Become a Better Golf, While Helping Your Community

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Pre Season Golf Starts Now

Now that frost delays here in the north are creeping closer and closer to lunchtime, it is time to admit that the 2012 golf season is just about over.  So as we are at the end of the year, it is time to reflect, analyze and plan.  Reflect on how this last season went, analyze what areas of the game need to be improved and plan how to make 2013 a better year.  The time to do this is now. I always talk to students about the winter in New England being the Pre-Season, not the Off Season.   The worst thing you can do is put the clubs away until the course opens in the spring.  This is wasting valuable time as well as giving away your golf fitness level.

So this week, please go through the following process to start getting ready for the upcoming season.

1. Did I have goals for 2012 and did I meet them?
   1. If you did meet your goals, did you get what you wanted out of it?
   2. If you did not meet your goals, why?

i.      Were they unrealistic?

ii.      Did you have a plan to make these goals attainable?

1. What area of the game was I best at?
   1. Divide golf into segments

i.      Full Swing

ii.      Partial Shots (Chips, Pitches)

iii.      Putting

iv.      Specialty Shots (Bunker Play, Trouble Shots)

v.      Course Management/Mental Game

1. What part of the game was my biggest weakness?
2. What part of the game can I improve to create the biggest positive impact on my game for next year?
   1. Keep in mind, hitting the driver further in many cases will have little to no impact on your score.
   2. Be sure to understand the breakdown of shots in a round of golf.

i.      14 driver swings in a round at most

ii.      40% of your shots are with a putter

iii.      Roughly 2/3 of your shots will be less than a full swing

1. What are my goals for 2013?
   1. Are they attainable?
   2. How will you achieve them?
   3. Do you have the time to dedicate in order to achieve them?
   4. What help do you need to achieve them?

Next year will be my 24^th season in the golf business.  Every Spring I hear people saying “This is my year! I am going to play better!”  If you wait until the spring to start your improvement plan, you are short changing yourself.  Use this winter to put a plan in place and by the time the courses open in the spring you will already be a better player.

Find out about Winter Coaching Packages from ConnorGolf

”Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” – Will Rogers

Old Habits

“Old habits are hard to break.”  I agree and there is scientific evidence as to why.

As I start to break into my off-season reading list I have started reading The Talent Code for the second time.  The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle is the study of why and how some people develop expertise in a skill and why there are “hot beds” of talent developed in very specific locals.  A unique aspect of the book is that Coyle from a biological standpoint basically defines talent.  With the help of scientists, Coyle explains a recently discovered microscopic substance called Myelin.  Myelin is simply put an insulation that is built and wraps itself around nerve fibers.  Since every movement, feeling or thought is an electrical signal travelling through a chain of neurons, the myelin allows for the movement to happen faster and more accurately.  The more the movement happens, the thicker the myelin becomes allowing the movement to become “learned” or “natural.”

Think about any simple human movement you may have learned.  The first few times you performed the task it may have been clumsy or you may have made mistakes and failed.  With persistence, the movement becomes learned.  It starts with some success that requires conscious thought of how to perform the motion.  Over time and with plenty of repetition, the movement becomes something you without even thinking about.  The repetition of successful performances allows the brain to wrap more layers of myelin around the nerve fibers.  The thicker the myelin, the more ingrained the motion.

So, old habits cannot be broken.  Hopefully!  You see, myelin wraps itself around nerve fiber but it doesn’t unwrap itself except through disease or old age.  So once you have developed the habit of making a bad move in your golf swing, you can’t unlearn it.  Hence, habits are hard to break.  In fact, they are not hard to break, the just plain won’t go away!  So how do we improve?  Since you cannot unlearn a habit, your only chance is to create, nurture and insulate new ones.  Your ability to “come over the top” or to hold the clubface open, whatever it may be is there.  You own that.  To get better, you need to own the desired moves as well.

This replacement is a key aspect of learning that I talk to my students about all the time.  If there is a “bad” move in your swing, there is no benefit to telling yourself not to do it, you must instead do something else.

So habits can’t be broken but they can be replaced.

Next time:  “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  This is not entirely true.  The older you get, the harder longer it will take to “learn” but it can be done.

 

Is It Over or Beginning

In-season and pre-season golf training are not the same!  During the golf season many golfers are apprehensive to make big changes to the mechanics of their swing.  In many cases, you are right in thinking so.  It is not uncommon for a change to take months to become habit.

