Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

With this swing tip, we are going to look at how to focus effectively on the target, how to concentrate when you are playing golf. You don’t need to be concentrating all the time, when you are playing golf. The crucial amount of time to concentrate for is the sort of 30 to 40 seconds before you strike the ball. And the way we are going to help you to focus is to look at how to get a really good pre-shot routine. If you look at all of today’s leading tour players, they all have a very, very consistent effective pre-shot routine. So in order to do this, we are going to split into three areas, before we get to the golf ball. Okay, this area back here is called the think zone. This is where we are going to do all our thinking and make all our decisions on what we need to consider. We are then going to move into the feel zone, where we are going to get a feel for the swing and then once we have done that, we are going to finally move into the play zone, where we just hit the shot.

So if we are back in our think zone here, our attention needs to be very wide at this point. We need a wide attention, because we need to be noticing things like what the wind is doing, what the slope is like, the lie of the ball, the slope angle that we are hitting from, the direction we want to move or hit the shot into, do we want to move the ball in the air, do we want to hit a straight shot. So there is a lot that we need to be focusing on this point, so our attention is here is very, very wide. We have considered the distance to the pin, once we have taken all of these things into consideration, we then select the club, that we are going to use. Once we have selected the club we are going to use, we then start to think about where we want to hit the ball to. So we’ve got a really good idea of, it’s this club, that’s how I am going to play the shot, we know exactly what we want to achieve.

And once we have done that we are going to walk over into our second zone and go into our field zone. And once we are in the field zone, we already know what we want to achieve, so we now are just getting a feel for the swing that’s going to produce that result. So take the swing, work on achieving the swing length, is it a full swing or have you decided on a part swing, get a feel for the length, get a feel for the tempo, and the force that you want to play that shot at. But you have already made all of these decisions in the think zone, here you are just getting a feel for exactly what you want to do. Okay, once you have completed that in the feel zone, we are then going to walk over into the play zone and we need to, get really good with our aiming.

So before you leave your feel zone, just draw a line back from where your target is to the ball and pick something out on that target line about a foot in front of the ball. Okay, what we are going to do is we are going to walk into that play zone nice and relaxed and now what we are concentrating on doing is aligning the clubface to that spot, taking a really good setup, checking again where the target is, picturing the target and hitting the shot. Okay, so the amount of time that we spend in each zone, we spend most time in the think zone, a medium amount of time in the feel zone and least time in the play zone and what's happening as we are moving through these zones, is we are starting to focus our concentration down. From here, we have a very wide focus for concentration, it’s got to take everything into consideration. As we go into the feel zone, we are only concentrating on the length of swing and force we want to play it with and by the time, we get into the play zone, we are just concentrating on the target. So we are really narrowing our focus down there and that’s exactly what you want to do to help you get focused on the target.