Good.Shepherd
New member
Disclaimer: this will be a longer post and a more full discussion of the topic. I'd handle it more incrementally, but many of these ideas function as a woven cord and do not really function so well in isolation. Please avoid the thread if longer discussions bother you as I have no desire to upset anyone.
I'm not a scratch golfer. In fact, over the years, I've moved around between a bogey and double bogey handicap. I've also had long periods off--years--and have restarted three times. And in those restarts, I've tried almost every different approach you can imagine. I've done the "buy a full bag of new, expensive, custom tailored gear" approach. I've tried the "Get tons of lessons from lots of different coaches" method. I've tried the self-taught, Bubba ball approach.
And I love going to the course as a single and getting paired with random people, because I've seen so many different approaches to the game and so many different attitudes and training methods that it's been a rich 15 years or so of observation.
This last restart for me, however, was the most important. Because of the recession and other events, I was off for about 4 years. It was painful, but I just didn't need all the gear and expense and frustration of previous methods. My passion for the game drew me back in, but this time, I was going to have some rules. I stood up and looked at all the previous approaches I had been talked into taking before and I said, 'This is crazy. There's no need for this. I'm going to make it simple or I'm not going to do it."
Something amazing happened--at least for me. This time in, I had so much less frustration. I shaved 10 shots off my average round in about 10 rounds over the winter (and the associated training time). I'd never progressed that quickly. And I had never progressed with so little anxiety, either.
What changed most was my approach to the game. It was going to be simple and meaningful to me or it just didn't matter any more.
I wanted purity, and I wanted golf. And I didn't want much else.
So over the last year I've kept a notebook I called, in jest, "zen and the art of simple golf". The rest of the post is simply a discussion of the 11 main themes that make up almost all of that notebook in one way or another.
I can do better. I can do better at golf, I can do better at life, I can do better as a younger father, and I can do better as a communicator. But I hope that sharing this will help someone else better consider their point of view of how they approach the game, and I hope that what others teach me in return can help me to do better in exchange.
Zen and the art of simple golf
1. Simplify whenever possible. Don’t add unnecessary complexity to any part of the game. Be ruthless about this.
Just one small example: putting. What an important part of the game, and yet how often do you see people adding layers and layers of complexity to it? If you're almost on tour or getting there, I can understand SOME of the advanced physics courses you may take. But for most people, their game will get better very quickly by simplifying their training, not making it more algorithm based.
Here's what an ex-tour pro once told me as we sat together on an airplane: "Putting is the most important thing to do simply. For me, I spend more time in putting practice than any other part of the game. And I have a two step approach that I begin all over again about every four weeks. First step is that I practice getting the ball to die at the hole. Preferably IN the hole, but AT is fine enough. Period. Doesn't matter if I missed left or right or whatever, it it dies at the hole whatever mistake I made won't get worse on the next shot. I do it on straight greens, insane and hilly greens, everywhere. Once I get that down, I start trying to drive the ball just 8 inches through the hole--that's what gets them in more often. And if I miss a few by 8 inches I'm okay, because I'm 100% confident that I can make any 8 inch put I'm ever faced with. Then after four weeks of this, I start all over again at step one."
2. Swing your clubs, don’t let your clubs swing you. This is much harder than it sounds. I cannot tell you how many guys and girls I see with a club they WANT to hit, or that they’ve lusted over, but to get it into their game they have to disfigure themselves. They hop on one foot, lift their knee at a 47.5% angle at the moment of hinge release, or whatever.
We all see these people when it's not ourselves. They're the ones who grab that new #1 driver out of their bag, twist around like a hindu yogi, aim for the parking lot, hit a shot that curves over the top of the clubhouse and then like a boomerang changes direction and rolls miraculously out to the 50 yard flag on the driving range in front of them and then they look up at you thoughtfully and say, "Hmmm, I think I may have topped it."
Their clubs are swinging them.
3. Intuition matters most. Practice and data and science and all of that is a wonderful tool, but all it really does is to sharpen your intuition. When you practice a putt, you line up a few balls and hit them all in succession. This is great, but it will never happen in a round. In a round, you don’t hit your driver 37 times in a row and tune it up. You hit a driver just after you’ve hit a putter. You then hit an iron and a wedge and then putt again. You’re mixing your perspective, your muscle groups, and your sense of touch--constantly.
