practice

Concentrated golfing practice

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There’s so much to practice in golf, and you need to do all of it at some time or another. But try this concentrated practice routine and see if it doesn’t pay off real soon in lower scores.

1. Hit range balls only with your driver and sand wedge. Go through your bucket in a six-shot pattern: hit five wedges, then one driver. That will tighten up your short game, and bring a controlled swing to a club that you just have to hit well to have a chance to score.

2. Go to the practice green, with one ball, and chip up to a hole and putt it out. Do this thirty times, hitting to a different setup every time. Maybe you don’t chip with a sand wedge all the time, but that’s OK. You’ll learn to get the ball close enough. You’ll learn to putt by making real putts: the back end of an up and down, which is golf’s major scoring skill.

I know there are a lot of shots and clubs this scheme doesn’t address, but it does address the important ones. The skills you learn here will carry over into the rest of it, believe me.

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statistics

Statistics for the recreational golfer

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Traditional golf statistics, such as fairways hit, greens in regulation (GIR), and number of putts, only exist because they’re easy to collect. They don’t tell you what you need to know about the state of your game. These four stats do. Get a second scorecard and record them on that one, for each hole.

1. Distance to the hole, in yards (DTH). This is the vertical distance to the hole after the regulation number of strokes (par minus 2) have been taken.

DTH is measured from the ball to a line drawn through the hole at a right angle to the fairway leading up to it. If your ball is on this line or beyond it, put down a zero. You can have a positive DTH even if the ball is on the green. A good way to lower your score is to get the ball hole-high as soon as you can.

2. Number of short shots (SS). Any shot into the green that is less than a full swing goes here.

If you want to, you can write down the length of the shot (distance to the edge of the green along the line of the shot) to remind you what kind of shot it was. Clearly, you want only one SS per hole if that.

3. Length of your first putt, in feet (LFP). Circle it if you sink it. LFP is a way of evaluating your long game (if SS is zero) or your short game, if SS is 1.

4. Length of your second putt, in feet (LSP). Circle it if you sink it. An uncircled number indicates a three-putt green. LSP is a way of evaluating both your approach putting (value of LSP relative to value of LFP), and your short putting (by the value of the circled or uncircled LSP numbers).

5. Mental errors. These errors cost you extra strokes for no reason. Examples are not being confident while hitting the shot, quitting on the shot (common in the short game), thinking too much about results, and so forth. Mental errors are not random. If you keep track of them, you will find a pattern of them occurring with particular shots, or at similar points in the round. Knowing that, you can take the proper corrective action.

Put a check mark in one of the four boxes above to indicate a mental error on that shot. You’ll remember what it was.

If you’re a beginning golfer, keep track of these two numbers only: number of fairways hit, and number of three-putt greens. These entry-level indicators show you how well you’re doing at learning golf’s two fundamental skills, the swing and putting.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

hands lead the clubhead

Your Hands Lead the Clubhead – II

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In an earlier video, I showed you a drill to teach yourself how to have your hands leading the clubhead as it comes into the ball.

Now I’m going to show you how to install that technique into your shot-making, one club at a time — the right way to install any major swing change.

If you’re not getting a ball first-ground second contact this technique should produce, you are likely playing the ball too far forward.    Gradually move the ball back in your stance until you get it right.

practice

Golfing practice is hard work

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Practice is not play. By that, I mean it’s not playtime, where you can knock around some golf balls and call it good. It’s serious business, if you want to improve.

A few days ago, I took my grandson to the range to practice his short game and putting. This is the phase of the game were he’s losing too many strokes, and can get them back the most easily. I gave him a challenge: get a twenty-yard chip up and down, and not quit until he did it.

He had four golf balls that he hit with his 6-iron. Two of them ended up way out of one-putt range, but two gave him makable putts. He missed them both, so back to the start. Four more chips. Just get one of them up and down.

Well, this was taking longer than I thought it would. After four rounds of this exercises, with no luck, I just stood out here and tossed the ball back to him if it ended up too far away. Finally, he got one to five feet. I helped him read the putt and line it up. He missed. Back to chipping, and he was getting pretty discouraged.

About six chips later, he hit one to four feet. OK, I thought, this is it. He missed. Back to chipping. We had to be getting to the 40th chip by now, and I was wondering how long this was going to take. He was getting pretty discouraged. I stayed calm, though, and told him that if we quit, we would have walked away and learned nothing.

So here we go again. The next chip he hit was running a little too fast, but had a really nice line, and it went in. We’re done. If the up goes in and you don’t need the down, that’s OK, too. He was so happy.

But one thing he was so happy about is that he had stuck with it (with some help) and met his goal. Anyone can quit. He left the range with a feeling of achievement rather than failure. That’s serious business.

