What are you thinking about when swinging the club? This is called your locus (location) of attention. You may be thinking about your hands, your shoulder turn, the clubface or the target. Research suggests that what you are thinking about affects your performance. Your focus can be in one place and only one place. Have you ever been talking with someone on the telephone then somebody walks in the room. You become visually distracted and for a moment, you don’t hear the person on the phone. This is an example of how your focus can only be in one place. Regarding golf, your focus can be internal, external or external result. When you have an internal focus, you are focusing on a body part. You might be thinking about turning your hands through impact, making a bigger shoulder turn or starting the downswing with your hips. Having an internal focus, focusing on a body part, is pretty common with golfers. When I ask students what they are thinking about, most often, the focus is internal. An internal focus may...

You may have heard the quote “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”. Your journey to better golf begins here. The first step is understanding where your game is now and where you would like to see it go. You would like to know the end result, your destination. If you were going to take a road trip, a vacation, you wouldn’t likely just get in the car and drive without having some idea as to where you want to end up. When planning our trip, we would choose where we want to end up before doing anything else. We would then determine the best route whether by car, train or plane. Our trip would have a timeline and would be planned out in detail. I see many golfers practicing without knowing where they are going, without a plan. They head to the practice tee and just hit ball after ball with no plan or often without even hitting to a target. This form of practice may be good exercise but it doesn’t really lead to better golf. Zig Ziglar said “If you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.” I want you...

Playing good golf requires you to be good in three areas, ball control, course management and self control. A valuable tool in the self control category is having a post-shot routine. Bob Rotella wrote a book called Golf is Not a Game of Perfect. Golf is definitely not a game of perfect, for anyone. Even the best players in the world hit poor shots. How you deal with and react to those shots is critical to your success. Ben Hogan used to say that during a round of golf, he would hit four to five good shots. If you went to any tour event and talked with any player after they were done with their round, they would probably tell you that they hit four to five good shots. Now it is a fact that you and I might take some of their “not so good” shots but it is relative. The same will happen to you in any round. You will hit a handful of good shots and will likely hit four to five bad shots. The remainder will be somewhere between the very good and the poor. Emotional events and responses are stored in our long term memory. Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001? Most do. Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2006? Probably not. The events of September 11, 2001 created an emotional response in all of us and that memory is easily recalled. A key to developing confidence and performing better when playing golf is to attach emotional responses to the good shots and know how to handle the inevitable poor shots that will happen in every round. We want to store the good shots in our long term memory rather than the poor shots....

The number one skill in putting is distance control. The ability to hit the ball the correct speed and distance helps you to eliminate 3-putts and make more mid-range putts. I think the second most important part of putting is the four foot putt. According to Mark Broadie in Every Shot Counts, the most important putt distance for amateur golfers is four feet. This distance accounts for 13% of the total strokes lost against pro golfers. The range from three to seven feet accounts for 46% of the total strokes lost. Developing your skill in the three to seven foot range will help you to save strokes and reduce the number of 3-putts. The main key to making more putts in the three to seven foot range is solid contact. Hitting the ball in the center of the face will encourage consistent speed and direction. Off-center hits will vary the speed and the starting line. To work on hitting the ball in the center of the face more often, you need feedback. Find the sweet spot on your putter face and then wrap two rubber...

You’ve heard the saying “Drive for show and putt for dough.” Putting is the most important part of golf, or is it? Putting accounts for anywhere from 30% to almost 50% of a golfers score so it must be important. According to Mark Broadie in his book Every Shot Counts, PGA Tour players average 29 putts per round with an average score of 71 so putts represent 40% of a tour player’s score. On average 9 of the 29 putts occur within 2 ½ feet (where they rarely miss), so putts outside of 2 ½ feet represent 30% of their strokes. Putts make up 30% of a high-handicap golfer’s shots and only about 20% if you exclude putts inside 2 ½ feet. So yes, putting is important but it is just part of the picture. According to Mark Broadie, “85% of the difference in scores between 80- and 100-golfers comes from skill differences in off-green shots.” Working to improve your full swing will help you to eliminate penalty strokes, keep the ball in play more often and hit more greens which will ultimately lower your score but putting...

The ultimate goal when practicing is to improve your performance when playing and competing. How can you practice to ensure that it will improve performance? The answer is in the way you practice. How you perform later is more important than how you perform when practicing. You want to use methods that will improve retention and improve performance. Technique is important in golf as it is in other sports. If you are a 10 handicap, you can work to improve your mental game or course management but without improving your technique, your improvement may be limited. Improving your technique is not as simple as hitting several 7-irons in a row in a practice session or two. Changing a part of your golf swing or putting stroke takes time, effort and repetition before you have created a new habit that works when playing on the course and when performing. Let’s look at two different types of practice: block and random. Block practice is doing the same thing over and over, like hitting a 7-iron to the same target several...