There can be no doubt – a systematic golf improvement plan is much more likely to deliver measurable results to your golf game than if you simple spend more time blasting away on the practice ground.
Practice is obviously important. Practice linked to a clear improvement plan will deliver much faster results.
If you haven’t already done so you can download The 30 Day Golf Improvement Plan now. It is completely free – you will just need to enter your email address to give us permission to send you the plan. If you have already registered you should have an email that will take you to the download page. Don’t worry if you have lost that email – if you enter your email in the sign-on form again with the same email the system will recognise you and send you directly to the download link.
This page outlines the essentials of creating your own plan.
Setting Goals
It has become a cliché but the fact remains that you are much more likely to succeed with the guide if you have already identified clear improvement goals. The more specific your goals the better you will do.
By downloading this plan you have shown an interest in improving your golf. If you simply sit and read this plan and don’t take clear action you will achieve nothing (that’s the only guarantee you will find anywhere in this guide). Before going any further take some time to define your golf improvement goals.
You can use the following template to define your own goals.
My overall goal is:
“I am going to reduce my handicap by xx shots by the end of the year”
I am going to do this by:
- Increase my average drives by xx yds
- Hitting xx% fairways
- Sinking xx% 3ft putts
- Sinking xx% 6ft putts
- Sinking xx% 12ft putts
- Hitting xx% approach shots to within 10ft
- Hitting xx% approach shots to within 20ft
- Hitting xx% approach shots to within 30ft
- Making xx% up and downs
- To start achieving my goals I am going to follow the systematic approach in the 30 Day Golf Improvement Plan
Simple! Change xx for whatever makes sense for you.
Your golfing goals don’t have to be anything like this template. It is incredibly important that you do take the time to define your own, specific goals and targets.
How To Choose Your Golf Improvement Goals
In the 30 Day Golf Improvement Plan it is strongly suggested that you should set yourself clear goals before starting your own Golf Improvement journey.
Set Your First Goals
Often goals are very easy to set.
For instance, if you are not 100% clear in your own mind on your own swing technique your top goal must me something like, “I am going to develop a clear mental picture of my personal swing technique”. Even this goal might have a number of enabling objectives. e.g. To achieve this goal I am going to:
- Take a lesson from my professional/Buy the Simple Golf Swing/Enrol with Pure Golf Training… It’s up to you how.
- Write down the elements of my golf technique – see My Swing Technique as an example
- Study the swing of great golfers – See Rory McIlroy’s swing analysis
- Spend 1 hour per week for the next 4 weeks on the range working on my basic swing technique
If you are fully comfortable with your current swing this would be an entirely optional goal but you can see how you could develop this into a clear, actionable development plan.
So What Next?
One of the best ways of deciding what to include in your personal plan is to spend some time analysing your current game. One of the things I have found over the years is that golfers are not always accurate in defining the weaknesses in their own game.
In our Awful Golf article we recommend spending a bit of time analysing where you lose shots. Awful Golf is based on the work of Professor Mark Broadie of the University of Columbia. In a more positive slant the ideas behind awful golf have been used to develop the Shots Gained statistics now becoming very popular on the Pro Tours.
The Pros have the advantage of the huge volume of statistics recorded by the ShotLink service. As club golfers we don’t have masses of statistics available to us so we need to do something to help ourselves.
In his original analysis work Mark Broadie identified 2 major ways in which golfers drop shots:
- Awful shots – cost you one shot compared to what you would normally expect to take from the location of the ball.
- Doubly Awful shots – cost you 2 shots. E.g. Hooking the ball out of bounds always costs at least 2 shots.
Broadie’s analysis considered 3 areas – the long game (more than 100yds from the Green), the short game (less than 100yds from the green) and on the greens.
Your Awful Golf Analysis
For your next 3 rounds – in addition to keeping your score – keep a note of your awful shots. You might like to use this awful golf analysis template to help – just print it out and tuck it behind your score card.
When I did this a few weeks ago I found that I had dropped 11 shots – mostly totally avoidable – to awful golf. No surprise my handicap was still stuck around 15.
A friend was adamant that it was his putting that was ruining his golf. When he kept a record of his awful golf it was pretty easy to see his major shot leakage was with his driving. Pretty much every round he would hit a drive out of bounds or into almost unplayable lies. A few 3 putts were the least of his problems.
Once you have an accurate picture of just what is happening with your golf scores you are going to be in a much better position to define your golf improvement goals that are going to provide the quickest, biggest return for your efforts.