I’m a good chipper. My exercise is more demanding. I chip four balls to one hole and don’t quit until I get all of them up and down. Then I hit four balls to four different holes and don’t quit until I get all of them up and down, too. Sometimes I get both parts right away, so I start over with more difficult chips. I make myself work for success.

You won’t get good on the course until you make yourself be good in practice. That’s my habit, that’s a habit I’m teaching my grandson, and I hope this post inspires you in that regard if you’re not doing that already.

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playing the game

Strategic planning on the golf course

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This excerpt from my latest book, The Golfing Self, explains how to plan the way you play a golf hole.

“Think of playing a hole of golf as a team project. At work, you might be on a team of four or five people, organized to plan and complete a project of some kind. Every member of the team has a role which is coordinated with the roles of the other team members, such that their efforts will return a satisfying product. The team in golf consists of yourself and the strokes you plan on playing from where you are, to the hole. All of you are in this together, each playing their role. The relationships between the work of each team member and its desired effect on the outcome of the project, getting the ball in the hole as quickly as possible, are known from the start.

“What you would not do at work is get a general idea of what you wanted to have done, ask someone to do this part of it, and when they’re finished, see what’s left and ask someone else to do another part of it, and so forth, never coordinating the tasks or the team members as a unified group. Playing golf in this way means you hit a shot off the tee, see where it ends up, hit another shot, see where it ends up, and keep doing this until you finally hole out. This is what I call “hit and hope” golf: hitting a series of unconnected shots and expecting good results. It’s not the way to shoot low scores.

“Before you tee off, make a plan for getting the ball in the hole. Expand the Gathering and Deciding phases beyond your tee shot to include every shot you intend to take on this hole. Plan it out in the following fashion. See yourself on the green hitting your approach putt (if you can see the pin from the tee). Next think of the spot in the fairway from where you would want to hit the ball to the green. From the tee, decide what’s the best way to get the ball to that spot in the fairway. We’ll call this the scoring sequence for the hole.

“Now all your team members have been assembled and each one has a job to do. You can move on to the Preparing phase for the shot you’re hitting now. Every shot you’ll be hitting is now part of a planned sequence of the shots that are most likely get the ball into the hole as soon as possible.

“As noted golf coaches Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott say, every shot must have a purpose. That purpose can only be known in light of the shots that follow it. “I’m hitting this shot to here, because next I can hit it to there, from where I can hit it over there, and into the hole.” Feel that each shot is the start of a sequence of shots that gets the ball into the hole, and you have thought through what that sequence is before you hit the shot you have right now. Every shot you plan to hit from here on is, again, part of a project for which you have gathered team members, decided what their roles will be, and of which you are the team leader.

“After you tee off and get to where your tee shot ended up, create a new scoring sequence, from the hole back to the ball. If you’re now playing from somewhere close to where you intended in the original sequence, the new sequence could be a continuation of the original one. Your gathering would be done to take into account any variables that were not apparent from where you first hit the ball.

“Of course, if the ball ended up far away from where you wanted it to, the original scoring sequence must be discarded and a completely new one developed. Adapting on the fly like this is not as simple as it sounds, mainly because it is not always easy to adjust to a new perspective at the same time you’re trying to figure out what to do about it. A moving mind keeps you detached from what might have been, and able to focus clearly on what to do next. It’s easy to make good decisions when every shot works out like we wanted. Better golfers do not let stray shots affect their ability to analyze their options.”

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commentary

Play Nine Holes

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There is a movement afoot to get golfers to play nine holes instead of eighteen. That’s a really good idea.

One of the problems with golf is that eighteen holes is almost a full-day affair unless you tee off at 7 in the morning. Say you tee off at 10. By the time you get home, it will be about 4 in the afternoon, and there’s the whole day. If you had played only nine holes, you would be back home two hours earlier, or more.

Nine holes is enough golf to hit all the shots, get your golf fix in for the day or week. Since you haven’t been on your feet for four hours, you’ll feel much more refreshed when you finish.

Those of us with back problems can play and not subject our back to too much stress. Those of you without back problems can avoid them by not swinging a golf club when you’re a bit tired. Doing that puts more strain on your back than your swing already gives it.

This might be just one of my values, but I prefer to stop doing something when I still have the feeling I would like to do more, than stop because I’ve had enough. That for me is the difference between nine holes and eighteen.

As far as your handicap goes, you can still turn in your scores. The first nine sits in the background and gets combined to make a composite eighteen when you turn in the second nine some days later. The course rating is the sum of the two nine-hole course ratings. The slope rating is the average of the two slope ratings, .5 rounded up.

The movement I referred to above is part of a way to get new golfers introduced to the game. Eighteen holes is a lot for golf for a newbie. Nine holes is much more enjoyable and a smaller chunk to bite off at the start.

I think it’s the same for experienced golfers, too. I haven’t played eighteen holes all year and I don’t miss it a bit.

