Those of us in that predicament are left to feed our passion for golf through books, magazines, television, or the internet. In times like these, we tend to try and learn some new technique or magic tip so we can hit the ground running when spring gets here. It’s like the ever-renewed New Year’s Resolution. We study up and vow to shave strokes off our games, come spring.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t usually happen, for a variety of reasons. It is partly because we overload ourselves with information in an attempt to figure out what’s going wrong, and just blindly go out and try a few things. Nothing really works and within a short time, we just slip back into last season’s form.

By the time you finish this post, you’re probably going to be thinking, “he didn’t tell me squat.” It’s true, nothing here is rocket science. But, too often, we fail to improve because we have no plan for success. We just flail around and ultimately fall short.

These steps will help you create a blueprint to improve your game, but I assure you, ALL the work falls on you. There is no magic pill.

Step One: Figure out What You Want from the Game

This step is so simple, it’s almost silly. But it’s the one that many people never consider.

Why do you play the game? For enjoyment? For exercise? Love of competition? To bond with family or friends? Love of gambling? The challenge?

Everyone has some reason(s) that they play golf. Take a moment and think about yours and do me (and you) a favor: write them down. Grab a sheet of paper and create a list of the reasons you play the game. List them all, however trivial, but list them in order of importance.

Step Two: Figure out Why You Want to Improve

Look at the list you created in step one. Those are the reasons why you play the game. Now, think about why you want to improve.

Are you embarrassed about your scores? Are you competitive and you just don’t like losing? Do you want to win more money? Are you trying to become a pro?

Create a second column on your sheet of paper and list the reasons you want to improve next to the reasons why you play the game, again, in priority order. Be completely honest. If your number one reason for wanting to improve is vanity or peer pressure, then you need to understand and acknowledge that.

Part of the reason for doing this is to help you decide if you should even bother going any further. Yes, that’s right, I said maybe you shouldn’t bother going any further. Look back at the reasons you play the game. Do your scores matter in relation to those things?

Maybe you just want to bond with your son and get some exercise and don’t really have any specific reasons for wanting to improve. In that case, why bother? Just go out and have fun.

On the other hand, suppose the only reason you play the game is for love of competition and your only reason for wanting to improve is to win more. That should tell you that if you’re not seriously working on improving your game, then you’re short-changing your own enjoyment of it.

Sometimes, it seems like we humans are wired to do an awful lot of things without spending enough time asking, “why?” It’s hard to change or to plot a course without first asking that question.

Step Three: Figure out What’s Wrong

I’m talking broad terms here. What’s wrong with your game? I don’t want you to figure out what’s wrong with your swing. We’ll get to that. In a perfect world, you keep stats about your play and can look at those, but you can just think back through your last several rounds or just think about your general tendencies.

What costs you strokes? Here are some examples of questions you should be asking yourself:

• Do you hit the ball into trouble a lot? Do you need more control off the tee to avoid that?
• Do you three-putt most of the time?
• Do you struggle with knowing which club to hit? Do you end up short of your target most of the time?
• Do you feel like there are certain shots you just don’t know how to hit?
• Do you have a slice or hook you can’t figure out how to control? Even worse, do you not have any consistent shot one way or the other?
• Do you struggle making solid contact with the ball on full shots? On short game shots? Both?
• Do you have problems being frustrated after bad shots? Do you have anxiety before shots?

Take your sheet of paper and turn it over. List out the things that are wrong with your game. Order by severity of problem with the worst things at the top of the list. Ask yourself why your scores are not where you want them to be. Think back to specific bad rounds or holes and try and figure out what went wrong. Write down every weakness in your game.

Again, don’t try and turn into Butch Harmon. If you had a blow-up hole, don’t write down, “I scored a nine because I’m having trouble releasing the club and am off-plane, which caused me to have a big slice and inconsistent contact.” Instead, the idea that you’re struggling with inconsistent contact and a big slice is good enough for now.

Step Four: Figure Out What to Improve and How to Improve It

Not counting the actual work of improving, this is the most difficult step. And it’s one that you might want to tackle with the help of a pro.

If you’ve gotten this far, then you have a list with reasons why you play the game, reasons why you want to improve, and things that are wrong with your game. These are the things that a pro needs to know to help you to improve. But if you insist on going it alone, you’re still going to need to know those things to formulate a plan.

