It is easy to get stuck trying to improve your golf game. You may feel you’re playing badly, and that you are in some kind of rut.
But if you take a step back and consider the big picture, you could be making each day more time well spent.
To give yourself the best chance at success, try these tips:
1) No excuses- You can’t win if you don’t play. There’s never been someone who didn’t want to play, there has just never been anyone who has succeeded at it. So don’t waste time thinking about why you should or shouldn’t play. Just get out there and go.
There are lots of ways to improve your golf game. But one way is to do a little digging. If you’re just starting out, it’s useful to know where you stand, so you can focus your learning on the areas where your game is weakest.
The first thing to do is to check what other people have written about your club type. Every manufacturer has its own range of clubs for each type of golfer, and there are industry standards for things like shaft length and loft, so it’s possible to compare different models. A rangefinder can help here – I use one for almost all my golf purchases – but if you don’t have one then just try clubs belonging to people whose swings are similar to yours.
If you want to be a better player but aren’t sure where the problem areas are, the next thing to look at is your scorecard and handicap index (HI). Unless you didn’t keep track of all those shots, this ought to tell you something about your strengths and weaknesses. If they’re not obvious, ask friends or a teacher who knows how golf works.
The best way to improve your golf game is not to play more golf. Golf is a very difficult game to play well. It is also very expensive to play, and the odds of developing good golf skills are low.
The best way to improve your golf game is to practice skills that will help you play well. One of the most important skills for a beginner is the ability to deal with pressure.
Many beginners try too hard in the beginning and give up before they have any success. They try too many shots in one hole, or the first time they tee up a ball, or the first time they hit out of greenside rough on the third hole, or before they have ever played a full 18 holes in all weather conditions at night, etcetera. If you think about it, these are all things you do only once, or at most twice, in your life. Unless you start slowly, there’s no reason to expect that you can do them as well as you would like them to be done.
Before you begin practicing your shot-making skills, it’s important to understand that if you want to improve your golf game – and get better at what seems incredibly difficult – then it’s important not to get discouraged by poor results. It’s how
The first thing to remember about golf is that it’s a game. And there are no perfect solutions. Every stroke you take, every swing you make, is a chance to learn something.
The second thing is that when you’re stuck, the only way to get unstuck is to play more golf. The best way to improve your game is to practice.
The third thing is that there’s no such thing as having too many clubs in your bag. But the more expensive the clubs, the harder it is to find good players to play with, and if you’re not in a great place in the world, the lower their handicaps will be. So don’t buy the most expensive set of clubs; buy three pairs of cheap irons and one hybrid, and average them out on regular basis.
The golf swing is a tricky thing to analyse. But that doesn’t stop people trying. The latest method, called “optimal path analysis” is based on the idea that since the way you swing your club depends on the way you’ve swung it in the past, it must be possible to make minor adjustments (as little as one degree) and get a more efficient swing.
Those who have convinced themselves that they can improve their golf by tweaking their swings are usually not aware of this fact. And if they do know it, they often have trouble accepting it. It’s just too hard to think about all the things you’re doing wrong before you start trying to do them right.
If you’re playing in a new course, the first time, it’s hard to know what to expect. But if you’ve played that course before, you can figure out what it’s going to take to hit your driver and make birdie.
If you watch a replay of someone hitting a drive on the range or on the fairway and see him take his swing, look at the ball, and then putt for a few holes, think about the mechanics of that swing. If he doesn’t get a good read on where the ball will go once he hits it (because there are trees in his way or because it’s windy), he’ll lose distance every time. The farther away from the hole that ball travels, the more difficult it is to hit.
If you watch a replay of someone hitting a drive on the range and then make birdie on the next hole, that person got a good read on where the ball would go. He didn’t do anything exceptional; he just figured out how to do things right.
Start by reading this post on the history of golf. It may be helpful to know that golf was invented in Scotland and England, where it was known as “foot-ball,” because it was played with a stick and a ball.
The first person to write down rules for golf was a Scotsman named James Anderson, who published them in 1744. The rules were simple: you had to hit your ball with a club and it had to go where you aimed at, which is why golf is still called “pitch and putt.”
Golfers used to complain about how difficult it was to take the ball out of the rough, so a Scottish landowner named James Montgomerie had the idea of using sand and water to mark out the fairways. He’d put sand in a bucket, soaked it in water, then beaten it with a club so it would stick together into little pellets. When he’d taken enough sand home he’d collect them back into a bucket, rinse them off, then pack them into his bag as fairway markers.
This sounds like an obvious solution today; you can hear people do something similar now if they want to mark out a putting green at home. But back then the idea must have been very radical: