How to improve your consistency 📈

Most golfers think the difference between their swing and a pro’s is huge.

But it’s not as big a difference as you might think.

Golf Digest Best in State Teacher Adam Young has spent his career studying the micro-mechanics of the golf swing—the tiny adjustments that happen at high speed around impact. These are too small to see with the naked eye, but they determine the fate of the shot you’re trying to hit.

As Adam explains:

“When that person hits a hot hook left and it goes 45 yards left, the face has probably only been three, four degrees more closed than normal,” Young says. “You’re not actually that far away from what a pro is doing. It’s half a degree in clubface angle.”

The good news is that you can get better at this stuff by varying your practice. Hitting different clubs every shot; trying to hit different parts of the clubface; trying to hit specific grooves.

They sound strange at first, but they’re some serious consistency-boosting methods that work...

8 evidence-based practice methods that really work

By Luke Kerr-Dineen

What You Need to Know

The goal isn't to be calm, it's to be regulated. 

That's the line that stuck with me in Sam Weinman's most recent episode of Mind Games.

Moving fast under pressure is a defense tactic that has served us well throughout human evolution. We sense danger; we become more alert; we run faster to escape. When you're nervous on the golf course, that same instinct flares up.

It's why in these moments you need to take an extra step to manually force yourself to go slower. You won't feel calm—the nerves are still there—but forcing yourself to go slower will make you feel regulated. 

I got a few questions about early extension in my recent Golf IQ mailbag episode.

I early extend in my own golf swing, and I think one of the biggest causes is hip mobility.

Most of us sit at a desk all day—I literally sit behind one talking about golf—and our hips get tighter and tighter along the way.

Then we go to swing, we have to turn them back and through, and they’re locked up. If you can’t turn, you extend instead. So the easiest fix is to improve your hip mobility.

Get to where you can turn your hips back and through and internally rotate them, and while it won’t solve everything, you’ll take away a big reason you were early extending in the first place.

These are what I'd describe as good player training aids. 

The types of training aids you see on the range at professional golf tournaments, and the stuff that you can use every day without fear of overdoing it. No surprise they're recommendations from professional golfer Hannah Gregg.

An alignment stick is one of her recommendations, and along the way she highlights one of my favorite drills:

"One of my favorite drills is to stand my alignment stick straight up, about 20 feet in front of my station on the range. I challenge myself to hit cuts, draws, punch shots, slices and hooks around it, which directs me to “feel” the shots more than trying to force them."

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