The Mental Golf Blog

Never have I been so pleased to have played so poorly! Let me explain. I recently was due to play a course that I knew very well but hadn’t played for quite some time and as I had been working on my mental game I decided to formulate a pre round mental plan. This involved creating a strategy for playing each hole, physically writing it down and reading it over and over, reinforcing the plan and visualizing how it would pan out.

I worked backwards from the green identifying the best angle to approach the green and where I wanted to position the tee shot. From this I planned the safest quarter of the green I wanted to target.

Obviously I wasn’t to know what the weather was going to be like but in general I adopted a conservative plan. The course has a number of tight, tree lined fairways and OOB so opted to play safe a number of times from the tee with Utility club and irons.

The idea was to write this down as a positive strategy for each hole.

As I had recently refined my pre-shot routine I incorporated this as I visualized going through each shot in my mind according to the plan over and over again.

When the day of the round arrived it was beautiful weather so my hopes were high of executing the game plan and playing and scoring well. What a disappointment, I hit it absolutely garbage particularly with the driver only hitting 2/9 fairways. This put a lot of pressure on approach shots and consequently only hit 7 GIR. Fortunately recent short game practice paid off and I scrambled pretty well (60%) and only had 28 putts.

I did though stick to the plan which I was very pleased about and two of the more cautious planned holes yielded birdies after positioning tee shots with Utility club and iron. So the good news was that despite a poor striking performance I ground out a reasonable score ending up playing to my handicap of 6.

As I said before it feels weird to be so upbeat about playing poorly but I was pleased to have had the discipline to stick to the plan and I firmly believe this was the reason I managed to get it round in a respectable score.

Part of the inspiration for putting the plan together came from a book I have been re-reading
Smart Golf: How to Simplify and Score Your Mental Game by DeDe Owens, Ed.D. & Dan Kirschenbaum, Ph.D. is a much underrated mental golf guide.

Technorati Tags: Pre-Round Mental Preparation, pre-shot routine, smart golf, visualization

You know I must be very slow on the uptake, stop nodding there at the back :-), but following my post Golf Is Not A Game Of Indecision I made a startling (to me) discovery.

I had some great feedback from the post at Stracka.com and got thinking about why certain things have distracted me on the golf course over the years and came to the conclusion that I was often reluctant to back away from a shot because I was concerned about holding other players up. Consequently, I was unprepared for the shot, rushed it and invariably got a poor result.   Continued……………

FOYT4

Technorati Tags: Mental Golf, pre-shot routine

Ok! ok! I know a blog is a kind of diary or journal but the kind I’m talking about is a diary of your golf game.
Some time ago I started to keep one (with the idea that it could become a blog but that would have been more self obsessed than this one :-)) and amongst the entries was a record of good shots played during the round, Drives, Approach Shots, Chip/Pitches & Putts.

More……………………………….

FOYT2

Technorati Tags: Mental Golf, pre-shot routine