How is your game?  Do you want to improve?  Of course you do, everyone wants to play better golf.

What is your road to improvement?  Believe me it is personal to you.  I can’t tell you what your road is.  I can give you a list of ways I believe you can approach improvement and you can choose what you want to do.  I can only tell you what I do.  What I currently choose as my road to improvement.

Notice I say my current road.  As you must already know we need constant change and constant improvement.  What that might be at any given time differs amongst all golfers, even Pros on the Tour.

Remember, I am an amateur golfer.  I presently consider myself a Bogie golfer.  I am not trying to give lessons.  What I am trying to do is perhaps show you a path to help you decide how you will approach your Road to Game Improvement.  It’s simple, but it can help to put it down on paper.

Todays blog is covering the first step toward Game Improvement.

Assess Your Current Game.

Let’s start with assessing your current game.  You can do this.  Where do you lose strokes?  What is your weakest point?  If you want, ask your golfing buddies’ opinion on where they think you lose strokes.  You might be surprised.  I look at it as 5 main areas of the game.

1. Hitting off the tee
2. Hitting fairway woods or long irons
3. Mid and short irons distance control and/ or direction control
4. Chipping and pitching around the green
5. Putting

Let’s take a look at each of these areas:

• Hitting off the tee.

Lack of distance:  Be careful most of us always want to hit further off the tee but is that the problem?  Are you mishitting or just not getting the distance you would like?  Topping the ball or hitting it fat (hitting the Big Ball First).

Missing fairways:  Do you miss more fairways than you hit?  Do you miss mostly right because of a slice or do you miss mostly left because of a hook?  Maybe you are so inconsistent you can’t say because you hit left and right.  Either way it’s no fun playing from the rough.

• Hitting fairway woods or long irons

Missing fairways or greens:  Do you miss mostly right because of a slice or do you miss mostly left because of a hook?  Maybe you are so inconsistent you can’t say because you hit left and right.  Do you pull or push most shots?  Which is it?

• Mid and short irons distance control and/ or direction control.

Missing fairways or greens:  Do you miss mostly right because of a slice or do you miss mostly left because of a hook?  Maybe you are so inconsistent you can’t say because you hit left and right.  Do you pull or push most shots.  Which is it?

Lack of distance:  Do you hit it fat or thin?

• Chipping and pitching around the green.

Do you chunk your chip shots?  Do you hit them thin?  Do you lack distance control?

• Putting.

Do you have an alignment problem?  Do you have trouble with distance control?  Do you have a problem reading greens?  Is your stroke inconsistent?

I would not be surprised that you have problems in most if not all of these areas.  Better golfers will have fewer weak areas until their weakness is fixed and perhaps becomes a strength.  At that time, another area will stand out as a weakness.  Like I said, Continuous Improvement.

 

Helpful Hints as to How to Choose:

 

The above picture is an example of how you can manually keep track of your game using The Round File.  Fairways hit, greens in regulation, up and down (chip and putt), sand save, and putts.  For example, you can check the sand save box or you can enter how many shots it took to get out of the sand.  How you choose to use the form is purely personal.  The only purpose is for you to understand where your strokes are.  I’m sure there are Apps for your phone you can use.

Whatever you decide you need to get a book or a form so you can write down each shot.  How many drives, fairway woods, irons etc.

You will have to choose which area you will first concentrate on to improve and it should be based upon where you lose the most strokes.  Carefully look at your scores.    Don’t get hung up on distance.  Many professional teachers say the road to breaking 90 starts with thinking of all holes as par 5’s.  Get on the green in 3 strokes and 2 putt.  Remember, you may not have that 200 yard shot but you may be very accurate with 2, 100 yard shots.  Count the number of putts you have in a round.  How many chip shots per green?  How close to the pin are your chips?  How many 3 putts do you have?  In my limited knowledge, I find that most people loose their strokes around the green.

Part II of this blog series will start from after you select your first area for improvement.  I will use my own personal experiences to illustrate ways you can approach improvement.

 

I would love your feedback.  Please leave any comments you have below.  Thanks