Wednesday, January 2, 2008 

Is it Possible to Play Better Golf With No Practice?

I, like most golfers, am always looking to play better, beat my mates and get bragging rights. I have a lifestyle that is pretty hectic and spend a lot of time with my family. I have two boys and we are a soccer mad family. I coach one of my boys teams and my other son plays twice a week as well. So you can see I don't get any time to perfect my golf at all.

Recently I have been managing about a game every 4 weeks and absolutely no practice, so I have been in search of a way to help me enjoy my game with no practice, so I researched and investigated and came up with 2 things that I could do with out too much bother.

  1. Course management
  2. Pitching and Chipping strategy
Course Management I decided that I would concentrate on choosing the right kind of shot at the right time, then I would definitely get better scores. The golf course that I play at has loads of bunkers on every green, and I figured that if I went for the green with my approach shots that I would either be on the green or in a bunker. Now depending on how far out from the green I was also had a bearing on my shot. I decided that for any shot requiring more than a 9 iron I would actually play short/lay up and take my chances with my chipping and putting. As part of that decision process was also where to lay up to to give me the best angle to chip on to the green.

So my simple course management technique was really to avoid the bunkers at all costs and give myself a chance of an up and down from a green side chip.

Unless you can hit the ball from where you are onto the green at least 7 times out of 10 then you would be better off playing short.

Pitching and Chipping Strategy

I read the following tip recently

"You can vary the distance of your chips by using different clubs - try using your 5 iron, 7 iron or 9 iron and only ONE swing instead of using your sand wedge and 3 different swings."

Basically, the secret is to have the same length backswing, but use a different club to ship the ball either longer or shorter, and I adapted it to have two swings.

Well that made sense to me so before my round started, I thought I would do a little scientific research, so I went to the practice area and played chips with 2 different swings

Swing #1 Take the club back about 18 inches behind my back foot. The key is to go back the same distance every time
swing #2 Takes the club back parallel to the ground
I spent 15 minutes testing out how far the ball went with each club using swing number 1 from my 5 iron up to my lob wedge to get a feel for the distance covered in the air and the total distance I then repeated the exercise using swing number 2 I also used a simple setup routine for chipping and putting (you can get this set up routine from my website TheGolfHelper.com

Now I didn't change any other part of my game, and just applying these simple methods improved my game without any practice (well actually about 15 minutes practice on the chipping range!)

As I said before these 2 things were the key to me winning our club A grade competition, and all done with 2 very simple techniques that anyone can do without remodeling your swing or taking a lesson, so that should give you some food for thought!

If you want to discover the simple set up routine that I used, simply go to my web site and See my review of The Simple Golf Swing Review

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