Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

I think we would all agree that when we play out in the golf course, we're secretly competitive with the people we are playing with, we are often competitive against ourselves and our own handicaps and our own score of course, but there is nothing better than beating the person you are playing with. So it’s interesting that when we practice, most golfers practice alone and they don’t practice with any of that competitive edge, competitive instinct. And I think that's a bit of a mistake. So this game will help you hone that competitive instinct in practice, so hopefully encourage you to take it down in the golf course and not suffer under pressure quite so much.

So we are going to play a game where it's a just simple one-on-one, man-on-man hitting into a fairway. Now the idea of measuring a fairway because you got to agree on your target line otherwise you are going to have arguments with your playing partner. Measure the width between this knuckle and this knuckle when you got your arm out straight. Point that down the fairway like that, so it’s arm's length, knuckles out and then measure from this edge to this edge, so that edge is a flag for me and that edge there is a tree over in the left hand side. And that's about the average distance, the average width from one side to another of a standard golf fairway.

So we hold our knuckles out, that's our fairway, that's what we are going to try and aim the golf ball into. And then you just take it in turns. So I will setup first, I will hit my ball, did it hit, did it miss? Then my playing partner has his go, knocks it down the middle, did he hit, did he miss? Now every time you hit the fairway, you are going to score a point, every time you miss a fairway, no points. You could even decide if you both hit the fairway, neither of you get a point either, so it’s all about who can hit while the other person misses. And then just play first of three, first of five, first of seven is quite a good game because out on the golf course you probably got seven fairways on each set of nine holes, that's sometimes quite a good number because you got nine holes less your par-3s probably two of them each side, so seven drives into a fairway.

You might even decide then to repeat that same game not with driver, maybe with 3-wood or hybrid club or even a long iron, a safer club that you might use to hit on to the fairway. You probably find that as you go down to a more lofty clubs, you actually hit a lot more fairways between you because driver as we all know is the hardest thing to hit on to a fairway, 3-wood hybrid club you probably score a lot more. But having a game against somebody, put the pressure on, wind each other up a little up you know who is going to win the most, maybe play for a little bit of money as well, only a small amount, always gamble responsibly. But try and hit those balls into the fairway, have a little bit of a competition, put the pressure on. Then when you go on the golf course, you won’t feel the pressure as much because you've practiced under pressure. That's a great game to improve your driving under pressure.