You Can benefit from hard practice

If you can break 90 with regularity, you are an advanced player.  One of the hardest things advanced players struggle with is transitioning from practice to play.  If you can steel yourself during preparation the game will come so much easier to you.   If you are in this group, your fundamentals are sound and you have good control of your golf ball around the green.  Follow these practice techniques and you will find transitioning to play is much easier.  Those who don’t usually break 90 should focus their practice on mechanics and not attempt these techniques until achieving a higher level of consistency.  The last thing we want to do is try something that will breed uncertainty and frustration. 

As an advanced player you can pitch, chip, hit bunker shots, and putt with reasonably solid technique.  You’ll need them all in this exercise.  To start, find a short game practice area that allows you to land shots on a green and putt.  Ideally, your practice green has some slope around the edges or is built on a small hill.  My home course has a putting green and chipping/pitching green, but you cannot putt on the chipping green so, I’ve located an alternate facility that satisfies the requirement.  For those in Montgomery County, MD, the venue is Poolesville Golf Course.

This session should take about an hour.  First, warm up your short game.  Take some pitches, chips, and putts from various distances.  Use a variety of clubs.  Next grab two mobile targets.  A lot of courses are using the practice pins that stick in the ground and can be moved.  These are best.  If not available, use two colored golf balls.  Next, place these targets at the top and bottom of sloped areas on the green, so getting a short shot close to either will be extremely difficult and there are no straight putts in close unless you manage to be directly above or below the targets.  The faster the surface the better.  For a visual, think of #15 green at Augusta National at The Masters.  The more difficult the better.

Green Markers; photo courtesy of paraide.com

The drill:

Now play 18 holes of up-and-down.  Throw a golf ball into a greenside lie and don’t improve the lie.  Hit the appropriate short shot to the chosen target and putt your approach until holed.  Use a variety of uphill, downhill, long and short-sided situations.  If you have an old scorecard it often helps to record your score on each hole.  Par is two strokes for each hole.  You will find even your good short shots end up considerably outside of gimme range.  As a reference point, when I play this game at my local muni with flat lies, I usually shoot 42-44 or between 6 and 8-over par for 18 holes.  Today’s session on my difficult setup left me at 50 strokes or 14-over par and I felt I played well. 

Why involve yourself in this masochistic activity?  You’ll find the difficult shots will force creativity into your mind.  It will help you focus on your landing point, the trajectory, spin, and club selection.  Everything but mechanics!  Training your mind to “paint a picture” of the shot is the key to becoming a good feel player around the greens.  This drill is more like playing real golf than dumping a bag shag of 50 balls and chipping each with the same club to a flat target. 

Let’s level set expectations:  You may get frustrated, you may get a little angry, but you will get very satisfied when you hit a great shot, and as you transition to the real course, you’ll notice very few short shots are as challenging at the drill.  Making practice harder than the real game is the secret sauce.  Give this drill a try, then play a real round of golf the next day and let me know how you made out.

Play well!      

Inside The Mind Of A Chip Yipper

It was November 11, 2014.  I had just hit 10 greens and shot a 14-over 86 at Bear Trap Dunes in Ocean View, DE.  This was the round where I hit rock bottom with the chip yips.  There is nothing worse than having a decent ball striking day only to know that when you miss an approach shot you have no chance because you’re going to blade a chip over the green or come up way short.  You are paralyzed with fear and indecision and cannot execute.  This is what it’s like to experience the chip yips.

It was clear the yips were a mental problem.  I had been plagued for about five years but earlier in my career had no problem executing a variety of shots around the green from a technique standpoint.  I can’t point to a single event where my chipping fell apart, it just did.  The primary symptom was fear of running the ball past the hole and as a result, leaving my shots way short.  A secondary symptom was blading the ball with a sand wedge, usually off of a good lie.  This happened with small straight forward shots and became worse the farther away I moved from the hole.  A 20-30 yard pitch with a sand wedge became darn near impossible, however when I moved back out to 50 yards, I had no problem because that was an automatic half swing with a lob wedge.  Also, bunker shots were never a problem.  That day at Bear Trap Dunes, I was firing blade runners everywhere and totally embarrassing myself.