For now, I’m going to pretend that you’re going to consult with a pro. With the information in hand from the previous three steps, he or she can begin to get a picture of what’s wrong with your game. Maybe your physical capability isn’t bad, but your attitude is what costs you. Maybe you can get back five strokes per round just by spending some time working on your putting.

A pro will be able to look at the list of things that are going wrong and suggest ways to tackle them. Obviously, he or she will need to see you in action to diagnose your technique, but this information will help with formulating a plan. Are you going to benefit from a couple of band-aid fixes and be on your way, or do your goals warrant a completely rebuilt swing? Are most of your problems with course management? Can playing within your own limitations better lead you to better scores immediately?

A good pro will probably try to determine the things I outlined in the first three steps through some casual questions. If you sit down and think about it ahead of time, you won’t be stuck trying to figure all this out while you’re standing on the lesson tee with the meter running. Take your sheet of paper with you and talk about the priorities that you arrived at through this exercise.

After looking at the parts of your game that are failing you, and after looking at your swing in action, the pro should provide you with a plan for improvement, based on what you’re looking to get out of the game. It might be a couple of swing tips and some drills. It might be a longer-term plan that spans a few lessons. It might be some tips on the mental game. But it will definitely target the things standing between you and what you’re trying to get from the game.

If you perform this step on your own, then you need to try and figure out what’s wrong by yourself. That, I can’t easily tell you how to do because everyone is different. Video can be a help, if you know what you’re looking at. Analyzing divots, ball flights, and so on can give you a lot of information.

It can be done, but you need to take your list from step three and then figure out what’s going wrong to cause those things, in a technical sense. Naturally, if your biggest fault in your game is that you three-putt almost all of the time, then your primary improvement plan probably shouldn’t center around fixing your over-the-top move. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need addressing, it means that it might not be the biggest problem. If you can’t hit a 2-iron well, but you only need to hit it occasionally, then it doesn’t make sense to spend hours on the range trying to hit it better.

Once you have a prioritized list of things to attack, then you need to figure out how to fix them. If you feel like you need to build your swing from the ground-up, then maybe you’ll want to get Jim McLean’s The Eight-Step Swing, or a book about the Stack and Tilt to see where to go next. If your short game is failing you, then maybe Dave Pelz’s Short Game Bible is what you need. If you won’t see a pro for help, then one way or another, you need to find the information you need to improve, through books, videos, or some other means.

The bottom line for step four is, you need to have a plan in hand, either from working with a pro, or from doing your own legwork, that gives you specific things to work on to produce better results in your game, and it should be prioritized.

Things that are most critical and that will provide the most benefit should be at the top of the list.  If you don’t prioritize, then you’ll just end up working on things that are easy and might not solve your most pressing issues. Humans like to take the path of least resistance and we don’t want to do that here.

There’s another reason to prioritize. No matter how serious you are about improving your game, unless it’s also your job, you’re not going to find time to address every issue with your game, at least not at first. There just isn’t enough time, and if you have a busy life, even dealing with just the top priorities in golf will take a back seat to the top priorities in life.

Focus on the important things that provide the most benefit to give yourself a realistic chance to see good improvement.

Step Five: Put in the Work

I hope you knew this was coming. It’s rare in the game of golf when improvement comes without work. Sometimes, it’s possible to improve immediately with properly-fitted equipment. Or, maybe a quick tip gives immediate results to get you on track.

Usually, though, improvement comes at a cost of time and effort. If you’ve gotten this far, then I hope you realized that the first four steps were leading here. I told you at the top that there’s no magic pill.

At this point, you should have a plan for improvement. All that is left is to execute it. You identified what’s going wrong, and you came up with a plan to fix those things. So get out there and work.

Set aside time planned for working on your game. Whether it’s an hour per week or an hour per day, it doesn’t matter. Schedule practice like it’s an appointment just like any other. Try to keep from getting distracted by other things that tend to draw your attention (yes, I know it would be so much more fun to be out on the course than stuck at the practice green).

Organize your time well. You have your list of things you need to do, so allot the time to address the things on your list in order of priority. Make your practice time count. You should always be practicing with purpose, or else you’re just out there hitting balls.

And don’t forget to enjoy yourself. Remember the old saying, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?” Well, don’t lose out on the fun of playing because you’ve now blocked in all your free time to practice. Look at your list from step one. Don’t forget why you’re playing golf in the first place. You need to commit to improve, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of enjoyment of the game.

