Can bad shots really lead to good golf?

How I'd rock the range at the Ryder Cup.

It's tragic.

I've devised a range drill I'd love to use at the Ryder Cup. It would astound, amaze and astonish onlookers. This routine would ensure everyone was talking about me.

I'd lure opponents towards the rocky shores of complacency whilst quietly topping up my confidence.

I'd be able to hide a bad session - because my poor shots would often look like good ones.

The only problem? I might not get the opportunity to use it.

I'm all for positive thinking, but at the tender age of 36 it's a bit of a stretch to see me playing in Samuel Ryder's tournament. I shall share it with you instead.

Here's a brief precis: I'd hit "poor" shots. On purpose. Sound good?

It doesn't?

Please allow me to explain a little further.

The unique selling point of this approach is it opens the door to a wide gamut of shots.

Shots opponents, commentators and spectators wouldn't believe anyone would deliberately attempt.

I'd get to stride off the range brimming with quiet confidence yet no-one would be able to understand why. People might start to whisper I'd cracked under pressure. I'd have lowered others' expectations, whilst stealthily becoming more confident.

As I'd be the only person who knew what shot I was planning to create, I'd be the only person who knew if a shot had failed or succeeded. What might in reality be a poor outcome could look like a good shot to the uniformed observer, making any difficulties less obvious.

How on Earth would I achieve this?

I'd devise a way of picking shots at random. I already use a dice rolling application on my phone on the chipping green to ensure I don't only give myself easy shots from good lies. A successful up & down from an impossible position is incredibly satisfying, and my short game and scores have significantly improved as a result.

With this drill I'd develop the concept, using a number of dice to define each shot in great detail. I'd include all sorts of factors in addition to the selection of club, ball flight and target. There would be a "wild-card" which if activated would require a speciality shot (a flop shot, for example, is always fun with a 5 iron) as well as factoring in pushes, pulls and "punched" shots.

Why go to all this trouble?

It's easy to see how this might have the desired effect at a high profile event like the Ryder Cup or The Open Championship. Television in particular is hungry for news to fill the gaps between shots, and commentators would be all over something like this. There's a reasonable crowd around the range at most professional events, so this might even work there.

But is it really relevant to the club golfer?

The benefits given above do not justify such an elaborate regime; indeed, their focus on factors outwith my control is less than ideal. But they're really only fringe benefits, pleasant side effects of a most worthwhile exercise.

My method leads to mastery by cultivating control, creativity and confidence.

I'm aiming to push myself to the very limit of my ability to control the club, instead of booming ego-boosters with my "Big Dog". It's all too easy to fall into the bad habit of "scrape & hit" hitting shot after shot in the same general direction, scraping ball after ball over with your club until your balls are spent. It might be fun, but it's an inefficient way to improve.

With this drill the shots are selected at random. I'll never know what shot I'll be asked to hit next. Much like golf on an unfamiliar course, there is no chance of slipping into a comfort zone.

To succeed, I'll need to divorce myself from outcome and focus on process, just as I have to do on the course. Anyone who's played knows golf can throw up any number of tricky situations. The experience of creating specific shots to order in a pressured environment undoubtedly increases my chance of escaping unscathed.

In short, it simulates golf but adds pressure and a demands a higher degree of technical proficiency - a powerful tool for improvement.

I'll be to spending some time developing this before adding it to my range routine. If you're interested, let me know; I'd be delighted to share.

As ever, I'd love to hear your feedback, positive or otherwise. Is there anything I might be able to help you with? If so, please feel free to leave a comment below, or catch me on Twitter (@The_Golf_Geek). I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Golf tips and drills won't bring you skills...

..but games should do it nicely.

We can't really have fun as we improve...can we?

Let me see if this sounds familiar...

How to fix your swing?

After another frustrating round, you start looking for answers.

The quest begins; you scour golf magazines, search the internet and take advice from anyone who offers. There are long sessions at the range scraping over ball after ball, enduring the pitying gaze of other golfers. Doubt floods in and you start to worry you'll never get it.

And then.

Something clicks. You find the "magic" tip. Suddenly you start to enjoy things again. Confidence returns. Golf is fun once more. You're so delighted you share your discovery with anyone who'll listen. You really feel that you've got it.

Haven't you?

Sadly, you don't. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when things start to slip, but they do. Not to worry, all you have to do is to reapply the magic tip...isn't it? But, much like a sitcom in its fourth season, the magic has gone. An unpalatable truth lies before you.

