Why You're Not Getting Better at Golf--- Even Though You're Practicing

There’s a misconception in America: more is better, particularly in time spent. If you work longer, you automatically work harder than your competitor, and will be better in the end, which is of course not automatically true. Intensity, intelligence, and efficiency all matter, and time spent is only one variable in the equation. Golfers generally believe the same about time spent, as I used to. For me, it used to be a math equation: more hours = better golf.

As a professional golfer, I figured if this was my job, I better at least put in the time, and I did. Ten-hour practice days weren’t uncommon, and yet… I never really got much better. Kind of got worse, actually. Which was sort of a total bummer since my life dream was to be the best player in the world.

Looking back, I wasn’t really practicing, I was just activity-ing. Filling the day. Enjoying sunshine. You know, wasting time. And not getting better at golf.

But.

I don’t want you to find the same result, and it took a bit, but I’ve finally figured out what it takes to get better at golf (or anything, really).

If you really want to get better at golf, you have to get feedback when you practice, every time you practice, and, good news (!!!!) golf is always giving us massive amounts of feedback. The issue is that most golfers, including myself once upon a time, never learn to read the feedback.

I work with professional, collegiate, high-level amateurs, high school golfers, and consistently, the thing we work through the most is how to read what happened on a shot, and what to do next because of what we just were told from the golf ball. Not swing positions, not body movements, not club selection, just what did the ball do, and what does that mean?

My oldest son is learning to read, and we had to follow the progression: what are our letters? What sounds do letters make? If you put two letters together, what sound do they make? Eventually, as your database grows, you can read the entire book cover to cover.

Golf works the same way. Most golfers are trying to read novels before they’ve learned the alphabet. If you have never learned what causes a ball to curve to the left, and I asked you to tell me why it did, it’d be like asking my kindergartner to read Lord of the Rings. Wayyyy too advanced. But, with a little knowledge for a base, then all of a sudden we can start becoming our own coach, reading our own ball flight, and then going about fixing what might have caused the miss.

Over time, I realized improvement always follows the same pattern:

Observe— What happened?

Interpret— Why did it happen?

Experiment— What variable should I test?

Adapt— What did I learn and what should I do going forward?

Every meaningful improvement I’ve ever made followed these four steps.

Golf is constantly giving us feedback, as I said. This means every time you catch the ball heavy, you just gained information. Every time it curves to the right = more information. Left, right, up, down, perfect, not perfect, feedback, feedback, feedback, feedback, feedback.

We just have to pay attention.

Let’s say I hit a quick hook 7-iron when I was trying to hit a fade.

Observe: The ball started pretty straight, and quickly turned left, when it was supposed to turn right.

Interpret: The club-face was definitely closed to the path I was trying to make, regardless of what my path actually was.

Experiment: I’ll try moving the ball slightly forward in the stance (thereby enhancing left-er path), and I’ll try to feel a more open club face.

Adapt: The next couple shots started left and curved back right. That’s information worth logging deep in my golf-brain. Improvement isn’t guessing. It’s testing. The golfer who learns fastest is usually the golfer who asks the best questions.

My goal here isn’t to give you every piece of data that will equate to the ball doing what it does, that would be an encyclopedia. There are some simple things most golfers should know however: the ball generally starts where the face of the club is pointing. The path of the club affects this a little. The delta (or difference) between face angle and club path creates opportunities for curvature. If you hit the ball off-center on the club face that has an effect. If you drop too much you will hit the ground before the ball, if you raise the club up too high, you will hit the equator of the ball and it will line-drive out in front of you, etc.

You need to know a few things like these, and these pieces of information are easily attainable through YouTube or simple books.

What we have to do next is the real challenge, and here’s the secret sauce. Getting better comes through experimentation. You need to have baseline knowledge (your alphabet and phonics) of the golf swing, which an instructor can teach you in an hour, and then you have to go and perform little tests every time you practice.

Every shot, you think about what just happened on the last one: what did I feel, what was I trying to do? Did the ball start straight and then curve? Did it start right and stay straight? These pieces of information give you a baseline, then you start changing variables so that you can start learning.

What happens if you move the ball back in your stance? What happens when you move the ball forward in the stance? What if you aim left, or keep your weight on your right foot longer? On and on it will go.

But with each rep, and each practice session, you will gain the feedback on things that work for you, and things that don’t. This is where gold has been struck, because the purpose of all of these little experiments is to understand your tendencies. Tendencies are magic, because by knowing them, you gain significant amounts of trust in your game, far more than your competitors will ever have.

Most golfers spend their entire lives trying to eliminate tendencies, but the best golfers in the world spend their lives looking to understand them. In fact, they spend the entire careers learning how to use them.

Those little practices, which taught you that if you move the ball forward in your stance, and aim a little left, you’ll never miss it left, are invaluable as a competitor because now under pressure, you know how to not miss it left, while most of your competition is just hoping. Without knowing for sure what produces what, we’re all just guessing in the wind.

A predictable miss is information.

Information is confidence.

Confidence produces performance.

If you can have the discipline to go and “learn yourself” (Socrates paraphrase), then you can actually, significantly faster than average, get better. It’s easier to hit balls than to learn from them. It’s easier to ask Youtube what you should try next. It’s much more difficult to take the time and try and figure out what each shot just told you about what’s working or not working.

It’s what I used to know, then stopped doing as a professional golfer, then had to re-discover later in my career, and what I preach exclusively as a coach.

The best golfers in the world are experts on themselves. They know who they are, what they do, why they do it, and what all of these little things they do produce… because they’ve tested it. They’ve seen what happens with little changes to the club face, or body, or breathing routines, or anything, and they’ve settled on what works for them because they’ve tested it and now they have trust because of that process. They’ve spent years understanding cause and effect. Years observing, interpreting, experimenting and adapting.

That’s the real goal of practice.

Not more hitting balls.

Understanding yourself better.

Because every golfer wants improvement.

But improvement begins with awareness.

And awareness begins when you start paying attention.

-Michael

Ready to understand your tendencies?

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