Building Confidence To Avoid Golf Topped Shots (Video) - by Pete Styles
Building Confidence To Avoid Golf Topped Shots (Video) - by Pete Styles

Now one thing that you can’t buy to help improve your golf swing is confidence. If you could just go into a golf shop and you say, "Well I have a dozen tight less golf balls please and a dozen big box of confidence," that would be fantastic; people would pay a lot of money for that. But you just can’t have that, you can’t buy I, you actually really have to earn, you’ve got to earn it, you are going to start to trust yourself, you got to build confidence in yourself, in your own ability and particularly the ability of your own swing. And confidence and lack of confidence is almost like a vicious circle that when you don’t have any confidence, you don’t perform very well, which therefore diminishes your confidence. So you just go around in circles and some golfers get worse and worse for years due to not having any confidence in their ability. And particularly this topping the ball issue, is probably one of those issues that creates lack of confidence and less confidence faster than any other part of your swing. And if you are standing up to the ball expecting to hit the ball really nicely, but then you’ve got not confidence in your ability you think, "I need to watch this one, I need to help this one, I need to look up and see whether the ball lands on the green." So you look up to see whether the ball lands on green and it just rolls straight off here.

So now on the next occasion when you next set up to the ball, of course I’ve now even got less confidence, so I’m looking up again to see how this one flies and I want to see whether I’ll get another one, and I’ve topped another one. That’s two balls straight in the water on the same hole, so my confidence really diminishes. So I need to now start to believe in myself and actually the belief and the trust in your own golf swing is probably going to be built on the driving range, not on the golf course, because if you do that on the golf course is a problem, if you do that on a driving range, just take another ball, forget about it and carry on again. So we need to work on the driving range and this idea of consistently learning to hit down on the golf ball to get the ball up. Now if you're on a driving range mat, this is often even easier, because you can just bounce the club off the mat over and over again, learning to strike the ball at the right place. You don’t have to worry about debits and replacing debits and mud going everywhere and damaging your club, just and down and down, over and over again into the range mat to learn to strike down, then you bring the ball in position, do the same striking down and start to trust so that ball will pop into the air. So instead of hitting up on the ball, I hit down on ball. As I hit down on the ball, a piece of tough flies up, because I hit down, but also the ball flies up and away and goes a good distance in the air. So learn to start trusting your golf swing, learn to start hitting down, build some confidence and then hold for that confidence is a cycle again that you hit a good shot because you have loads of confidence, the good shot rewards with even more confidence. Then that’s a positive cycle rather than the negative spiral that we saw before with lack of confidence. Improve your confidence to improve your game. 2016-07-27

Now one thing that you can’t buy to help improve your golf swing is confidence. If you could just go into a golf shop and you say, “Well I have a dozen tight less golf balls please and a dozen big box of confidence,” that would be fantastic; people would pay a lot of money for that. But you just can’t have that, you can’t buy I, you actually really have to earn, you’ve got to earn it, you are going to start to trust yourself, you got to build confidence in yourself, in your own ability and particularly the ability of your own swing. And confidence and lack of confidence is almost like a vicious circle that when you don’t have any confidence, you don’t perform very well, which therefore diminishes your confidence. So you just go around in circles and some golfers get worse and worse for years due to not having any confidence in their ability. And particularly this topping the ball issue, is probably one of those issues that creates lack of confidence and less confidence faster than any other part of your swing. And if you are standing up to the ball expecting to hit the ball really nicely, but then you’ve got not confidence in your ability you think, “I need to watch this one, I need to help this one, I need to look up and see whether the ball lands on the green.” So you look up to see whether the ball lands on green and it just rolls straight off here.

So now on the next occasion when you next set up to the ball, of course I’ve now even got less confidence, so I’m looking up again to see how this one flies and I want to see whether I’ll get another one, and I’ve topped another one. That’s two balls straight in the water on the same hole, so my confidence really diminishes. So I need to now start to believe in myself and actually the belief and the trust in your own golf swing is probably going to be built on the driving range, not on the golf course, because if you do that on the golf course is a problem, if you do that on a driving range, just take another ball, forget about it and carry on again. So we need to work on the driving range and this idea of consistently learning to hit down on the golf ball to get the ball up. Now if you're on a driving range mat, this is often even easier, because you can just bounce the club off the mat over and over again, learning to strike the ball at the right place. You don’t have to worry about debits and replacing debits and mud going everywhere and damaging your club, just and down and down, over and over again into the range mat to learn to strike down, then you bring the ball in position, do the same striking down and start to trust so that ball will pop into the air.

So instead of hitting up on the ball, I hit down on ball. As I hit down on the ball, a piece of tough flies up, because I hit down, but also the ball flies up and away and goes a good distance in the air. So learn to start trusting your golf swing, learn to start hitting down, build some confidence and then hold for that confidence is a cycle again that you hit a good shot because you have loads of confidence, the good shot rewards with even more confidence. Then that’s a positive cycle rather than the negative spiral that we saw before with lack of confidence. Improve your confidence to improve your game.