Watch the PGA Tour and you’ll see professional golfers get upset with shots you would kill to make consistently. Occasionally, you’ll see them hit one into the netherworld and somehow escape with par or bogie.
How do they do it?
It’s the biggest difference between professional golfers and amateur golfers. When a pro goes to the driving range, he’s there to warm up, check how his swing feels and maybe make some minor tweaks to adapt his shots to the course conditions.
An amateur is trying to find his golf swing. Once he’s found his golf swing, his battle will be to keep it working and pray that it doesn’t disappear once he’s out on the golf course.
The difference is that the professional golfer has a Master Swing locked into memory. He has a pattern to reference every swing by so he knows as soon as his swing feels a little off that he needs to make some minor adjustments to his routines to keep things working.
Now the amateur will say that he doesn’t have time to hit 500 balls a day to create his own Master Swing and he’s right, but there is a way to do it practicing just 15 minutes per night.
How?
Well, the first trick is to practice before you go to bed. If you do, your mind will continue practicing while you sleep, but on one condition…That you don’t confuse it with too much information.
The Master Swing was also Ben Hogan’s real secret. He didn’t get it by hitting 500 balls per day, he did it by feel, using sometimes as few as 40 golf balls during his practice sessions.
The second trick is a technique used by John Wooden when he Coached the UCLA Bruins. During practice, he would tell his players to identify their greatest weakness, what they should do to correct it, and work on nothing else until they were satisfied with the results. The next practice would start with an assessment of strengths and weaknesses to find what to work on next.
At first, this would seem to be the long way to fix things, but in fact, this method creates the most permenent changes with less time re-learning or reviewing old issues, and therefore works most efficiently.
You can do the same thing with your golf swing. Rather than going to the range and beating golf balls, you can practice any part of your swing at home by working on how it feels so that your mind remembers the Master swing you will eventually create.
Now you might be thinking, “How do I know what I’m doing is correct?”
That’s the third trick. You must do like the professional golfers and develop routines for every part of your game, including your swing. Watch professional golfers setup to the ball. They do it the same way every time. If they get interrupted, they start over. Their physical routines start with golf swing biomechanics as it relates to their personal body structure to make sure they aren’t practicing a routine their body will reject.
Why?
Because they’ve practiced the routine and the routine takes care of every aspect of their setup without needing to think about it. They have routines for the backswing and the downswing as well.
So how do you create a Master Swing, become a consistent golfer and learn to recover from bad shots on the golf course?
Develop routines for every aspect of your golf game. Practice them at night before you go to bed, only working on one part at a time. Learn how your Master Swing feels so you have a pattern to follow and a reference to tell you when it’s time to look at your routines to fix the problem.
By: Tracy Reed
About the Author:
Teaching golfers in 29 countries, Tracy Reed is a Golf Biomechanic, Mental Game Coach, and author of “Golf Swing Control”. With over 6100 students around the globe, he’s mastered the art of teaching golfers how to quickly develop a Master Swing and to be able to fix a swing fault, even right on the golf course when needed. Go to http://www.golfswingcontrol.com.