It’s Not Just a Golf Thing

If it hasn’t hit you yet, these steps aren’t something that are specific to golf. They can apply to many different things. Having documented goals and a plan for achieving them is important for success.

If you boil down these five steps, it’s nothing but:

1. Figure out why you like to do something
2. Figure out why you want to do it better
3. Figure out why you don’t do it as well as you like
4. Come up with a plan to do it better
5. Execute the plan

You could come up with a hundred different things that you could improve in your life by performing steps like these to document your goals and to devise and implement a plan for improvement.

I really wish I could magically make us all better golfers, but I can’t. We can’t usually get magically better at anything. Improvement is greatly assisted by defining goals and creating a plan.

When we skip everything else and just arrive at step five, it’s not conducive to success because if you don’t know why you’re trying to improve, what you need to improve, and how to improve it, then what, exactly, are you going to accomplish?

If you’re sitting around, snowed-in like I am, then you probably have time on your hands. If you’re serious about wanting to improve, then give it a try. What do you have to lose?

© 2007-2011 Life in the Rough. All Rights Reserved.

Five Steps to Improving Your Golf Game This Year

Hopefully you see where I’m going with this.

Looking at the poll currently in my sidebar, a vast majority of respondents want to make significant improvement in their golf games this season.  That’s a pretty lofty goal, but it’s certainly achievable for just about everyone.  What each of us considers to be significant improvement is certainly a subjective measure, but how do we know when we’ve been meeting our goals?

What if the goal was weight loss? Or, what if it is to learn oil painting? Or, what if the goal is to visit all 50 states in the U.S.?

Fortunately, it’s usually fairly easy to recognize when a goal has been met.  If the goal is to lose 50 pounds, when the scale says that 50 pounds are gone, the goal has obviously been met.  On the flip side, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out why goals haven’t been met or if we’re even on track to meet them anymore.

That’s where keeping a journal comes in. It can help us look back over time and figure out why the scale isn’t changing or why our golf handicaps are stagnant or why our painting looks like someone just spilled paint on the floor.

One of the things humans do well is, we delude ourselves into thinking that the status quo is fine or that we are making progress when we’re really not.  We also tend to have selective memory and to take the path of least resistance.

This is something that I’ve discussed extensively over the years, but why do people tend to spend most of their time at the driving range instead of around the practice green when we all know that the practice green is where we’re going to have the biggest effect on score?  Why do people stand at the driving range hitting driver after driver after driver, when they know they’re not hitting any greens in regulation and they’re three-putting most greens?

Keeping a journal isn’t going to fix that, but having a plan will.  And keeping a journal will help you stay on plan and help you evaluate your progress as time goes on.

In a lot of ways, Life in the Rough is a journal for me.  I try to do semi-regular progress updates to keep track of where my game is going.  I also keep track of statistics, which is another form of journal.

A while back, I felt the need to keep track of my practice and play in a more immediate, personal way.  I don’t write progress update posts for every event that happens in my golfing life so details are forgotten and lost over time.  I keep statistics for many of the rounds that I play, but the numbers don’t really reflect what was going on that day. Things like amount of confidence or swing tendencies can be lost in the numbers.

Believe it or not, I’ve found that despite the fact that we live in the age of computers, that keeping a journal with old fashioned pen and paper works best for me.

Logically, it wouldn’t seem like that should be the case.  After all, with a computer journal, if you can type reasonably well, you can put down a lot of information in a shorter amount of time.  It can be organized in a myriad of ways. It’s easy to be able to search through the data.  You can e-mail it, edit it from many locations, or share it on a website.

However, I’ve found that these modern conveniences don’t really affect or enhance the biggest benefits of keeping a paper journal.  Based on my experience for the last 7 1/2 months, here are the benefits I see with keeping a paper journal as well as reasons why doing it electronically doesn’t really add anything compelling enough to make me want to computerize it.