The solve:  Some of these techniques may seem counter intuitive and simply worked for me.  They may not work for you, so don’t necessarily try them for yourself or think that they constitute an avocation on my part of a certain method.  They simply worked.

The first thing I tried to fix was the bladed shot because that was a total loss of control.  I know my left arm softens at the elbow in my full swing and I suspected that might be happening with chips, which in turn would shorten my swing radius.  I simply focused on keeping my left elbow firm on all short swings and presto, no more bladed shots.

The more difficult issue was the fear of going long.  In the past, I had tried hitting to a spot and letting the ball run out, or feeling the distance to the hole with my practice swing but neither worked.  Everything still came up short.  If I accidentally got one to the hole, the immediate feedback upon hitting the shot was that I hit it way too hard.  The only way I could save par was by sinking a 10 or 15 foot putt.  But then I remembered seeing a video of Seve Ballesteros rehearsing chip shots with his right hand (dominant hand).  Then I recalled reading Greg Norman’s Shark Attack where he advocated throwing balls with your dominant hand at the hole for practice to gain a feel for short game.  I decided I was going to try to use my dominant hand (right) to hit my short shots because I’d always focused on making a turn with my torso and keeping my hands out of the shot.  It was a mechanical move and not feel based.  In short, I needed more art and less science.    So I started with a change in my pre-shot routine.  I stopped approaching the shot from behind, like a full swing, and started to stand astride the shot and rehearsed it until it felt good.  Then I hit the shot without delay.  The mechanical change I made was on the back swing, to feel like I was taking the club back with my left hand (with my elbow still firm), and then on the downswing controlling the force of the swing with my right hand.  When I did this, all of a sudden, I started swinging more aggressively, hitting the shot a little harder, and generating more backspin.  Now, my only thought is to “take it back with the left hand, hit it with the right.”  When I first tried this, I felt like I would chunk everything, but that never happened.  On my recent trip I started to pull my chips slightly which was probably due to the over-active right hand.  I added a little bit of pivot to the downswing and that was corrected because the chip is still a mini swing that requires timing and needs to be initiated with a hip turn.

After 18 rounds, I’m trusting this pretty well.  Now when I miss a chip or pitch, it inevitably goes long, and I’m fine with that because I can see the ball break around the hole and I know it’s had a chance to go in.  On occasion, I’ll still feel a little apprehension about going long so I make sure to take enough practice swings feeling my right hand initiate the downswing and then I hit the shot quickly.  In all my 2016 rounds, I can honestly say I’ve only yipped two or three chips, and actually seen a few more than that go in.

Finally, regarding club selection, I am in the camp of matching the club to the shot rather than being able to execute a ton of different shots with one club because I don’t play or practice enough to do that.  For chips, I like the sand wedge, pitching wedge, and on long chip and runs, the 8-iron.  For green side pitches, I favor the lob wedge or sand wedge.

So that’s the story of recovering from the chip yips.  They are horrible and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone.  Hope my luck holds out and that you never see them.

Play well!

Yesterday I Chipped In!

In the long road back from the chip yips, I hit an important milestone yesterday; I chipped in.  I’m not sure if the chip yips afflict you at 50, but I’ve been struggling around the green since I turned 51 in 2012, and yesterday’s lob wedge from a gnarly lie came as a huge relief.  It’s been so long since I chipped in (years) I can’t remember the last time.  In fact, it’s felt like years since I hit a good chip.

Late in 2015, I had been contemplating taking short game lessons but then during a December practice session, I made a mental change to my pre-shot routine and a technique change.  The mechanics are weird and a little unconventional, but were born from a tip I read by Seve Ballesteros on controlling the shots with your right hand.  I do believe the closer you get to the green, the more individualized your game can become, as long as you get the ball in the hole.  So I will continue with this method and hopefully eradicate whatever had infected my short game.