Your improvement occurred in spite of the tip, not because of it.

It's the boom & bust of tips and drills. The bogus focus on the golf swing as the sum total of golf improvement. A cycle that can repeat in perpetuity, or at least until you throw your clubs into the darkest recesses of your garage.

Frustration is the only guarantee of this approach. I know because I've been there.

This obviously isn't the case when we see a PGA pro. At least then the advice is individualised and fitted to your swing...isn't it?

Not necessarily. Some professionals are married to teaching a system, rather than focusing what an individual might already have. I'm not a golf instructor, so I'm loathe to criticise. However, I'm dubious a complete swing rebuild is what most amateur golfers want or need. Might the frustrations arising from this contribute to the number of golfers leaving the sport each year? It's certainly not a route that I'll be going down.

Or your professional may be keen on video analysis. Again, this is something I'm not sure is as helpful as they may believe. I'm not alone in this; Michael Hebron at Neuro Learning Golf, the Instinctive Golf team and Marc Solomon of Golf Made Simple are prominent doubters.

I started dabbling with golf during an illness enforced absence from work. Progress was slow, but addiction came quickly. I started following the course I've outlined above, peppered with the occasional half hour range lesson. As a return to work loomed I fretted that my hard won skills would dissipate.

But they didn't.

In fact they started developing faster than I'd dared to dream.

Some of this was a matter of reaching the threshold where the ball flew as intended that crucial bit more often...and some was due to sitting down and committing to fitting golf around work and family life.

Some of my development was down to these factors. Some, but certainly not most.

I changed how I practised.

I'd already invested quite some time listening to the Golf Smarter podcast. I'd been very impressed by a number of coaches who appeared to be advocating a paradigm shift in instruction. They wanted to move away from golf's prevalent culture and its limitations. One of their main ideas was to stop the golfer playing "golf swing" and instead get that golfer playing golf. To achieve this, they suggested that golfers start to "practice like they play". This made a lot of sense.

Why should we practice like we play?

Not long before Mrs Geek & I got married, we completed an Advanced Life Support course. This was a very busy course, covering everything from how to press on the chest through passing a tube into the larynx up to delivering the patient to Intensive Care, all over a period of 3 days. It was a mixed group of participants with differing knowledge bases, so the course had a lot of ground to cover.

What's interesting is how this was done. There was a course handbook to be read before we started, then a few lectures and a quick recap of the basics on the first day. But most of the course was running through carefully crafted scenarios designed to cover all of the relevant information.

Repeated simulation of real situations formed the basis of instruction.

The scenarios started off basic, but by the end they were getting more and more complex. The instructors were all excellent at creating and maintaining the correct atmosphere, to the point where you'd feel a genuine pang of sadness any time the dummy "died". As I'm a robust soul and had made no secret of my desire to be an instructor, my scenarios were most complex of all by the end of the course; they even had me trying to manage a situation where a pregnant woman had collapsed into a swimming pool after taking illegal drugs! It was a relief to discover the final test was a bit more straightforward, whilst still covering all of the necessary areas.

It's very different to how golf is traditionally taught.

If we'd been teaching these skills as golf is traditionally taught, we'd probably still be there. We'd be looking at slow motion replays comparing a candidate's chest compressions to an instructors, or flicking through magazines to see how to get the angle of the laryngoscope perfect.

Instead we ran through the algorhythms so often I could recite them in my sleep, and did so in situations far more complex than we would typically see. This led to a much greater understanding of what to do and how to do it. And it worked for everyone, not just those with the greatest knowledge base and experience. One of the best things was how egalitarian it was, putting nurses, doctors and paramedics on an equal footing.

Most of all, it was a lot of fun.

It's pretty obvious it's different from the traditional paradigm of golf instruction. There's good reason for this. It's an internationally recognised qualification which is paid for by the taxpayer. Almost all of the participants were government employees undertaking paid study time. It's also, as you can imagine, an important thing to get right. The course therefore has a huge responsibility to educate participants fully and in the most efficient way. It's essential the education is both efficient and sufficient. I've never heard anyone who's been on one of these courses dismiss it as worthless.

How does this relate to golf?