• It’s available anywhere. I can pick it up and take it with me to the driving range or read/write in bed right before going to sleep. I could achieve the same thing with my iPhone, but typing out a bunch is kind of time consuming and cumbersome. I don’t need to boot up my PC or laptop, I can just immediately chronicle my practice and play whenever I’m inspired to do so.
• It’s personal. The journal is for me, not for sharing online with all of you. It’s not that I mind telling you what’s in there, but I can feel free to whine and complain or brag or express other emotions that I might not want to share with the world.
• Writing by hand tends to lend itself to more careful thought and consideration. I can certainly sit down with my laptop and perform a brain dump relatively quickly. I can type out every little detail that comes to mind however unimportant it might be. Writing my journal by hand, however, is a slower process.  It forces me to sit there and reflect on what I’m trying to capture. Not only does it force me to limit it to what’s important, but the deliberate reflection helps me learn from what happened at the range or practice green, so that I can adapt my plans for the future. It helps me think about what’s going wrong right then and there instead of having to worry about it down the road when I’ve gotten frustrated enough.
• I like leafing through and scanning old entries.  Every so often, I pick up the journal and flip through it, trying to see how my swing has progressed. It’s much more pleasurable to do that than to sit at my computer and try and read back through a file of huge brain dumps.
• Searching is overrated. We all know that Google has made information more readily available to the world.  It’s natural to expect that having a journal that is searchable would be a big benefit, too.  However, I’ve found that I just don’t want to use it that way. I don’t have trouble with my driver and then wish I could type “driver problem” into my journal and get a list of every time I had driver trouble so that I can see the trends and how I fixed it.  Even as I’m re-reading this paragraph, I can’t help thinking that would be useful. Believe me when I tell you, I can’t explain why, but it’s just not.  In general, it seems like searching is beneficial when I want to boil down another person’s information.  With my own information, the personal connection is enough.  Maybe it’s because my journal is relatively small, so it’s easy to find things. Even I use the search box on Life in the Rough because there’s too much information to sift through to find something.  With my journal, though, I don’t miss it one bit.

Don’t get me wrong. Having an electronic journal is better than having none.  If you can’t bring yourself to put pen to paper, I understand.  The most important thing is to have some kind of plan and to use a journal of some kind to make sure you’re sticking to it and to help you understand what’s going wrong so that you can refine your plan.

I recommend trying a paper journal. I think you’ll find it has the same strengths that I outlined above and that the weaknesses are no big deal.  If you don’t like it, you can always go electronic without much hassle.  Whichever way you go, give it a try.  It will help you keep your golf improvement plan on track.

© 2007-2011 Life in the Rough. All Rights Reserved.

Keeping a Practice Journal

The latest poll asked about the ways you improve your golf game.  If you haven’t voted yet, please feel free.  The question is, “Which of the following have you done in the past 12 months to improve your golf game?“  I presented you with a bunch of answers and asked you to pick all that apply (my apologies – for a brief period early on, you were only able to select one answer, but that has since been fixed).

This is how the responses broke down as of this writing (out of 167):

• Practice at a driving range or practice green (81%, 136 Votes)
• Read or watch instructional materials (63%, 105 Votes)
• Take a range lesson from a golf pro (34%, 57 Votes)
• Get a club fitting (22%, 36 Votes)
• Conduct a video analysis of your swing, (by yourself or with a pro) (20%, 34 Votes)
• Have a computerized swing analysis done (not at a club fitting) (15%, 25 Votes)
• Another thing which is not listed (15%, 25 Votes)
• Take a playing lesson from a golf pro (12%, 20 Votes)
• Attend a clinic at a local course or driving range (7%, 12 Votes)
• Attend a golf school (4%, 7 Votes)
• None of the above (3%, 5 Votes)

In many ways those answers aren’t surprising.

For instance, I’m not surprised that only 34% of you have taken a lesson from a golf pro in the last 12 months.  One look at my driving range tells me that if all of them were taking lessons, my course would need to employ a dozen pros.  I’m also not surprised that only 4% of you have attended a golf school.  They can get pretty expensive, after all, and often require travel and several days of commitment.

(Update: Doug alertly pointed out in the comments that I had originally referred above to the 12% who had taken playing lessons with a pro.  The number taking range lessons is actually at 34%, but I wonder how many of them overlap with the 12% who took playing lessons.  In reality the number taking some form of lesson could be anywhere between 34% and 46%, which actually puts the total in the somewhat surprising category.  Though, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because as I went on to state below, most people visiting here are those interested in game improvement.  What wouldn’t surprise me is if these numbers are higher than in the overall golfing population.)

A couple of things there are very surprising to me, though.

For one, I’m surprised that 22% of you have gotten a club fitting in the last 12 months.  I expected that number to be much lower.  I’m surprised there were that many of you that bought clubs in the last 12 months (or at least thought about it seriously enough to get a fitting), though I probably shouldn’t be.  We golfers are nuts when it comes to buying new equipment sometimes.

