A fix for disaster drives

I've been tracking my own stats with Arccos this season, and I noticed something that I suspect is quietly hurting a lot of golfers.

On three separate rounds, I was positive or close to it off the tee — until one shot blew everything up.

❌ A snap hook on the 14th hole.

❌ A low block OB on the 6th hole.

A good round ruined by one bad swing. Why did this keep happening?

That sent me back to a book called The Practice Manual by Adam Young. In it, he breaks down four different types of attention — internal, external process, external result, and neutral — and explains when each one is most useful.

It's a surprisingly simple framework, and it helped me eliminate those disaster shots.

Worth a read before your next round...

I tracked my own stats and found a surprising pattern. Here's what fixed it

By Luke Kerr-Dineen

What You Need to Know

Most golfers do most of their practicing on mats. Which, to be clear, is mostly a good thing.

But there is one downside that golfers should be aware of before it backfires.

Mats are softer and have more give than the ground, which can mask the effect of chunked shots. A club that hits the mat too soon simply bounces back up into the ball rather than sticking into the ground.

And this effect is so severe that in many cases, a chunked shot on a mat actually flies longer than a good one, because it effectively turns it into a low spin knucklebomb.

A really simple way to fix this is to put a towel a few inches behind the ball. This forces you to hit the ball first, and unmasks those chunks masquerading as good shots.

Want to find the sloppiness hiding in your game?.  Play a round from the forward tees.

Here's why it works: teeing it way forward only makes one thing easier—getting your drive up near the green. Once you're there, nothing else changes. That 70-yard wedge is just as hard. A 12-footer is the same 12-footer. So you end up with a round stuffed full of scoring shots: wedges inside 100, greenside chips, and a ton of makeable putts.

Playing from way forward forces you to hit a lot of these really important scoring shots. And if you're not scoring markedly lower, you'll instantly know why.

Amateurs tend to under-read putts and miss low, because they misunderstand how the ball breaks. They think it rolls straight, then curves. In reality it curves constantly—gently at first, then a lot at the end, when it's rolling slowest and gravity's grabbing it most.

Renowned putting coach Phil Kenyon has a fix he calls the two-thirds formula. Pick the spot where you want the ball rolling two-thirds of the way to the hole, then double that distance—that's your aim. If you want it a inch left of the hole two-thirds of the way there, aim two inches out.

It budgets for the break you're ignoring.

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