The breaking 80 math most golfers miss

Hitting greens is nice—and obviously very important. 

But for golfers trying to break 80, getting greenside in regulation is essential.

It's one of the central premises of my latest Game Plan video, which dropped on YouTube this week. And to understand why, just do some basic number crunching.

Breaking 80 means making 11 pars and 7 bogeys on most golf courses. Let's say you get yourself greenside-in-regulation on 18 holes, so a chip would get you on the green in regulation in one extra shot.

The average up-and-down rate for 10 handicaps is between 30 and 40 percent—lower on trickier chips, higher on easier ones. 

So if you miss every green, but give yourself 18 opportunities to get up-and-down for par, you're probably going to make about six or seven pars.

That's a few short of the 11 you need, but it's a higher baseline than you may think. And that's not factoring in that you probably won't miss every green, and that with the right chip shot selection or a good putting day, you can easily get to the magic number.

The point I'm trying to make here is that simply keeping yourself in play puts you right in the breaking 80 zone.  

GIR+1 is a key stat if you want to break 80

By Luke Kerr-Dineen

What You Need to Know

According to our friends over at Mustard, the most common golfer fault in the app is outracing your lower body with your upper body. Golfers' upper bodies spin too soon, dragging the club over-the-top.

Cam Young used to have the same problem in his golf swing. His signature pause came from him feeling like his upper body stayed back at the top while his lower body fired forward. 

Lower body forward, upper body back. A good feel for the rest of us.

My first ever Golf IQ podcast mailbag went live this week.  

16 different questions, on everything from swing speed to early extension to the yips. You can check it out in full right here. And any other questions, make sure to shoot me a DM on Instagram! I'd love to do another one.

How can you adjust to different green speeds in a hurry? It's a pressing question for me.

I'm a member at Tamarack Country Club, and the greens run pretty fast there, so this happens to me when I travel—first-world problem, I know. I asked a top putting coach I do some work with named Bill Smittle about it, and he said the big thing is hitting multiple putts at consecutive distances. Three 30-footers will help, but hitting a ball 30 feet, then 35, then 40 will help more.

We've actually got a good stress test about this that measures how good you are at this kind of thing. Ultimately, mixing it up gets you used to different speeds in a hurry.

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