Think of in-season training as fine-tuning whatever your current skill base is.  On the other hand, pre-season training is the time to improve and broaden your skill base.  How do we do this when the courses are closing and the snow is approaching?  Well I am glad you asked! Establish a goal for next year.  Then create a plan to achieve that goal.  Remember, a Goal without a Plan is only a Wish.

1. Get in “golf shape.”  Many of my students “workout.”  I encourage and am thankful that these students are in good physical condition.  However, a general exercise program will not get your body in the specific condition we need to have in order to posses a powerful, repeatable and injury free swing.  The winter is the time to get started.  In order to assure that you are using your exercise time to best prepare you for better golf, you should start with an assessment.  A simple assessment will allow you, your instructor and your trainer to understand what areas of your body need either more stability or more mobility.
2. Get an MRI of your golf swing.  Similar to the fitness process, this starts with an assessment.  The place to start is with an assessment.  Video is great and I still use it with students daily.  However, 2-Dimension video is limited an unfortunately sometimes vague as a diagnostic tool.  Think of video as an x-ray and 3-D as an MRI.  Both have their place but one sees a lot more.  Capturing data of your golf swing using  3-D technology gives a very precise view of your golf swing.  From this we can pinpoint and prioritize where your problems are coming from.  Furthermore, by using 3-D as a starting point, we can track your progress during the pre-season to assure that you are on track with your improvement plan.
3. Get to work.  Now that you have a goal, a physical assessment and a complete diagnosis of your current swing, it is time to put your plan in place.  Prioritize the steps to reach your goal and start down the road towards improvement.

Most importantly, don’t wait!  I hear far too often that golfers are going to wait until next year, or after the Holidays.  Until you establish your current fitness and mechanics baseline it is impossible to know what the steps of the improvement plan are going to be.  Rather than putting things off, start this month.

Skills Before Style

Why do you take a golf lesson?  Why do you listen to your golf buddy’s advice about what you are doing wrong?  What is your goal in either of these instances?  I would hope the goal in either of these cases is to play better.  It seems like an obvious answer but based on some of the advice I hear given, or tips my students have received from former instructors, I am not convinced that the person giving the advice has your clear cut goal in mind.

All too often, advice is given to a student or a friend based on how a golf swing looks rather than how it performs.  Another way to refer to this scenario is people being coached on their Style rather than their Skills.  The result of this is more confusion, maybe a more traditional looking swing yet the performance is still as poor or worse.

Allow me to give you a few examples:

A friend of mine is an exceptional player.  Right out of college he started making money playing professionally and won a Mini-Tour event just a few weeks after earning his degree.  After a strong six months of playing he started to get into a bit of a slump.  He was by no means playing horrible golf but was just not as sharp as he had been.  He turned to his swing coach for a tune-up and got an overhaul.  Posture changes, swing plane changes to places it had never been etc.  I had a long conversation with this young man about what was going on with his game.  As it turned out, he was doing a lot of good things but had simply lost his normal, expert control of the clubface.  After spending some time working solely on his ability to deliver the clubface as he wanted, he was able to regain his ability to hit solid shots that flew to the target.  He was lacking in a particular skill, he addressed only that skill and was back on the right track.

Another case study is of a high school player that takes a lesson a week from her “teacher.”  They use 3D Motion analysis in all of her lessons and she has memorized many of the particular angles, degrees of rotation, side bend amounts etc. that the 3D machine has listed as optimal. Despite all of this, she has the uncanny ability to deliver a clubface that is consistently 15 to 20 degrees right of her target.  She knows all the numbers but can hit shot after shot a mile off line!

Finally, reflecting back on my visit to the Ryder Cup a few weeks ago, I saw players with some unique swings that obviously have become the world’s elite players.  To name a few, Bubba Watson, Graeme McDowell, Sergio Garcia and of course Jim Furyk all have quite unique swings.  I would venture to say that if as developing players these gentlemen were forced to fit their swings into a look that was more traditional, we might never have heard of them.  Furyk’s posture and backswing are “wrong.”  McDowell’s clubface is “shut”, Garcia’s plane is “way off” and well Bubba’s swing is just……wow.

These players look different but have amazing skill to strike the ball solidly, with expert control of the clubface, not to mention hitting the ball tremendous distances.  They may look different but are some of the best in the world.