The biggest shock to me, however, is that only 81% of you have practiced at a driving range or practice green in the last 12 months.  I want to scream, “WHY?!” but I’ll just calmy ask.  Why?

In fairness, 3% of you answered “none of the above”.  There are likely some non-golfers that came by and answered the poll.  I’ll throw those out and I’m still shocked that 16% of you haven’t practiced at a driving range or practice green in the last 12 months.

I understand that most of you would rather play than practice.  I get it.  But those of you that found your way here for the first time were most likely looking to improve your game somehow.  As much as I’d like to believe you’re interested in my quest, the vast majority of you were brought here while searching for things to help you fix your game.  The Stack and Tilt.  Learning how to hit from sand.  Straightening your slice.

In general, I expect that most of you like to work on your game in some fashion.  I’m betting many of you like to read golf books, magazines, blogs.  You take lessons.  You buy training aids.  I would have thought going to the range and/or practice green is the most basic fundamental to game improvement like the need for air, water, and food for basic human survival.

It’s not even the fact that 16% of you didn’t practice at a range or green that boggles my mind the most.  It’s really the fact that you selected one of the other answers instead.  I sincerely hope you’re not taking lessons and not putting the teaching to work in between.

I have to know.  Those of you who did not practice at a driving range or practice green in the last 12 months, please tell me your story.  I promise I won’t be judgmental.  I’m just extremely curious.  Do you just not like it?  Did you just accidentally not select that answer?  Do you just prefer to work on stuff out on the course?

Hopefully some of you 16% will fill me in, or maybe the rest of you know the answers and will let me know.  Either way, I’m intrigued with another great poll.  If you haven’t voted yet, please feel free.  I’m going to run it for a while longer.  I’m also interested to hear from any of you about your general practice habits.  If you read regularly, then you know all mine, so let’s hear yours.

© 2007-2011 Life in the Rough. All Rights Reserved.

Your Golf Improvement Strategy

Doug has developed an interesting game improvement system, that I think might help me get more forward motion in my quest this coming season. It’s called Golf – Your Perfect Plan for Practice and Play

You can read a little about it here. If you’d like more information, just enter your name and e-mail address at the bottom of that page, and you’ll be taken to another page with much more information.

I’ve read all the information, and have read and studied the system itself.

I’m very intrigued. Enough that I’m going to give it a try this year.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me lay some things out there, so there are no misunderstandings.

• This is NOT some magic pill for golf improvement. There are no hidden secrets revealed here.
• This is NOT a manual teaching you the game. It’s a system of how to learn the game.

If you’ve been following me since I started this spring, then you know that I’m a goal-oriented person. I’m also a big fan of tracking statistics and learning from trends and results.

Doug has used his 17 years of teaching experience to bring these things together.

One of the things I struggle with is organizing my time and effort. The system takes care of a lot of the work for me.

• There are helpful charts to plan and track results and progress.
• There is information about setting goals and achieving them.
• There are skill tests to let you know exactly where you stand and whether your efforts are paying off in each area of the game.
• The system helps you analyze where you should actually be putting your time. Based on what I read, my own efforts this year were grossly inefficient.
• There are sample practice itineraries to help get the most out of practice time.

There’s no shortcut to hard work. Nothing will ever change that. But a system like this will help someone like me do it in an organized manner.

This system is for:

• Players who are serious about improving their games.
• Players that like to be organized in their planning, practice, and play, or for players who simply want to improve their organizational skills as they apply to golf improvement.
• Players who would like to be more disciplined in learning the game, but might not be sure how to go about it.
• Players who like to track statistics, but might not be sure what to track and how to apply that knowledge to improving their practice and play.
• Players who are willing to work with a pro or coach to improve their fundamentals.

This system is NOT for:

• Players that don’t want to put in work to improve their play.
• Players that don’t like to bother with tracking stats, outlining goals, or optimizing practice time.
• Casual players that just want to go out and have some fun and don’t care if their games improve.

I’m going to organize my efforts this season with Doug’s system. I’ll be letting you know periodically how it’s working out. At the end of the summer, I’ll evaluate my progress and whether the system has helped me reach my goals for the year, as well as whether it has gotten me closer to my overall goals.

———————————–

Further Reading:

Golf – Your Perfect Plan for Practice and Play (Doug Kercher Golf)

© 2007-2011 Life in the Rough. All Rights Reserved.

An Interesting Golf Improvement System