Can I pronounce myself cured?  Heck no, but I can feel the confidence returning.  Yesterday, we played at Little Bennett.  The greens were fast and the pins placed in diabolical positions with several bordering on unfair.  Getting close to the hole with any club, including the putter was extremely difficult.  In short, this was an awesome test for short game.  Because of the pin placements, up-and-down stats were not a true reflection of performance so I rated my performance on chips/pitches that I hit like I wanted to.  I was 5 for 9, but more importantly, I was able to rehearse the shots and execute without angst or feeling defensive.

It’s a rare day that you shoot a bad score and come away from the golf course feeling inspired.  The rebuild is starting to work!

Play well and Happy Easter to all!

Short Game Shore Up

Is any part of your golf game creating a blocker for full enjoyment?  The short game has been my nemesis for years; so much to the point that it was totally inside my head and rendering me incompetent when I got within 30 yards of a putting green.  Up until today, I knew my problem was mental.  The main symptom was coming up short with chips and pitches.  For some reason, I could not get the ball to the hole and my continual failures were beginning to affect other areas of my game.  These were not exclusively in-game failures, as I experienced the symptoms during practice too.  I knew it was not technique related because I had the shots, I just could not execute.  Has this ever happened to you?

My method of playing and practicing short game has evolved over the years in an effort to combat the failures.  I used to practice with a bag shag and drop about 60 balls in a spot and hit different shots with the same club over and over in an attempt to perfect technique.  This single club method is advocated by some short game gurus most notably Stan Utley, in The Art of the Short Game.   After reading his book, I used to try and feel the distance to the hole with a practice swing but would come up short on the shot.  Then I tried chipping to an intermediate landing spot, but would miss my spot short.  Recently, I tried to adjust by making a concerted effort to play approach shots to the correct side of the hole and leave myself an uphill chip or pitch, and this strategy worked well from a game management perspective, except I couldn’t even execute the simplest uphill chip and get the ball to the hole.  What to do?

I have been rightly accused in the past of over-tinkering with parts of my game, but when a subsystem was as broken as my short game, I felt justified in trashing the whole approach and starting fresh.  First I changed where I practiced.  I got away from one local muni where I had practiced for years.  It was often too crowded and was utilized by beginner clinics and folks with poor practice etiquette.  I moved to a course that was harder and was patronized by higher caliber players.  This was important because I could disassociate all ties to my previous short game, get some more space to work, and practice uninterrupted.

Next, I got away from the Utley methodology and started altering clubs on every shot.  For example, I took three balls and hit for the same flag with a sand wedge, pitching wedge, and 7-iron.  I would try to feel the distance to the hole with each club and not hit towards a landing spot.  I immediately noticed an improvement in concentration and confidence and view this as a critical breakthrough.  Clearly the solve was mental and I’m not sure why it worked but am guessing it had something to do with improved visualization, minimizing air time on the shots and maximizing roll, and ignoring mechanics.  Essentially, I transformed myself into a feel player.

Today, before my round, I warmed up on the practice green alternating clubs on every shot and using three balls.  I actually chipped / pitched with every club in my bag from the 6-iron on up and my concentration was razor sharp.  Out on the course, I was faced with a mix of easy and difficult shots and executed quite well on each.  What a pleasant surprise.

Going forward, I have a little trepidation because the sample size has been small and the methodology is so new, but am filled with hope and excitement about the possibilities.

The benefit of playing golf for over 40 years is that you have the opportunity to screw things up and keep trying new fixes until one works.  I overhauled my putting routine over a year ago and have been enjoying excellent results.  If I’m half as successful with this short game change, golf is going to become a lot more enjoyable real soon!

How Tiger’s Masters Helped My Golf Game

The most awesome thing about golf is that it’s the one sport where amateurs can relate to issues their favorite touring pros are suffering from.  Despite the difference in skill level, it’s possible, on occasion, to achieve greatness at the same level as the best players in the world.  For example, a middle-aged round belly like me has no idea what it’s like to try to hit a 95 mph fast ball 400 feet over a wall.  I’ll never know, but I could conceivably birdie the toughest golf hole on a tour track with a couple purely struck shots and a little luck.

from thesun.co.uk

So, this past week, I eagerly anticipated the return of Tiger Woods to active competition, and was paying particular attention to Tiger’s chipping since both he and I have been suffering from the chip yips for a protracted period.  I’m sure my problems were much worse, but his were more magnified.  Either way, I was paying close attention to see how he handled himself under the pressure of a major.  I heard all the pre-tournament talk from Tiger about how he, “worked his ass off,” during his long layoff, but the true nugget was when I learned he changed out all his wedges.  Ever since I changed my wedges out a couple years ago, I’ve struggled greenside with my chips and pitches using my 58.  The bladed low ball has become an unwanted playing partner and the longer it stayed, the more it started to infect my thinking and other parts of my short game.