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putting

What I learned at the range – 10

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Lately I’ve been spending my time at the range doing nothing but putting. Here’s what I’ve learned about putting in the past few times out.

1. I miss short putts (2-3 feet) too many times. It is because my clubface opens on the backswing, but the short swing doesn’t give time for the clubface to close again coming into the ball. So I have developed a technique of hooding the clubface just a bit on the backswing so it stays square to the line. This technique works for putts out to twenty feet or so, after which when getting the ball close is a more realistic expectation than getting it in the hole.

2. To putt the ball farther, you swing the putter back farther. But there comes a point at which you lose connection with the ball and subject yourself to frequent mishits. There is only so far back you can take the putter and maintain control of the stroke. Past that point, to make the ball go farther, you have to hit it harder.

When I have a putt that I have to hit harder like this, I hit it like a chip. I’ll turn my feet a bit toward the hole, opening my stance. Then I’ll take the club back only a short way and use my right hand feel to hit the ball the right distance, like I would if I were chipping from just off the green with a 6-iron.

3. There are three kinds of putts. First are the ones you think you can sink. Line is paramount, so you spend your time aiming the putter and ensuring a square stroke and contact, using your normal putting stroke.

The second kind are beyond the point where you think you have a chance to make it, but can still get it close. The idea here is to cozy up the ball to the hole and give it a chance to fall in. The third kind is farther away than that, the true approach putt. All you want to do is get it close. Going in would be sheer luck.

Each of these putts can be hit with a different stroke. The second and third kind of putts can be hit successfully with the “chip-putt” method described above.

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putting

Putt 17 inches past the hole – fact or fiction?

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Dave Pelz, the short game and putting guru, put out a factoid in the late 1970s that hitting a putt so that it would go 17 inches past the hole if it missed is the speed, at the hole, which allows the most putts fall in. Many golfers and teaching professionals believe that. But is it true?

One key to consistent putting is for the ball to approach the hole at the same speed every time. That way, you always know how much break to read since one variable, speed of the putt, is now a constant.

The fastest speed a putt can have and still go in the hole is 4.3 feet per second (fps), rolling over the centerline of the hole. A putt can be going 2.1 fps at the edge of the cup (outside edge of the ball meets the inside edge of the hole) and fall in.

How fast would a putt that grazes the edge of the hole and stops 17 inches past it be traveling when it reaches the hole? Unfortunately, that’s not a question we can give a unique answer to.

Greens have different speeds, meaning the decay rate of the putt differs. They have slope. They have grain. All this means that a putt traveling the same speed can go farther or shorter, depending on those variables. To get the ball to get to the hole at a 17-inch-past speed, it would have to be hit differently almost every time.

Say your target speed is 1.2 fps. A putt going that fast at the hole on an uphill putt will not go as far past the hole as it would if the putt were downhill. How about a bermuda green where you’re putting uphill against the grain versus downhill with the grain? Those two putts will finish at wildly different distances past the hole should they miss, even though they approach the hole at the same speed.

To have all these mentioned putts finish 17 inches past the hole, they all have to be hit at different speeds. That is what you do not want to do.

Pelz did say, and this fact is not paid attention to, that 17 inches is an average, which means it is not a goal. It is a guideline. By the way, I know about the lumpy donut and all that. Modern greenskeeping practices have pretty much eliminated or at least greatly reduced that effect. If it exists, your putt has to be moving very slowly in order for the effect to be noticed.

The biggest problem is that the “17 inches” concept focuses on the wrong thing. Forget about where the ball would go if it missed. Concentrate on where you want the ball to go when it falls in.

Do you want it to hit the bottom of the hole first? Do you want it to bounce off the liner about halfway down? Some other place? Whatever it is, that is what you want to concentrate on, because it is a reflection of the speed at which the ball approaches the hole. You want that speed to be the same, so it hits the liner in the same place.

Drill: Practice this by laying down a club and laying down a coin about a foot in front of it. Now start with three-foot putts and have the ball hit the club just barely. When you can do that consistently, move to four feet and continue. Keep moving back foot by foot, out to about 15 feet.

When you get good at this drill, you have reduced green-reading to one variable, slope. Your line and speed will match up a lot better than before, and you will start making putts you were barely missing, all other things being equal.

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commentary

Better Recreational Golf review

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I would like to ask a favor of you. If you have read BRG, especially the Left-Hander’s Edition, would you please go to Amazon and write a review? I’m asking so maybe I can make a few bucks off them (though believe me, I’m not getting rich), but more so you can help me spread advice to a larger number of recreational golfers that is correct, relevant, and targeted to what they/we need to know–which is why I wrote them.

Original book

Left-hander’s edition

Thank you for your help.

Little Differences That Make a Big Difference in How Well You Play