?

Recreational golfers have two solutions to this problem. One is for every architect to design tees at distances average men and women can reasonably play from. Not sure when that will happen. The other solution is to find courses, and they’re out there, that have tees at the right distance for you, and play those courses from those tees.

One more note. I have broken 80 six times in my life. Four of those times came one course which measures 5,917 yards from the white tees. I’ve broken 80 on my 6,402-yard home course, which I play much more often, once. See a pattern here? I do.

See Do You Play From the Right Set of Tees, Part 2

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