So that first putt in your practice, that is your intuition shot. It’s the most important. It’s how you put together all the things you know about that shot, and about putting, before you could apply a more scientific approach with your followup putts. Pay so much attention to that shot every time you take it, no matter how many practice balls you follow it up with, and at every part of your game (full swing, short game, putt).
When you see your intuition sharpening, that is the sign that your game is improving at a deep level. All of us can make a lucky shot or a terrible shot. But our intuition is the part of the game that has nothing to do with luck.
All the great golfers have built their intuition. They’ve spent countless hours training and crunching numbers and data, and that’s important, but then they still cannot fully explain to you how exactly they know, or do, some of the most important things you see them do.
That's what I think the real wisdom was behind the "simple putting" advice--it was about sharpening intuition to get putts to die at the hole. In 10 years you may never play two important puts that have identical statistical profiles--curve, green condition, green speed, grass type, humidity, wind, etc. There's no way to analyze it all, keep a catalogue, and stay sane. And the greats can almost never tell you how, but put them on 50 different greens and 50 different conditions and they can get that ball to die at the cup more often than not. They just can.
4. One example of why intuition is king: rhythm. Many things can cause a slice. Dozens and dozens of tiny things. Too much to ever keep in your mind in the form of a full checklist before a swing. But if you simply work on having great rhythm (often slower than most assume), you can avoid a huge number of those causes without ever having to keep a conscious checklist of them.
Remember also that partial fixes compound against you. This is why we want to keep simple intuition as king. Because we have bad rhythm, our club head comes down wrong and gives us a slice or etc. To prevent this from happening, we roll our wrists over more at address. But that can lead to inconsistent chili dips, so we lean one way or another at address as well, or push our feet into unnatural places. Which stiffens our back, so we need to bend our knees a lot more.
Pretty soon we’ve got a list of 96 disfigurements we’ve made to our swing just so we don’t gift Poseidon another $4 ball every time we try to drive over a small water hazard. And all simply to make up for the fact that we didn’t keep great rhythm back at step 1.
5. Oh, yeah, and HAVE GREAT RHYTHM. It’s one of the most important things you can tell yourself during your training or your round. So many things all converge at this point. If you have great rhythm, as with many things in life, even a larger number of your misses will be playable. You'll also notice more quickly when you are disfiguring something, because rhythm is a gathering point for intuition and feel.
CONTD:
I'm not a scratch golfer. In fact, over the years, I've moved around between a bogey and double bogey handicap. I've also had long periods off--years--and have restarted three times. And in those restarts, I've tried almost every different approach you can imagine. I've done the "buy a full bag of new, expensive, custom tailored gear" approach. I've tried the "Get tons of lessons from lots of different coaches" method. I've tried the self-taught, Bubba ball approach.
And I love going to the course as a single and getting paired with random people, because I've seen so many different approaches to the game and so many different attitudes and training methods that it's been a rich 15 years or so of observation.
This last restart for me, however, was the most important. Because of the recession and other events, I was off for about 4 years. It was painful, but I just didn't need all the gear and expense and frustration of previous methods. My passion for the game drew me back in, but this time, I was going to have some rules. I stood up and looked at all the previous approaches I had been talked into taking before and I said, 'This is crazy. There's no need for this. I'm going to make it simple or I'm not going to do it."
Something amazing happened--at least for me. This time in, I had so much less frustration. I shaved 10 shots off my average round in about 10 rounds over the winter (and the associated training time). I'd never progressed that quickly. And I had never progressed with so little anxiety, either.
What changed most was my approach to the game. It was going to be simple and meaningful to me or it just didn't matter any more.
I wanted purity, and I wanted golf. And I didn't want much else.
So over the last year I've kept a notebook I called, in jest, "zen and the art of simple golf". The rest of the post is simply a discussion of the 11 main themes that make up almost all of that notebook in one way or another.
I can do better. I can do better at golf, I can do better at life, I can do better as a younger father, and I can do better as a communicator. But I hope that sharing this will help someone else better consider their point of view of how they approach the game, and I hope that what others teach me in return can help me to do better in exchange.
Zen and the art of simple golf
1. Simplify whenever possible. Don’t add unnecessary complexity to any part of the game. Be ruthless about this.
Just one small example: putting. What an important part of the game, and yet how often do you see people adding layers and layers of complexity to it? If you're almost on tour or getting there, I can understand SOME of the advanced physics courses you may take. But for most people, their game will get better very quickly by simplifying their training, not making it more algorithm based.
