Category Archives: supporting your golf

How to Figure Your Iron Distances

Want a good way to find out how far you hit each iron? Try this.

Play a round of sprinkler head golf by yourself. Nine holes will do.

Play the first hole like you normally would. After that, hit your tee shot, pick up the ball and use the sprinkler heads or cement markers embedded in the fairway to stand at what you think your 9-iron distance (say) is. Then walk straight to the edge of the fairway and hit two shots.

You hit your shots from there so you don’t mark up the center of the fairway with your divots.

To know how much distance you have walked off from marker or sprinkler head, you need to know the exact length of your step using your typical stride.

Yes, I know, going to the edge of the fairway adds distance, but not much. With a fairway that is 40 yards wide, hitting from the edge of the fairway at 150 yard adds just over one yard (1.3275) to that distance.

In the notebook you brought, write down the distance club, and result–short or long by X yards, or just right.

It doesn’t matter if you hit the green or not. You can tell even when you miss if that was the right club or not and if not, by how much.

So you don’t slow things down, skip putting and move on to the next tee.

On the next hole, do this with your 7-iron, the 5-iron after that.

On par 5s, measure both the second shot where the ball ends up, not to where it lands, which you probably couldn’t determine accurately anyway.

After nine holes, you should have enough information to be getting a good idea how far you hit those two clubs. You can use the pattern they create to fill in the distance for the 8 and 6. Longer clubs you can measure on a long par 3, but don’t use a tee.

You might want to do it all over one more time to be sure.

Why would you do this on the course when you could get the same information from a launch monitor at a driving range?

The reason is to determine your distances under playing conditions, which are different than range conditions. There are very likely differences in the distance you will get from each, and the course is where you need to get the distances right.

Filming Your Golf Swing

Here and there you read that it would be a good idea to film* your golf swing in a period when you are playing well to have it as a reference.

That’s a good idea, but that alone is not enough.

If you fall into a bad patch, film that swing and compare the two. Then you can find out what’s wrong.

When you make the films, get a face-on view and a down-the-line view OF THE SAME SWING. That means you will need to have two cameras rolling at the same time from those two viewpoints.

I did that once and discovered a bad habit of getting too steep in the backswing, which had the effect of jamming my right arm into the shoulder, which closed closing the clubface.

Films compared, problem solved.

* I’m a product of the film and wet darkroom generation, so I just keep using that word.

The World Golf Handicap

Beginning in 2020, that is, now, a new handicapping system has been installed worldwide. The intent was to bring six separate systems into one. It follows in great part the USGA system, but there are some new wrinkles.

In no particular order of importance, the major changes are:

– the best eight of your last twenty scores will be used to calculate your handicap, not the best ten as before.

– equitable stoke control had been replaced by Net Bogey: par + 2 + strokes allowed for the hole is the maximum hole score you can post for handicap purposes.

– handicaps will be recalculated daily instead of every two weeks.

– scores for a day’s round can be adjusted for temporary playing conditions, such as rain, wind, hole locations, and height of rough.

There is more, but it gets arcane pretty fast, and is of use only to the people who maintain handicaps at your club. The handicap guys at my men’s club attended a detailed workshop to learn what to do.

This web site gives you a good overview of the new system in the form of short, less than 1½ -minute-long videos. Please do watch them, but with the sound turned down. There is no narration, just music that gets annoying after a while.

Dean Knuth, the architect of the now defunct USGA Handicap system, wrote an article in Golfworld regarding his thoughts on the new system. There are some bugs that need to be worked out, and he should know.

All that said, long-term readers are well aware of my opinion of establishing a handicap. It is necessary if you compete in any fashion, but if you play only recreational golf, please don’t bother with any of this.

Stepping Off Yardages

Very few of us are good enough to worry about whether, from the fairway, the pin is 160 yard away or 158. I’m not, but around the green, two yards makes a world of difference to me.

I didn’t want to assume my pace is one yard long when I step off a shot. I wanted to know exactly how long it is.

I went to a baseball diamond and walked around the bases, counting my steps. At 90 feet per base, or 30 yards, that’s a 120-yard walk in total.

It took me 140 steps. Divide 120 yards by 140 steps and I got 6/7 of a yard per step.

I made up a card that I keep in my bag showing how far I walk with any number of steps from 1 to 20. For example, if I take 11 steps, that’s 9.4 yards.

