Are You Proactive or Reactive?

photo from unwisdom.org

Let’s take the average golfer.  He goes out once per week and shoots around a 90, drinks a couple beers with his buddies and heads home.  When the thought of game improvement appears, he drives down to the nearest Dicks and buys the latest $400 driver.  He takes his new purchase to the driving range and bangs himself into a frothy lather with a large bucket.  Next weekend, he goes out and shoots another 90.  Is this you?  Not sure what you call it but it’s neither proactive nor reactive improvement.

Your golf personality determines how you prepare yourself for success on the golf course.  You are either a proactive or a reactive improver.  Proactive improvement is when you practice what you need to get better.  You may already do it well, don’t necessarily enjoy it, but do it cause it’s good for you, like eating your vegetables.  Reactive improvement is addressing weaknesses observed during rounds and trying to correct them.  These can be physical or mental mistakes, with the former being more difficult to fix.  Good players use a mix of proactive and reactive practice to improve.  The balance just teeters towards one or the other.

I’m not a great player but consider myself a dedicated player and do both.  Over the course of a season, my work includes reactive practice in the form of lessons with my professional.  You could argue that this is proactive practice, but I go to him with a desire to fix my swing or show me how to execute shots around the green that I am struggling with or don’t know how to hit.  Generally, this is the most rewarding type of practice because I feel like I learn something.  Occasionally, the “ah ha” moment kicks in, and I experience a feeling of euphoria as the wave of super optimism washes over me.  I love leaving the golf course with this feeling.  A more common form of reactive practice is hitting balls with a specific technique change.  When I miss hit a couple of wedges during a round, I’ll go to the range to make corrections.  Incidentally, this is my most frustrating type of bad shot.  Chunking or blading a wedge from the middle of the fairway in prime A position sucks.  What’s yours?

My proactive practice is more common.  It can take the form of mechanical work like hitting sets of 50 three-foot putts or short game work to simulate game conditions.  Tom Kite used to work in a field and bang wedges for hours.  Yeah that must have been boring, but he was a damn good wedge player when it counted.  He ground in that habit with proactive practice.  When I haven’t played for a while, and I have a game the next day, I’ll inevitably head to my practice green for 18 holes of up-and-down.  Often, I’ll perform poorly because of rust, but it’s important to play every shot out.  This proactive practice may not be fun, but it ingrains the great habit of toughness and the ability to manage through adversity.  Getting a little angry with yourself is not the worse thing because it makes it real.  Proactive practice is fine tuning mental and physical aspects that you do well.  Like Tom Kite in the field, it’s time well spent.

I’m generally a stickler for planning and preparation, and will engage in a lot of proactive practice.  I find practicing my strengths are more beneficial than always attacking a weakness.  For example, I don’t have much problem with short bunker shots, but long ones kill me.  I don’t practice them and try to avoid them on the golf course.  It’s as simple as not hitting three wood into par-5s with greenside bunkers and back pin placements.  With good course management, you can play to your strengths and away from your weaknesses.

Whether you are proactive or reactive, you need both.  Remember to mix them up, work in some golf stretches and exercises, and keep your practice fresh.  Are you proactive or reactive???

Play well!

 

 

 

 

 

Hidden Gem Found in Myrtle Beach!

Just returned from a week on the Grand Strand with my wife.  This was a fabulous beach vacation and not a golf getaway, but the clubs are an essential accoutrement for any journey to South Carolina, and mine were in the SUV.  We arrived to some beautiful weather on Saturday, September 12 and after four straight days planted in my beach chair, I was ready for some action.  On Wednesday, I headed over to Barefoot for a couple hours of practice and was feeling pretty good about my game.

Squall in Hurricane Sally

Hurricane Sally had come ashore in Alabama and was supposed to visit the area on Thursday so I set out to find a tee time for Friday.  My only criteria; the course couldn’t be too far from our condo in North Myrtle Beach, and I didn’t want to spend over $100.  So, I booked a 1:00 pm time at Myrtle Beach National – Kings North.   This is an Arnold Palmer design and is one of my favorite tracks.  The greens fee was $50 which is about the best value you’re going to find for a course of this caliber.

As scheduled, Sally ripped through the area on Thursday afternoon/evening and produced an awesome lightning show and tons of rain.  On Friday, I drove to the course and found one of the nines on Kings North was under water and closed.  They offered to let me play the open nine twice or rebook on South Creek.  MBN has 54 holes and I had played Kings North about five times.  I had replayed once on the  West course and thought it rather ho-hum so I agreed to try South Creek.  What a delight!

