In one of my earlier posts I spoke about effective practice and how you should go about getting the most out of your practice time. This is great, but what parts of your game should you spend your time practicing? One obvious answer is to practice the parts of your game that you are struggling with. But how do you know what parts of your game are the weakest? Another problem you may have is how do you know if your practice is actually improving your skills in the areas you are practicing?The first part of any training program should be evaluating where you are at the moment. The easiest way is to use skill tests that test your ability in all of the different golfing skills. I have used, or am using, the AIS long game test, Dave Pelz putting test and Dave Pelz short game test. these tests test all of the golfing skills and are a great way to see what parts of your games need the most work. These skill tests should be done at regular intervals throughout the year so you can measure your improvement.
You don't need to use these particular skill tests, you can make up your own. As long as you complete the same tests each time you can measure your improvement. If you decide to make up your own tests, make sure you cover all the skills that you use on the golf course in competitions. Design different tests to test your skills in driving, irons, wedges, pitching, chipping, bunkers, trouble shots, long putts, medium putts, short putts and breaking putts and any other skill you want to evaluate. You can make up your own scoring system and check your improvement over the next six months.
Another way you can analyse your game is to keep statistics on the rounds that you play. This is a great way to see what parts of your game need work as well as analysing the parts of your game that let you down for that particular round. You can keep very basic statistics such as fairways hit, greens hit, number of putts and number of up and downs or you can get into more detail by recording where you miss your shots (left, right, short or long), the distance of each shot and what club you used. Keeping statistics is a great way to show any patterns you may have in your golf game and it makes it easy to target your practice in the appropriate, weaker, areas.The picture on the right of this post is a picture of the report that the golf statistics software program that I use generates. It gives a great deal of information and you can go into a lot of detail when analysing your rounds. This is a great program for keeping statistics but I have also used a simple Excel spreadsheet in the past for keeping the statistics of my students. Feel free to contact me at any time should you need any more information on statistics and how you should keep them.
Until next time,
Brent