Fast forward to Masters Thursday and I was at Whispering Pines in Myrtle Beach practicing for my Friday round at Myrtle Beach National.  The blade ball had reared it’s ugly head again and I was starting to panic with the prospect of hitting low screamers from tight Bermuda lies.  Then I remembered Tiger changing out his wedges and figured what the heck.  I started hitting the same shots with my 54 instead of the 58.  Bingo!  All touch and feel returned, as did the nice little “thump” you get from a purely struck short shot off a tight lie.  After a few adjustments for the lower loft, I was making clean contact every time and getting them close.  I was thinking the blade ball was being caused by too much bounce on the flange of the 58, but still wasn’t sure.

The next day, during my pre-round warm up, I chipped with the 54 and actually made a couple.  Then I went out and shot a tidy little 2-over 74 which was unexpected, but felt natural with the returned boost in confidence.  If you don’t think a little confidence in one small area can take your game a long way, you are highly mistaken!  I didn’t hit the ball that great, but was relaxed and got it up and down out of some trash can lies.

I used to play these shots with a 56, then moved to the 58 with the new clubs, and now it’s down to a 54.  So what’s four degrees of loft here or there?  Has this ever happened to you?  Please share if you have a similar experience.

Thanks Tiger!

 

CAUTION!! The Domino Effect of Golf Drills

Have you ever worked a golf drill, fixed a fault, and then watched the drill negatively impact a previously solid part of your game?  Like a time bomb, one of these exploded in my face over the last two days of an otherwise excellent golf trip to the Delaware – Maryland beaches.  On my excursion, I experienced the most god awful episode of skulled, thinned, chunked and totally stone-handed chipping and pitching in the last 20 years.  Oddly enough, I drove the ball superbly, putted well, but if I missed a green, couldn’t hit squat.  It was literally 30-handicap caliber chopping and the bemused looks of my playing partners spoke volumes.  (Apologies to any 30-handicap readers; the problem is not you; it’s me.)  Technically I knew I was flipping my hands at the ball and letting the clubface pass my hands, but I couldn’t stop it.  This was not the chip yips because I didn’t feel any pressure even though the previous failures had gotten in my head; I simply could not execute shots I knew were in my arsenal.

On the drive back today, we were still bemusing over the root cause until I remembered back in August, I read Tour Tempo by John Novosel and took it for a test drive.   Little did I know but this drill to help with ball striking rhythm was sowing the seeds of the catastrophe.  If you’ll recall, Novosel’s theory is to introduce a 3:1 backswing to downswing timing ratio.  Most students, myself included, needed to speed up their downswing to comply with the the ratio.  After a few rounds, I noticed I started to hit my full swing gap wedge shots a little fat but disregarded it as an anomaly or something that occasionally creeps into my game which is handled with a correction.  After further analyzing the wreckage, I correctly identified the cause as an early release created in an attempt to speed up my downswing for Tour Tempo.  To be fair, there’s another Tour Tempo book for short game, that I did not read, and which purportedly has a different timing mechanism for short shots.  Oops!

Everyone who’s instructed or been instructed in golf is familiar with the concept of over-correction.  You over emphasize a fix to clearly turn a negative habit to positive, then tweak as the over-correction becomes a fault of its own.  Now I’ve got a bit of an early release with my full swing and a full blown mess with my short game.  I’m kinda glad winter is almost here, but anyone have a good drill to promote hands ahead of the clubhead with the greenside shots?  Please send along.  Thanks!

Golf game is coming around. . .FINALLY and thank you!