In order to be a better golfer, look to develop better skills.  Put that ability in front of what your swing looks like.  The goal should be to consistently hit the ball solidly and have it fly with a consistent shape to the target.  How it “looks” to others should always be secondary to that.

Lifting Your Head? I Don’t Think So

Maintaining Posture in the Forward Swing
(After a discussion with an old friend, I brought this out of the archives)

Lifting Up, Peaking, Not staying “in the shot.”  These are terms I hear students use when they lose posture in the forward swing.  It is not an issue of the player’s head raising during the forward swing, but rather, that the spine has changed angles or straightened during the forward swing.

This motion causes problems for two main reasons.

1. If the spine moves towards vertical, they player is no longer aimed at the ball and will have to manipulate the club to find the ball.
2. In order to avoid topping the ball, the player will instinctively use the hands and arms to force the club down towards the ball.  This action makes the posture worse and topping the ball more of a possibility.  Let me explain.

Back in school we all studied a little bit of physics.  Most of us will remember the term “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”  This is the Third Law of Motion.  How does this impact the golf swing?  If the arms and hands attempt to force the club down towards the ball, all of that energy is being directed towards the ground in quite a vertical path.  Because the Third Law of Motion exists, the same amount of energy will correspondingly be sent from the ground directly at the player’s chest.  This force will move the player to a more upright spine angle.  The worst part of the whole mess is that it makes perfect sense to the player to force the hands down.  With each subsequent topped shot, that instinct grows.

The proper motion in the forward swing is a rotation.  The forward swing must start from the ground and work in sequence up the body.  At the top of the swing a slight shift to the forward leg will establish that leg as the axis for the forward swing.  Once that has occurred the pelvis and mid-section begin to rotate.  This combination of body rotation and arm swing creates centripetal force as well as adequate counter-balance  Not only does this allow a player to stay in balance and posture, this proper sequence will transfer the most energy to the ball resulting in longer shots with less exertion.

Junior In High School? Tick-Tock-Tick-Tock

Are you a Junior in High School this year? Do you have aspirations of playing college golf? If so, the clock is ticking. Next summer is your last chance to shine and attract interest and eventually offers from college programs.
Every August I get some uncomfortable calls from potential new students. Like clock-work, a “Rising Senior” will be looking to come see me to get some magic, play well in his or her last few tournaments and get some last minute looks from college coaches. While I am a good instructor and have assisted many players to develop their games, I am sadly without a magic wand. Developing your game takes time. The time to start is now, not next summer.
Even if by chance there was a magic wand, by the end of summer, most college coaches have already narrowed their search down to a few players as offers will start to be made before Thanksgiving. If you haven’t gotten on their radar by mid-summer, chances are you won’t ever get a look.
Use the remainder of this season to do two things:
1. Get an assessment of your game, your entire game. I put players through a series of tests ranging from Short Game skills, Full Swing mechanics and results as well as a physical screen. From this a blue print creates itself. The testing will point out what skills need to have the most improvement. You should find a Golf Coach that takes this unbiased approach.
2. Get to work. You might be able to squeak by in Biology by cramming a lot of study hours in the few days before an exam but the sport of golf doesn’t work that way. Developing in Golf takes time. There are motor patterns to learn, muscles to stretch and strengthen, some habits to break and some new ones to create.

Here in the Northeast, the autumn is a time to assess, plan and make changes. With winter approaching, many of the short game skills must be improved now. Once the snow flies it is time to work on your full swing and putting stroke. Until then, make sure you are learning and learning to use all the short game shots. (chipping, pitching, bunker shots, etc).

Tick Tock Tick Tock

Email me today! george@connorgolf.com

Don’t Be Redundant

My Father always got mildly upset when someone used a redundant statement.  Things like “an unexpected surprise” or “at this point in time” he felt was wasting words.  You could say “at this point” or “at this time” but there was no reason to say both.

The other day I saw another teaching professional encourage a student to “let the club fall so it comes from inside the target line to the ball.” Redundant!  If the club falls, truly falls, it must be inside the target line.  The only way to get the club to go outside the target line would be to use the upper body to move the club there.  In this case the arms and club would not be falling.

Allowing the arms to fall translates into the arms and the club swinging when the body rotates.  Whatever falls and swings is no longer dependent on the hands to guide the club.  Falling and swinging are controlled by the laws of motion and physics.  Those two are more consistent than you are!