South Creek, photo from GolfAdvisor

With all the rain, we were playing cart path only.  This was a day where wedge shots were exploding foot long divots and caking your legs with mud.  But I loved the track.  South Creek plays about 6,400 from the blues but I moved up a set on the front nine because it was so wet.  You need to drive it straight out here, and I did, but couldn’t get anything going with my irons or putter and shot a four-over 40.  I was by myself and following a twosome and raced around the front in 1.5 hours.  When I got to the 10^th tee, I found the last of three threesomes the pro shop had sent out to start on the back.  A little perturbed, I asked the starter what he recommend I do and he told me to skip 10 and 11 and start my back nine on 12.  I rolled up to the tee and joined the twosome that had also received the same instructions.

These two were a father and son combination, with the boy playing a practice round for a 16-18 year-old junior tournament scheduled for South Creek over the next two days.  Dad was playing the whites, but the son was playing the blues, and clearly had a lot of game, so I backed up and played the blues with him.  This kid was busting it past me but for some reason, joining him elevated my concentration level and I carded an even par 36 on the back.  What a weird phenomenon: some kind of focus switch engaged in my mind as I played with the better player.  It reminded me a similar situation a couple years back when I was out for a round on my local muni and a couple young pros from the course joined me on the first hole.  They were pounding it 50 yards past me off the tee, but that same switch went off and I elevated my concentration and played great.  I wonder what causes this?  Has this ever happened to you?

So, I finished my round playing 10 and 11 and after ending with a birdie, realized how much fun I just had.  This was primarily because I was driving the ball so well, but I loved the golf course.  I also realized how straight you have to be to score, and how penal it could get.  The greens fee was $43 and I was tickled pink with the great value.  I will definitely be back to play South Creek at the next opportunity.  You should consider adding this course to your play list next time down.

Play well!

Sunrise at North Myrtle Beach

Playing Great Golf on a Time Budget!

On #13 tee at Arthur Hills – Boyne, MI

Is work/life getting in the way of your golf?  How do you play your best if you can’t tee it up four times a week or visit the driving range on a daily basis?  Time is a precious commodity and it depends on how you use your available hours, but you can shoot low scores even on a constrained schedule.  Here’s how.

Use the correct combination of play and practice.  My preference is for more play than practice, but first you must measure how much you do of both.  Today is Sept 8 or day #253 in the year.  I’ve played 21 full rounds and practiced 41 times.  My 62 days of golf divided by 253 indicate I have my hands on the clubs only one out of every four days.   I’d consider myself a dedicated player but not a frequent player, with a 1:4 ratio.  What is your ratio?  If you can get your hands on your clubs every other day, your ratio is solid.  You need both play and practice, but given a short supply of time, favor play.

Meaningful practice is essential and doesn’t require the same time commitment as play, which is why my practice days are double my play days.  In season, I’ll generally practice twice per week and play once.  Off season, I’ll practice more and play less.  A general rule about practice:  The closer you are to playing a round, the more you should practice your mental game.   This is the best way to ease the transition from practice to play.  Have you ever overheard players out on the course saying, “I don’t understand why I’m playing so bad; I was hitting it great on the range.”  That’s because they haven’t practiced correctly by focusing on their mental game.

The key to mental practice is to mirror game conditions.  Many coaches in other sports utilize this technique.  Football teams pump crowd noise into practice.  Teams also script their first 15-20 plays and rehearse that script over and over in preparation to implement in games.  I try to script my golf practice by playing up-and-down in the short game area and working with only one ball.  I’m getting my mind ready for the pressure of difficult green-side shots.  Sometimes I’ll putt 9 or 18 holes alone or against a friend, varying the length of the holes.  Always play a match with a goal.  The key is to build pressure on yourself.  On the driving range, don’t rake ball after ball with the same club.  Vary your clubs from shot to shot.  Play a simulated round at your favorite course.  All these activities insert small doses of pressure and condition your brain into play mode.  Finally, when warming up before a round, do not work on your swing.  Just get loose.  Reserve the last half dozen balls and hit shots to simulate the first three holes of the course you are about to play.  This will give you the best chance of getting off to a great start.

Mechanical practice is necessary when trying to make swing changes and should not be attempted too close to a scheduled round.  Golf is a difficult game.  Playing golf swing when you’re trying to focus on scoring just makes it harder.  A big challenge amateurs face is playing a round immediately after a swing lesson because the plethora of swing thoughts can quickly get your mind off the business of scoring.  Has this ever happened to you?  Tour pros are often seen working with their swing coaches at a tournament site and are simply good enough to execute mechanical changes into their game immediately.  Forget them.  Sometimes you cannot avoid playing right after a lesson.  In this case, work with your pro to distill the lesson content into at most two swing thoughts.  And try to keep them as simple as possible for easy replication on the course.

One final though.  Lately, I’ve been working the Dead Drill into my Mon-Wed-Fri gym workouts and found this is a great way to build good mechanical habits without focusing on swing changes.  A couple weeks ago, right after introducing, I enjoyed a great ball striking round just thinking about the movements of the drill, and they’re really quite simple.  Give it a try and play well!