Winter is almost here for most of us, which means that playing golf is not always possible. Does this mean that you should put the clubs away until the Spring? No chance. There are still a lot of opportunities to enjoy the game during the winter month. Also, it is a great time to improve your game, fitness and conditioning in preparation for next season.
The easiest part to practice at home is your putting. If you have a carpet then you are all set. If you have wooden floorboards then you can buy a putting mat from Edwin Watts or somewhere like that.
A good drill when on the putting green is to putt to the edge of the green. This will help you develop good feel for distance. Similarly in the house you can putt to the wall. Just like on the putting green you want the ball to gently rest against the fringe, you want the ball to gently rest against the wall. If it is rebounding off the wall then you have some work to do.
Also, when practicing indoors, it is a great time to work on your club face angle and swing path. Get one of the gadgets that allows you to draw a line around your golf ball. Line it up with your target and practice getting the ball to roll in a way that the line on the ball does not wobble at all. If the line is not rolling true, then either your clubface or swing path is a little off.
Pay attention to what is going on in your stroke and see if you can feel what is happening and what is throwing your stroke off.
There are a lot of unique putting grips out there. It is easier to be unique with the putting grip as you are not looking for the same powere that you are with the full swing. Putting is all about control. Today I am going to talk about the left hand position.
A lot of golfers place the left hand in a poor position. Gripping the putter the way that you would a driver encourages club face rotation. This is going to require a lot of timing to get a consistent result. The less putter face rotation you have in the stroke, the easier it is for you to be a good putter and a consistently good putter. Placing the left hand correctly essentialy gives you a bigger margin for error.
Left Hand Putter Grip
As you can see from both pictures, the grip is running through my index finger and through the lifeline of my left hand (for right handed golfers). This reduces the chance of my wrist collapsing and gives me a better chance to make solid contact, get the ball started on the correct line and hence hole more putts.
The second picture shows how I hold the putter in my left hand. My putting is the strongest part of my game and it does bail me out on a number of occasions.
Have a look at what you do when you grip the putter, paying attention to the face rotation when you putt. If you follow the information above you will find that you will start to hole a few more putts and your misses will get closer to the hole.
You can knock a chunk of shots off of your score just by improving your putting.
Do you play golf in the winter? For me playing golf in the winter is totally different than in the summer.
In the summer, I play to play on great golf courses in top condition and play to my best. Can you tell that I have a tendency to take my golf a little seriously. It is one of my traits, but I do love my golf.
However, during the winter, the golf is completely different. It is about the camaraderie. It is about the funny bounces that you get, hitting the ball 200 yards with a sand wedge, because it keeps on bouncing on the frozen ground, fighting to get your tee in the ground and not being able to feel the club.
The air is fresh and crisp on a bright winter morning and you usually have to do some jumping about just to keep yourself warm. Well I do anyway. That;s probably why I get so many strange looks. Oh well.
We have a winter league at my home club which is always fun. It is almost more about the whisky than the golf. There would always be a few guys that would turn up with the hip flask full. On occassion it would be a rusty nail (whisky and glayva mixed together). That gets you warm in a hurry. I very seldomly drink, as it tends to go straight to my head and I prefer to know what stupid things I am doing.
This is probably the only time that alcohol could improve your golf. The guys would always bring out the hip flasks on the par threes and pass it around, then leave it for the group behind that were playing in our league. On a number of occassions I have lost the hole to guys that have just had a shot of whisky. Go figure!
Now I need to go and find my winter gear. Where did I put it again?
Just like most people, golfer’s tend to have a problem with their self image see theirself in a negative way with at least one aspect of their game, if not all of it. They will see theirself as a slicer, a hacker, a good golfer, bad putter etc etc.
You may be happy with this, but if you want to improve then you are in for trouble. As soon as you start labelling yourself as anything you are making it harder for you to improve.
The easiest way to improve is to change what is inside you rather than working on your technique. If you change the thoughts and images that are inside your head, you make it a lot easier for you to change what happens on the outside.
I like to find products that will make it easier and quicker for you to make those changes, and I believe that they Psycho-Cybernetics program is the easiest way to make those changes. I have used the techniques with myself and with students that I coach with success.
The program talks about what to do and then gives you exercises in how to do it. Even if you don’t understand the theory and just use the exercises you will see results.
This program is not golf related and therefore will not be on most golfers radars like most mental programs that will help your golf. If you want to quickly make improvements and get the jump on your playing partners, then grab yourself a copy (click on the image at the top).
Wow! There was some low scoring this week in Vegas and a surprising winner. Anyone betting on Marc Turnesa to win this week would have pocketed a nice amount.
Everybody knows that the guys on the PGA Tour are good, but how does a rookie ranked 290 in the world come from nowhere, lead wire to wire and win his first event?
To start with, it all starts in his mind. Before anything is achieved, it is visualised in the mind. Every invention started in the mind. Therefore, anything that is created in reality has already been created inside your head.
The more detail that you can add to the picture inside your head the better the outcome. So, if you wanted to improve your golf game what could you do?
Well, to start off with, you would have to think about how good you would wante to be, the kind of scores that you would want to shoot and the handicap that you would want to get to. Once you have done that, you can start think about how that would actually look. Start visualising the shots that you will be hitting, the way you will be acting and the way that you will be feeling.
You are essentially connecting the dots. You are reverse engineering your success.
Once you have got the end goal in mind and visualised where you would like to be, you can start thinking about what it would actually take to get you there. Make a note in your head and on paper of the things that you will have to do to get yourself there.
You have now created for yourself a path to get you to where you want to be. Now you can start branching it out and start working on getting to your goal.
