IMPROVE YOUR GOLF

Your Improvement Golf Calendar

When I know a student is serious about improving and has the time to devote to a program I give them a calendar – a “when to do what” guide for improvement. To give this guide some sense of chronological order, I've broken it into weeks—13 of them—which gives you roughly 90 days to reach your goal – here is week 2.

DIGITIZE YOUR GAME

Review the relative strengths and weaknesses of your game in preparation for creating your strength and weakness profile. Take a yellow pad and draw a line down the middle then label the two columns Strength and Weakness.  Down the left side list all areas of your game from chipping/pitching, lag putting etc.. Also list each club in your bag. Down the right side honestly evaluate each entry by annotating the appropriate columns. Keep a running list until you have a handle on your playing profile.

DEVELOPING A STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS PROFILE

Rate each of your clubs using 3 for weak, 2 for average, and 1 for strong.  If you like, add decimals as in 1.5, to create a more sensitive range. In addition to rating your clubs, it's helpful if you keep a journal where you record important golf experiences and observations.

What do you do with this information? You use it to play the game by evaluating each situation and then choosing a club that is on the strength side. Plus it tells you what to practice to improve. For example keeping your stats you discover that you're a not very accurate with your short irons. When it’s time to lay up on a par five you use this information to govern your lay-up choices i.e. lay-up so you have a six iron [a mid-iron you hit well] vs. a nine iron you have trouble with.

The Takeaway: A major aspect of playing your best golf is fitting your Strength and Weakness Profile into the defenses set up by the architect.  To do this you must make an accurate assessment of your playing skills, which are often different from your practice range skills.  For this reason I encourage you to develop both a practice and a playing profile, and be sure you never confuse the two.  You’re playing profile reveals how well you perform when shot selection depends not only on the conditions but also on your ability to execute under the one-ball-success-rate, that is, a situation where every swing counts.