It’s not often we once-a-week chops are able to string a series of positives together, but I had such the experience from last weekend to this, and it finally feels like my game is coming around .  It has been a brutal spring punctuated by bad weather and terrible ball striking.  The bad swings compounded into stress, worrying, and some serious mental game foibles.   But after this weekend, things are finally looking up and many in the on-line golf community have played a positive part and deserve my thanks.

First, thank you to The Grateful Golfer for pointing out that focus is extremely important in golf.  After our dialog, I realized that I needed a serious re-commitment to my pre-shot routine and to work on changing focus to targets instead of mechanics.  It’s great to bounce ideas off Jim; he’s such a wealth of knowledge and has great perspective.

Next, thank you to The Birdie Hunt for reinforcing the notion that continuous play is more important than practice, especially for the weekend hack.  I try to do both, but clearly the part time player benefits more from play.  Playing once a week is hard because it feels like you have to re-learn too many shots instead of call on them.  I finally played two days in a row for the first time this season, albeit only 27 holes, but the added reps were great.

Third, thank you to my friend Jim Rush who spotted a serious flaw in my swing during my pre-round warm up last weekend.  Nothing will start your round off worse than hitting huge smother hooks while you get loose.  I leveraged his advice as well as the on-line lesson from FixYourGame.com I took a couple years ago.  The takeaway; when things go bad with your swing, you are usually reverting to bad habits, as I was.  I will probably be fighting spine angle issues the rest of my days, but at least when I spray the ball, I understand why and can work it.  Yesterday and today I worked it and finally felt in control off the tee.

Lastly, thank you to Gary Marlowe for the chipping lesson back in 1983.  Gary was a fellow student at the University of Maryland and on the golf team.  Later he went on to play the PGA Tour for one season but had his career cut short by injury.  Gary and I were on the putting green one afternoon and he had me choke down to the metal with my trailing hand for better control, and play the ball back with a pronounced forward press.  I have been very dissatisfied with my distance control and contact this season, and recommitted to this tip yesterday during my nine-hole practice round and it felt good.  Today, I missed the green on #1 at Northwest and imagine how great it felt when I chipped in for birdie.  Change validated!

I’m not totally out of the woods, but it was nice to feel like myself again over consecutive rounds.  Hoping the momentum continues to build through next week’s trip to South Carolina.

How’s your swing coming along this spring?

Darth Vader – The Skinny Chip Shot

The Force is not with me and I’ve been trying to clear my head lately on an area of my game I used to consider a strength (chipping) but the proverbial stew of techniques, approaches, new wedges, and adjustments for Myrtle Beach is staring to take on Death Star proportions.  I am tumbling head over heels around the greens, like a big ball of matter through outer space, with giant chunks of confidence falling off at inopportune moments.   Looking for some stability fast.  Here’s how the mess started.

I’ve chipped my best when I work with one technique and can laser focus my attention on a specific landing spot.  For some reason, this method has left me coming up short on all chips and I don’t know why.  Late last season, a skinny chip started creeping in to my repertoire, mostly with my old 56 and now with my new 58 and the root cause is a mystery as well.  I’m working with three new Cleveland wedges, which I use very successfully in practice, but can’t seem to transition to game conditions.  Third, I’m trying to relearn a low spinning shot I need off the tight Bermuda surfaces around the greens in Myrtle Beach.  I used to hit this great with my old 56 and even when I clipped it skinny, it would fly very low and have a tremendous amount of spin, and would bite hard and sit down instantly.    There is no deep rough in MB but that’s all I’m playing out of in our plush courses around the DC area.  I can’t find a comfortable technique on this play.

Finally, I’ve got two techniques in my head and cannot reconcile.  The first is the Stan Utley approach of squaring everything up and making a concentrated pivot on every chip.  The second is the Michael Breed drill of identifying a percentage of distance you want to fly your chips to the hole (say 40%) and then identifying different clubs that will take you different distances.  I did have some success blending the two in my post round practice session, but during play, was dreadfully inconsistent.

Anyone with some surefire chipping techniques from good greenside lies, or on tight Bermuda surfaces, please pass them along.  KISS please, thanks!