If repeated simulation of real life scenarios is an effective way to teach health professionals vital skills, then surely it's an effective way to learn golf? It's certainly improved my game and revolutionised my practice. Instead of aimlessly thwacking balls out into the range before scraping over another ball to hit it in the same general direction with the same club, I'm using special shot challenges which challenge me to hit specific shots to order. This is learning how to control the club, which in time will lead to mastery. Done properly, it makes the range a lot closer to the course. This makes it easier to take your "range game" to the course- a frequent lament of golfers. Quite apart from all of that, it makes practice a lot more fun, which is great for those of us who can't always find the time to play 18 but can squeeze in 40 minutes of practice.

Choose your coaches wisely.

A good coach is wonderful to watch in action. I spent a long time looking for my current coaching team, and I couldn't be happier. Their group sessions are very similar to that life support course. There's a brief discussion of the theory behind the desired actions, a run through the basics and thence to repeated simulation of "in-game" scenarios. This often progresses to harder than usual situations, or the deliberate inclusion of pressure (e.g. make x consecutive shots from y feet). Add in a bit of friendly competition and you have an excellent environment for sporting growth that's fair, fun and fit for purpose.

Increased fun, decreased frustration and the confidence that time spent practising will lead to on course improvement. What's not to love?

Let me know your thoughts. You can catch me on Twitter, but did you know that people who comment on blog posts have a 42% greater chance of being thought attractive by the opposite sex?*

*sadly, this isn't true. But it should be. And I really like what you've done with your hair today.

A cautionary note

As I start to have a more definite plan for this blog, I've been learning as much as I can. I thus found myself experimenting with Google Insight for Search.

Below is the "interest over time" chart for golf.

The sine-wave like pattern's no surprise - interest peaks around Major championships and the Ryder Cup. Despite the year-long schedule of the main tours, golf remains a seasonal game for most of us.

The really chilling aspect is the consistently downward trend. Each time a Major rolls around, fewer and fewer people are searching the world's number 1 search engine for "Golf". This cannot be a good thing.

Google is the world's largest search engine. It's 1st port of call when we seek information - a sudden increase in searches for "flu treatment" informs Google there's influenza afoot. In the US Google knows there's an outbreak before the Center for Disease Control does. It's therefore not unreasonable to use search trends to gauge public interest.

Don't get me wrong - golf will always exist. Even the Lost island had a course. If the pro tours were wiped out overnight and the major manufacturers spontaneously combusted, someone somewhere would be making clubs. There will always be a market- as long as I have breath in my lungs, at the very least.

The size of that market is what's concerning. If the decline continues there will be a lot fewer courses, clubs and coaches out there. It's not enough to say "something needs to be done" and then wait for someone else to do it.

We have to be the ones to do it.

Golf must do all that it can to maintain the level of participation. Golfers must support their clubs. Clubs must entice & retain members. Professionals must look at maximising their client's return on investment.

We must arrest the decline or face a very different golfing landscape.

Take some time. Work out what you can do to improve the situation. Buy another beverage after your round. Seek out the nervous new members at your club and do everything in your power to make them feel at ease. Cajole your "that's me finished with that stupid game" buddy back onto the tee box.

Above all, treat junior golfers as you would adult members. Make it clear they are every bit as welcome on the course as you are. If they're better than you acknowledge it; let them play through if you're having a bad day. Junior golfers are tomorrow's full members and as such they hold the key to golf's future. We simply cannot afford to drive them away.

The power of "When"

The secret of the little change that brings big results.

I can put my finger on the day my golf game started to move forward with surprising precision.

You might think it was when I started to hit my driver well. Perhaps when I regularly took fewer than 3 shots from 100 yards and in. Or even when I started playing competitively.

Important as the above steps were, they all came some time after my game started moving forward.

This step fundamentally changed the way I viewed my golf game and indeed my life.

And yet, it's so simple many wouldn't understand its importance.

I stopped saying "if"...

...and started saying "when".

Unconvinced? Consider these examples:

"If I can get my swing to a point where it repeats and is predictable" versus "When I get my swing to a point where it repeats and is predictable"

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you"

"When you can keep your head..."

It takes a future where success is uncertain and failure remains an option and changes it to one where success will happen but is a question of time and effort. For me it was the realisation I was far too motivated and keen to improve at golf for it not to happen. It stopped me saying "I'll never get this stupid game" in my darker moments. Instead I accepted that however far away it might seem, I would get better. That kept me coming back when I might otherwise have become discouraged.

You may be shaking your head as you read this. I can appreciate that this could come across as "positive thinking mumbo-jumbo". All I can say in reply is whilst I understand this point of view, my game has improved significantly after taking this step. It's a step which involves no pain, is easy to make and only you know you've made it.

After all, what exactly have you got to lose?