Remember - It all starts with a picture in your mind. Even for a PGA Tour Winner.
Watch this video about Tiger. Do you think you can learn anything from it? Earl realised that developing focus within Tiger would be very beneficial to his development and reaching his potential.
No matter what you want to do in life focus is vital to your success. The golfers and people that are the most focused are the ones that tend to reach their goals quicker and get to a higher level than those that aren’t focused.
Take your pick. What would you rather be?
To be focused you must have a goal. Not just any goal, but a goal that you want so badly that you will work your backside off to get there. Having a goal is not enough. If you want to go to Scotland to play St Andrews, but don’t know how to get there, do you think you will be able to get there by just visualising it?
NO! Visualising is great, but you need to take action. In order to turn your goal into reality you need to map out all of the steps that are required to get you there. What do you need to improve to get you there? What is standing in your way?
Now you are ready to achieve your goal. Turn up your focus and make it happen.
You are probably wondering how golf and kettlebell training go together, but trust me they do and when you understand and experience it for yourself you will relise how much of a benefit it is to your golf game.
Kettlebell training is great for improving strength, endurance and flexibility. It is great for working the hamstrings, glutes, abs and shoulders. All of these muscles are particularly important in the golf swing. If you are to play to your best and avoid injury it is important that you have strength and flexibility in these muscles.
If you do not, then you will require compensations in your swing which will make it harder for you to gain consistency.
Training with Kettlebells will give you a whole new level of fitness. Yes, it is hard, but so good. If you want the best for you and your golf game, then you will have a go at Kettlebell training. It will also make you mentally tougher. This is a benefit that is worth it on its own for any golfer.
This was the video that got me interested in Kettlebells. There are several benefits for golfers by doing this exercise. One, it is great for the obliques and abs (required for stability and generating power in the swing). Two, it requires balance. Three, it requires co-ordination. This video is from Anthony Diluglio.
You should be looking to train 3 times per week with the Kettlebell. A couple of resources that I like for information on Kettlebell training is Art of Strength by Anthony Diluglio and Dragon Door by Pavel Tsatsouline. You will start to feel the benefit in a short period of time.
Spending time beating balls on the range isn’t going to improve your golf. Buying new equipment isn’t going to make you a better golfer. Practice won’t necessarily make you a better golfer, unless you know what to practice and how to practice.
There are certain things to work on and in a certain manner that will help you get to where you want to go quicker than you think without the frustration of changing your swing or beating balls until your hands bleed.
I discuss 10 areas where you can save at least one shot. For higher handicappers, this can easily be 2 or 3 shots. The areas discussed mainly focu on the short game. The qualities that you require for a good short game are transferable to your long game. However, the opposite is not true. A good long game does not necessarily help you improve your short game.
Therefore, do you think it would be more beneficial to you if you exhausted all the easy to improve areas before you tackled a tough swing change? What you will find is that working on the easier areas will actually improve your swing.
As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life. The majority of golfers that I have watched on the driving range hitting ball after ball with the driver or a 7 iron is incredible. All they are doing is ingraining the same thing over and over again and not really doing anything that will help them improve.
I remember an interview that was done with Severiano Ballesteros. He made a remark that he could tell how good a practice sessions he had by the way his clubs were lying. If the majority of his clubs were in the bag, then he knew that his practice hadn’t been that productive. When he had had a great practice session, his clubs were scattered all over the place. Does this not tell you something? Seve was one of the best players of all time and potentially the most creative when it came to shotmaking.
When you are on the range, you should be hitting no more than 3 or 4 balls to the same target and no more than 3 or 4 balls with the same club. After all, when would you ever hit 20 drivers or 20 seven irons in a row on the golf course.
The idea of practice should be that you practice how you intend to play.
Just as bad as standing on the range with a bag of balls is standing around the chipping area with a dozen balls chipping to the same flag over and over again with balls clashing into each other. Where is the benefit in that?
Take 2 or 3 balls chip from one location to different flags, go and pick them up and do the same. When chipping, pitching or messing around at the side of the green, the key is to keep it creative.
Give yourself a horrible lie or a nightmare of a shot and see what you can and can’t do with it. This comes back to getting to know your game and what you can and can’t do with the club.
Doing this will ultimately help your hand eye coordination and your feel, ultimately improving your game and your score.
It is a sweet feeling to chip in for birdie. Be one of these people that chips in pretty much every round.
Winter is on its way. For the first time in a while I had the waterproof trousers on this morning for a bit of extra warmth. They haven’t been used much this year for the rain. Any time it has been raining it has been the type of rain that makes you run for cover. Similar to a thunder storm in Florida in the middle of winter.
It was rather nippy on the golf course this morning, but soon got over it once I started moving. The course was a little wet. We had a lot of rain on Saturday night / Sunday morning.
Today was the first time I changed my strategy for casual water. Usually you would expect to change it for a hazard or pressure in a competition, but no. I had to change it for a big puddle.
Usually on the 17th hole I would hit driver, but not today. It was 3-wood off the tee to make sure I laid up short of the puddle. The green keeper looked like he was having fun. The water was almost up to the top of his welly’s. He didn’t look too enamoured.
It is also the time of year for crater like pitch marks. You could make a decent impression just throwing the ball up in the air.
I only played four holes this morning, but spent some time chipping around the green. I forgot how much fun it could be. I am going back to the basics and rediscovering the things that I enjoyed to do so much as a junior learning to play and honing my skills at my home club.
If you keep in mind why you started playing golf in the first place I think it helps insulate you from the ups and downs of the game.
Psycho-Cybernetics by Dan Kenedy and Maxwell Maltz