Here's what an ex-tour pro once told me as we sat together on an airplane: "Putting is the most important thing to do simply. For me, I spend more time in putting practice than any other part of the game. And I have a two step approach that I begin all over again about every four weeks. First step is that I practice getting the ball to die at the hole. Preferably IN the hole, but AT is fine enough. Period. Doesn't matter if I missed left or right or whatever, it it dies at the hole whatever mistake I made won't get worse on the next shot. I do it on straight greens, insane and hilly greens, everywhere. Once I get that down, I start trying to drive the ball just 8 inches through the hole--that's what gets them in more often. And if I miss a few by 8 inches I'm okay, because I'm 100% confident that I can make any 8 inch put I'm ever faced with. Then after four weeks of this, I start all over again at step one."
2. Swing your clubs, don’t let your clubs swing you. This is much harder than it sounds. I cannot tell you how many guys and girls I see with a club they WANT to hit, or that they’ve lusted over, but to get it into their game they have to disfigure themselves. They hop on one foot, lift their knee at a 47.5% angle at the moment of hinge release, or whatever.
We all see these people when it's not ourselves. They're the ones who grab that new #1 driver out of their bag, twist around like a hindu yogi, aim for the parking lot, hit a shot that curves over the top of the clubhouse and then like a boomerang changes direction and rolls miraculously out to the 50 yard flag on the driving range in front of them and then they look up at you thoughtfully and say, "Hmmm, I think I may have topped it."
Their clubs are swinging them.
3. Intuition matters most. Practice and data and science and all of that is a wonderful tool, but all it really does is to sharpen your intuition. When you practice a putt, you line up a few balls and hit them all in succession. This is great, but it will never happen in a round. In a round, you don’t hit your driver 37 times in a row and tune it up. You hit a driver just after you’ve hit a putter. You then hit an iron and a wedge and then putt again. You’re mixing your perspective, your muscle groups, and your sense of touch--constantly.
So that first putt in your practice, that is your intuition shot. It’s the most important. It’s how you put together all the things you know about that shot, and about putting, before you could apply a more scientific approach with your followup putts. Pay so much attention to that shot every time you take it, no matter how many practice balls you follow it up with, and at every part of your game (full swing, short game, putt).
When you see your intuition sharpening, that is the sign that your game is improving at a deep level. All of us can make a lucky shot or a terrible shot. But our intuition is the part of the game that has nothing to do with luck.
All the great golfers have built their intuition. They’ve spent countless hours training and crunching numbers and data, and that’s important, but then they still cannot fully explain to you how exactly they know, or do, some of the most important things you see them do.
That's what I think the real wisdom was behind the "simple putting" advice--it was about sharpening intuition to get putts to die at the hole. In 10 years you may never play two important puts that have identical statistical profiles--curve, green condition, green speed, grass type, humidity, wind, etc. There's no way to analyze it all, keep a catalogue, and stay sane. And the greats can almost never tell you how, but put them on 50 different greens and 50 different conditions and they can get that ball to die at the cup more often than not. They just can.
4. One example of why intuition is king: rhythm. Many things can cause a slice. Dozens and dozens of tiny things. Too much to ever keep in your mind in the form of a full checklist before a swing. But if you simply work on having great rhythm (often slower than most assume), you can avoid a huge number of those causes without ever having to keep a conscious checklist of them.
Remember also that partial fixes compound against you. This is why we want to keep simple intuition as king. Because we have bad rhythm, our club head comes down wrong and gives us a slice or etc. To prevent this from happening, we roll our wrists over more at address. But that can lead to inconsistent chili dips, so we lean one way or another at address as well, or push our feet into unnatural places. Which stiffens our back, so we need to bend our knees a lot more.
Pretty soon we’ve got a list of 96 disfigurements we’ve made to our swing just so we don’t gift Poseidon another $4 ball every time we try to drive over a small water hazard. And all simply to make up for the fact that we didn’t keep great rhythm back at step 1.
5. Oh, yeah, and HAVE GREAT RHYTHM. It’s one of the most important things you can tell yourself during your training or your round. So many things all converge at this point. If you have great rhythm, as with many things in life, even a larger number of your misses will be playable. You'll also notice more quickly when you are disfiguring something, because rhythm is a gathering point for intuition and feel.
CONTD:
