Is your warm-up a coffee and a doughnut?

Ever go to a PGA tournament and watch the best players in the world warm-up?  I will park myself at the range for hours and marvel at the machine-like ball striking consistency of a Vijay Singh

Vijay warming up

or the effortless rhythm of a Fred Couples.  Vijay typically warms up with alignment sticks laid out all over the ground, umbrellas stuck in the turf to guide his swing plane, head covers under his armpits, and training aids sprinkled around his station at the ready.  You wonder how the guy gets ready to play with all the mechanical input.  We weekend players love to emulate our heroes on tour but you need to be very careful when it comes to copying their warm-ups.  These guys typically get to the course two hours before their round and condition their bodies and every aspect of their game before play.  We don’t have that luxury.  Usually we grab a coffee and a doughnut and do nothing, or throw on our shoes in the parking lot and rush to the first tee, or buy a bucket of range balls, pound 30 drivers and roll a few putts before heading out.  I’ve tried ’em all and none of them work.

Last year I thought I had this whipped when I tried a new warm-up routine and followed it up with a great round, but soon discovered the routine wasn’t extensible enough to support different practice facilities and different amounts of time.  I can’t count the number of times that I’ve either played with no warm-up or tried to warm-up sensibly and still stumbled out of the blocks.  How frustrating is it when you always need to play three holes to fully engage the golf circuits?

In 2013 I’m determined to find the perfect warm-up routine that will:

1)  put me in the best frame of mind

2)  put me in the best physical condition

3)  have me looking good doing it (got to avoid the Miguel Angel Jimenez  10-200 scenario.)

So coming soon are two warm-up routines constructed from a combination of exercises out of my workout regimen, and from trial and error at the golf course.  Look for the:

A)  Economy warm-up (10 minutes)

B)  Business Class warm-up (30-60 minutes)

Send me your ideas to help move this along and I’ll try the good ones.  Thanks!

What are the Do’s and Don’ts of golf practice?

Lately, I’ve been getting quite a few inquiries on what to do and not do while practicing golf.  Here we go:

• Do find a PGA professional for lessons.  Make sure you trust him/her and that their teaching style melds with the way you learn.
• Do work on your short game.    Dedicate 75% of your practice time to see the quickest improvement.
• Do simulate game conditions.  This will help you transition your practice to the course.  
• Do develop a pre-shot routine for every club in the bag and repeat it for each practice shot you hit.
• Do use alignment sticks as an aid for correct setup and for dialing your mind into the target on short game shots (and putts).
• Do film your swing and review it regularly.  What you think you are doing often is not what you are doing.
• Don’t become a range robot and rake ball after ball into the same position shooting at the same target.  
• Don’t confuse practice with warm-up before a round.  Never work on swing mechanics right before you play; it will screw your head up on the course.  Just get loose and relax.
• Don’t practice extraordinarily long putts.  You want to see your lags get close and expunge any visions of three-putting.  30-40 footers should be the max.
• Don’t accept swing instruction from well-meaning friends.  Amateurs teach amateurs to play like amateurs.  (See #1 Do above.)
• Don’t work on more than one mechanical change at a time.  You’ll become a swing pretzel if you do.

There you have them, now Do get to work.  Good luck!

2013 Top Five Lists!

Here we go with my top five’s for 2013.  What are yours?

Top Five Players of All Time:

1. Jack Nicklaus
2. Tiger Woods
3. Byron Nelson
4. Ben Hogan
5. Sam Snead

Top Five Tournaments to watch:

1. The Ryder Cup
2. The Masters
3. The U.S. Open
4. THE PLAYERS Championship
5. The Open Championship

Five most popular players of all time:

1. Arnold Palmer
2. Tiger Woods
3. Jack Nicklaus
4. Fred Couples
5. Phil Mickelson

Five least popular players of all time:

1. Colin Montgomerie
2. Tiger Woods
3. Vijay Singh
4. Tom Weiskopf
5. Scott Hoch

Five greatest golf courses in the world:

1. Augusta National
2. Old Course St. Andrews
3. Pebble Beach
4. Oakmont
5. Pine Valley

Top five legendary tempers:

1. Tommy Bolt
2. Tom Weiskopf
3. Steve Pate
4. Pat Perez
5. Woody Austin

Five purest swings to watch:

1. Ben Hogan
2. Ernie Els
3. Fred Couples
4. Rory McIlroy
5. Sam Snead

Five ugliest swings to watch (but not emulate):

1. Jim Thorpe
2. Jim Furyk
3. Moe Norman
4. Calvin Peete
5. John Daly

Honorable mention:  Charles Barkley

There you have them.  What have I missed if anything?  Please weigh in!

One Bourbon, One Shot, One Beer in 2013?

One GIR, one chip, and one less putt per round.  Is that the recipe for improvement in my golf game this year?  I must be suffering from cabin fever or the general malaise of winter, but this new mantra was starting to click in my brain to the tune to the old Thorogood rendition.

George Thorogood

After reviewing my performance stats for the past few years, it would seem that making just minor improvements in these key areas would allow me to shave two strokes off my scoring average, which would be huge.  But it’s been incredibly tough to make any measurable improvement and my propensity to plateau has got me concerned.  Two things seem constant:  I have a continual desire to make significant changes in different areas of my game and the work I put in hardly yields any downstream positive effects.  Does this happen to you as well?

Then I read the “3 – 8 – 13” theory in a recent golf publication and decided to put it to the test.  The assumption:  If you hit 3 greens, you should break 90.  Hit 8 and you’ll crack 80.  Hit 13 and you break 70.  Since I averaged 8.74 GIR last year and 78.85 strokes per round, I figured the correlation was close and set out to measure it.  I had 23 rounds with 8 or more GIR and broke 80 19 times; pretty darned accurate.  In the last three years, I hit or exceeded 13 GIRs 11 times and shot 70 once and broke it twice.  However, my worst score of those 11 rounds was 76, so that proved there is a huge correlation between GIR and score.  Funny how it keeps coming back to ball striking.  So what now?

From various lessons and film analysis, I know my ball striking inconsistency stems from a loss of spine angle on the downswing and a bit of an early release.  It’s hard to work on swing in the winter, so I’ve been focusing on eliminating bad habits in my backswing and putting myself in the best positions possible.  This work is possible with just a mirror and a club in your basement, and as I work the various positions, the guy looking back in the mirror seems to be in pretty good shape but what’s going to happen with that first live contact in a couple of weeks?  Also, in one of those sub 70 rounds, I noted my playing strategy was to shoot for the center of every green on any iron shot longer than a pitching wedge; interesting.  Perhaps some conservative course management would be in order as well.

Anyone with some good drills for maintaining spine angle, increasing lag on the downswing, and overall course management improvement tips, please send them along.  Thanks!