Are you addicted to practice? Apparently I am.

I’ve been chewing on some advice that Vet4Golfing51 passed on in response to my 2012 improvement plan.  His premise was that I didn’t play enough and that play improves performance more than practice.  I just looked at my 2011 records and holy cow!  In addition to my 35 rounds, I spent 70 days practicing, which is a ton of effort for essentially very little improvement.  Not only was I surprised that I dedicated as much time as I did but that my approach clearly didn’t pay dividends.  Thanks Vet 🙂

Now the weather in the DC area has been quite mild this winter with no measurable snow and I actually have practiced twice in January while trying to learn the new short game and putting techniques of Stan Utley.  This is clearly required work since I’m trying to train my muscles for a new motion, however it’s clear from my stats last year that I’m addicted to practice and am wondering what my performance might have been with only half the practice time dedicated, if I had used the balance on play (9-hole rounds, for instance.)  Range rats like Tom Kite and Vijay Singh benefited from their time spent on prolonged practice but they got enough play in to validate.

So going forward my goal in 2012 is again, 35 full rounds, only 35 practice days and 20 9-hole rounds between the full rounds which should provide enough play to avoid that foreign feeling I often get on the first tee, and still keep me fresh.  10 of the full rounds will again be compressed into six straight days of play at Myrtle Beach which would leave a good  interval of 18 hole and nine hole play for the balance of the year.

A couple notes on the Stan Utley techniques.  I’ve been rug putting all winter and am very comfortable with the new fundamentals.  The change has appeared to take hold and I putted very well on my practice green last weekend.  The chipping is going well too, as I’ve been working that on the rug, but the pitch shot is still a work in progress.  When properly executed, the direction and distance control are great, yet without the opportunity to pitch inside, it’s still quite foreign.  Looking forward to temps in the 60s this week and feeding the addiction a little more.

Book review: The Art of the Short Game by Stan Utley

I read The Art of the Short Game (Gotham Books – 2007) over the Christmas holiday and actually tried out the techniques at my local muni’s practice green, and wow!  YOU NEED TO GET THIS BOOK!   Those who follow this blog know I’m a big proponent of short game and continuously look for and share valid methods for improvement.  The infusion of life this book had on my chipping and pitching technique was remarkable.

Stan Utley is a journeyman pro turned short game/putting guru, and has put together a system that simplifies the approach to playing chips, pitches and bunker shots that’s easy to implement and is tremendously effective.  In two hours of practice I found my distance control and consistency of contact and direction significantly improved.   For chipping and pitching, Utley’s main premise is to keep everything square to the target line (club face, hands, feet, knees, shoulders) and make a mini-golf swing that includes a pivot.  This is counter to a lot of conventional chipping advice whereby you play from an open stance, keep the ball back and the lower body still and essentially make a arm swing with a short iron.  He also advocates using your sand wedge for all shots around the green rather than switching clubs based on the distance required for carry and roll.  This was a significant paradigm shift for me but after practicing with the altered technique, I was easily able to control the distance on longer chips with my 56 degree wedge.

The pitch is simply a longer extension of the chip, with a bit more pivot supplying the power.  Admittedly, the 30-40 yard sand wedge shot is the weakest part of my game but I was able to dial in amazingly well with the technique.  I was not able to practice the bunker play recommendations and they are significantly different from conventional advice.  I would advise to first spend some time on the chipping technique and convince yourself the method works before moving to pitching and bunker play.  So get the book,  you will not regret it.  Here are my practice notes for the chipping techniques just to get you started.  Good luck!  Now go wear out your carpet.

1. Setup with a neutral grip with the Vs in both hands pointing towards your right collarbone.
2. Square the club face at the target
3. Play from a square stance; it’s okay to flare out your left toe for comfort
4. Position the ball in the middle of your stance, not in the back
5. Shade 2/3 of your weight on your forward foot and keep it there throughout the shot
6. Forward press your hands so they are even with your front thigh
7. Allow for a small hip turn away from the ball on the back swing
8. Initiate the downswing with your hips turning slightly toward the target
9. Your hands will naturally be pulled toward the target and lead the club face towards solid contact.