When I walk off short pitches, chips, and approach putts, I know exactly how far it is. That’s one step closer to hitting the ball stone dead.

How Far Do You Hit Your Irons?

Your irons are your offensive weapons. Once your ball is on the fairway, the shot into the green is where you set up your score. Really knowing how far you hit each iron is critical. Use this easy method to find out.

Go to an executive course nearby with a laser rangefinder. The idea is that you pick a club to analyze and drop a ball in the fairway at a measured distance and hit the club you think will go that far. As the holes, go by, you can refine the distance at where you drop the ball until you have it just just or nearly so.

Let’s start with you 9-iron. Maybe you think you hit it 130 yards. Drop a ball 125 yards at from the pin. It’s better to start off conservatively. Hit your shot, and if you would call it a representative shot, go to the spot on the green where the pitch mark is. Step off the vertical distance (see illustration) from that mark to the pin. Add that distance to, or subtract it from 125 yards, accordingly, and do the same on the next eight holes, if possible.

VertDist

After nine holes, you will have a good number of data points to work with. Estimate the distance you hit your 9-iron by taking out the longest four and the shortest four. The one in the middle is the distance to use.

Now play nine more holes, from 145 yards, analyzing your 7-iron.

You can also do this with your 5-iron and your 3-iron or hybrid equivalent.

Now look at the yardages you have for these four clubs. There should be a consistent progression from club to club. It won’t always be ten yards. I hit my irons at nine-yard intervals. When in doubt, adjust a club distance downward.

Determining distances between hybrids is more difficult. Because we don’t hit greens with them too often, it’s hard to tell exactly where the ball landed.

I have twelve-yard intervals between hybrids, as well as between my longest iron and shortest hybrid. I learned that by keeping watch on the course and adjusting as I gathered results.

Play several rounds on a regulation course now, sticking to the yardages you just figured out, and see how it goes. Adjust if you are always short, but if you are always long (but not too long), don’t change a thing.

I would go through this exercise every year. You change, your swing changes, and especially if you bought a new set of irons, do this right away.

Golfers: How to Know How Far Your Clubs Carry

To play accurately around the course, you have to know how far you hit each club. Here’s how to find that out.

Driver: Step off the vertical distance between your ball and the 150-yard marker for drives that stay in the fairway. By vertical distance, I mean the distance along a line connecting your ball and the green.

Irons: If you have a laser rangefinder, find the distance to the pin. Select your club and hit the shot. If the ball lands on the green, step off the vertical distance between the pitch mark and the hole. Here, vertical distance means the distance along a line parallel to the axis of the hole between perpendiculars at your ball and the hole to that line. Write down the club and distance, and after a few rounds, you will have a pretty good profile to work with. Bonus: from the same spot, take one more club, grip down one inch, and make another shot. By recording these gripped-down shots, you will come up with two working distances for each club.

Wedges: Do this at the range. Pick a flag and hit different wedges to it, using your standard pitching swing, until you find the wedge that hits the ball closest to it. Use the same swing every time. Move to different places until you find a place where that wedge gets the ball right to the flag. Then measure the distance to that flag with a laser rangefinder. That’s your distance with that wedge. Continue to this procedure until you have a distance for all your wedges. If you want to get finer, you can measure what you get when you use a standard shorter swing and standard longer swing. Or a standard faster swing and slower standard swing.

Chipping: Take out your lob wedge and hit five chips, with the same swing, and step off the distance you get. That’s how far a chip with your lob wedge goes. Do the same with each club in progression down to your 7-iron. Important! Use the same swing for all the shots you hit with all the clubs. You want the club to be the only variable.

Putter: This more subtle. You’re looking for a way to putt the ball different distances. You do that by taking the club back to spots where you feel different muscles get strained. That’s the stopping point for that particular swing. For example, if I take the putter back to the point where my left forearm touches my abdomen, that stroke will hit the ball 15 feet. If I take it back farther, to a point where I feel a slight strain on the right side of my lower back, that stroke will send the ball 22 feet. And so on. These distances were determined on a medium-speed green. If the greens you play on run faster than the ones on which you calibrated your stroke, just increase the distance of your standard strokes by an appropriate amount.*

None of this is to say that you play strictly by formula. Feel counts for a lot, but you need some place to anchor your feel. It can’t be out there by itself. And, on days when your feel isn’t working, you can still play well.

