Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro
Often when I sit down with a golfer for the first time we're assessing their game we want to work out how we can make progress. I ask them “You know how much do you practice?” and they say “well I don't really practice I just play so every Saturday.” they turn up on the golf course and playing plain play never practice in between and if this sounds familiar to you then I want you to think about how that can hamper your golf and how you want well get better unless you spend a decent amount of time practicing and then if you are spending time practicing. Let's try and get the most out of that practice so the first thing is likely to achieve is to just to set a big picture goal so to look at your overall game and set a big picture and say OK well my handicap is twenty four and a cap and I want to get down to eighteen and that's a reasonable smart achievable goal that we can achieve in maybe the next year so that's my big goal. OK Now let's break that big goal down into some smaller subgoals what do we need to do to get the handicap from twenty four to eighteen. Well I need to hit more tee shots onto the fairway OK that's one bit we can work on I need to strike my irons more out the middle OK that's another but we can work on I need to get up and down from when I miss the green more OK that's a short game goal I know I need to take less than thirty four pops in around the golf course.
OK There we go so we've got a big goal twenty four to eighteen five all subgoals one in each part of the game then we can focus on going to the driving range and working on those bits and quite often say to golfers you know why don't you practice and say well I don't really know what to practice but as soon as we've identified the big goal and the subgoals we've now got a motivation to practice we've now got our sort of areas of things that we can go on practice to the next consideration I would suggest is track your progress effectively tracking your practice there's no point going to the range and hit hundreds hundreds of balls and not get any better. Likewise you wouldn't accept been on a diet for two years and not losing any weight and the way you track your progress with your weight is you might see that some of your clothes are now fitting you or you might jump back on the scales and go OK I'm losing weight on looking better so the same needs to happen in golf we need to put some effort into practice but we also need to track that practice so we need to go out and measure ourselves again. So if our driving goal was to hit more fairways measure how many fairways you know hitting if you're putting goal was to take less than thirty four puts measure that quantify that see whether you know hitting less than thirty four pots and if you've done a couple of hours with the practice over the last couple of weeks or months and you've achieved your goal guess what there's your motivation that hey you know what practice works I'm getting better at this game and therefore I'm moving closer to getting down from my twenty four handicap to my eighteen handicap. So practice will play off practice works but just make sure you've set yourself some goals break those goals down into smaller targets and then really focus on measuring those targets and see whether you're achieving your goal practice goals.
2018-08-22 Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro
Often when I sit down with a golfer for the first time we're assessing their game we want to work out how we can make progress. I ask them “You know how much do you practice?” and they say “well I don't really practice I just play so every Saturday.” they turn up on the golf course and playing plain play never practice in between and if this sounds familiar to you then I want you to think about how that can hamper your golf and how you want well get better unless you spend a decent amount of time practicing and then if you are spending time practicing. Let's try and get the most out of that practice so the first thing is likely to achieve is to just to set a big picture goal so to look at your overall game and set a big picture and say OK well my handicap is twenty four and a cap and I want to get down to eighteen and that's a reasonable smart achievable goal that we can achieve in maybe the next year so that's my big goal. OK Now let's break that big goal down into some smaller subgoals what do we need to do to get the handicap from twenty four to eighteen. Well I need to hit more tee shots onto the fairway OK that's one bit we can work on I need to strike my irons more out the middle OK that's another but we can work on I need to get up and down from when I miss the green more OK that's a short game goal I know I need to take less than thirty four pops in around the golf course.
OK There we go so we've got a big goal twenty four to eighteen five all subgoals one in each part of the game then we can focus on going to the driving range and working on those bits and quite often say to golfers you know why don't you practice and say well I don't really know what to practice but as soon as we've identified the big goal and the subgoals we've now got a motivation to practice we've now got our sort of areas of things that we can go on practice to the next consideration I would suggest is track your progress effectively tracking your practice there's no point going to the range and hit hundreds hundreds of balls and not get any better. Likewise you wouldn't accept been on a diet for two years and not losing any weight and the way you track your progress with your weight is you might see that some of your clothes are now fitting you or you might jump back on the scales and go OK I'm losing weight on looking better so the same needs to happen in golf we need to put some effort into practice but we also need to track that practice so we need to go out and measure ourselves again. So if our driving goal was to hit more fairways measure how many fairways you know hitting if you're putting goal was to take less than thirty four puts measure that quantify that see whether you know hitting less than thirty four pots and if you've done a couple of hours with the practice over the last couple of weeks or months and you've achieved your goal guess what there's your motivation that hey you know what practice works I'm getting better at this game and therefore I'm moving closer to getting down from my twenty four handicap to my eighteen handicap. So practice will play off practice works but just make sure you've set yourself some goals break those goals down into smaller targets and then really focus on measuring those targets and see whether you're achieving your goal practice goals.