* This is the first mention of a concept that in 2017 became Triangulated Approach Putting (TAP).

How to Make a Video of Your Golf Swing

There are several reasons why you might want to make a video of your golf swing. One reason might be just to look at to teach yourself. Another might be to record what it looks like when you’re swinging well, so that when you get into a bad patch, you might be able to see what is wrong. Another might be to send it to a swing guru to have it analyzed.

Your video should show two views — face-on, looking across the ball at you, and down-the-line, which is taken from the backswing side of the golfer, looking toward the direction the ball is going to be hit.

For both views, the height of the camera should be at about the middle of the rib cage when the player is standing upright. Higher or lower than that distorts the image of the golfer.

The field of view should be wide enough to include the ball, and show the clubhead throughout the swing. The clubhead should never disappear out of the top or the sides of the frame.

When taking a face-on shot, the camera should be pointed directly at the middle of the player’s body. For the down-the-line angle, the camera should be directly behind the hands at address. Laying alignment sticks on the ground to mark the location and direction of these points of view will be very helpful.

It will also be helpful to lay down an alignment stick next to the ball so the golfer can align his or her normal stance in relation to the stick pointing at the face-on camera.

This part is important: the camera must be on a tripod. A hand-held camera will move around and you will not be able to compare different stages of the swing. When the image is dancing around, you can’t tell if changes in the angles created in the video are caused by the golfer’s swing or by camera movement.

If you have a variable shutter, set it on 1/2000 sec. Clearly, you should take your video on a bright, sunny day.

To get the full benefit of making a swing video, set up two cameras, one in the face-on position and the other in the down-the-line position, and run both cameras at once. This way you get two views of the same swing. What you’re trying to do is show what your swing looks like from two views, and that can only be done with certainty if you’re filming one swing from two locations at the same time.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

How Solid is Your Handicap?

[September 2018: My advice in the second half of this post about playing a variety of courses stands. The first part, about getting a USGA handicap, does not. To heck with a handicap. Just go play and have fun. Your golf belongs to you, not the USGA.]

I hope you have a handicap, an official USGA handicap. If golf for you is just knocking the ball around every so often, then, maybe it isn’t that important. But if you are a steady player, you should have one. It brings you into the company of golfers by allowing you to enter competitions. It will show you how much you are improving, you can tell how well you play on courses of varying difficulty, and if you travel abroad, many courses won’t let you on unless you can show them a USGA handicap card.

To have an accurate handicap, you should turn in every score, the good ones, and the bad ones. And you keep an honest score, counting the penalty strokes and playing by the rules. If you do, you can say your handicap truly reflects the condition of your game. But does it?

There is one other consideration — does your handicap travel? This is the important part. It’s one thing to be a 12 at your home course, which you have learned inside and out. It’s another to be a 12 no matter where you play.

A few years ago, a golfer shot a 62 at one of our local courses. He had a 2 handicap and had a day where everything went right. I looked him up on the GHIN Handicap Lookup page, which you can do if you have a name and a state, and found that all of his rounds were played on the same course.

Now you can’t argue with a 2. That’s pretty good golf no matter where you earn it. But I wonder how that 2 would stand up if he took his game to some of the other courses in the area that are, quite frankly, harder than the one he’s playing on? I wondered if he shot higher rounds on some of those courses and just didn’t turn them in. Who knows?

How well your handicap travels is the factor that makes your handicap legitimate. This isn’t about honesty. It’s about how good are you, really?

If you play a rotation of courses, you now that certain courses demand shots that are different from other courses. One course I play is a first-shot course. Get your ball in the fairway, and you’re home free. Of course, that isn’t easy to do, and a price for missing is paid. Another course has high rough around the greens that demands chips I never hit anywhere else, and so on.

I would suggest, as a general rule, that you the twenty scores in your handicap mix should at any time be made on at least four different courses, and the ten scores that determine your handicap should come from at least three.

That would give you the assurance that when you go to a new course, you won’t get a big surprise by finding out there are big holes in your game. This will also give you the joy of rounding out your game, and knowing that wherever you go, there isn’t a challenge you can’t handle.

If you don’t have a handicap, join a club to get one. The USGA’s definition of a club is quite permissive. It doesn’t necessarily mean an expensive membership in a private or semiprivate club. Your local muni should have a mens’ club or women’s club you can join for maybe $40 per year, and you’re all set.

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