Short Putting Challenge

When I was out playing tournaments as an amateur and a professional I always had the theory that if my short putting was good, my longer putting would be good as well. My theory was that I could be more aggressive with my mid and long putts when I was confident I could hole the short putt coming back. This meant that I spent a lot of time working on my short putting and I thought up a few different games/challenges to make my putting practice time more enjoyable. One of the games I used was called Putting Tee Ball and this is one I want to set as a challenge for you today.

To start you need six golf balls and six extra long tees. It is important that you use extra long tees as we want to make this game as challenging as possible. You need to set five of the golf balls on five of the tees as is shown in the picture above and to the left. It is important that you tee the balls up nice and high for the challenge to work. Then I want you to measure two feet from the tees and place the sixth tee as your marker to begin the challenge. Place the sixth ball next to the marker tee and take aim at one of the tees with a ball on top. The goal of this putt is to hit the tee so that the ball falls from it. This is why it is important to tee the balls high so that the ball you putt only strikes the tee and not the ball on top of the tee. Once you have knocked one ball from a tee you need to attempt to do this for the second tee and ball. If you succeed with your first attempt you can move onto the next tee and ball. The aim of the challenge is to knock all five balls from their tees with five consecutive putts. Once you have completed this from two feet, you can move the marker tee back to three feet and start again.

This is a tough drill and it may take you some time to move away from the two feet station. Make sure you keep trying and working on your short putting. I want everyone to record their scores either in the comments section of my blog or via my twitter account which you can find here. If you get to the three feet station and you knock four balls from their tees before missing one you would record your score as 3ft 4balls.

Enjoy the challenge that this drill is and I am looking forward to reading your best scores and seeing your improvement over time.

Until next time,

Brent

Happy New Year/Taiwan Girls Update

I want to wish all of my students, both past and present, as well as all of my blog readers a happy new year for 2011! It is a new year and most people are thinking of ways to improve themselves and their lives by setting new year resolutions. The new year is a great time to evaluate yourself and decide what you want to do for the next year. It is also a great time to evaluate your golf game and decide what you want to achieve during the next year.

Use some of my earlier blog posts to evaluate your game with skills tests and statistics and determine the weakest areas of your golf game. Then you can sit down and write some goals that will give you something to aim for. You then need to have a plan for your training and what you will do to achieve your goals for the year. This plan is important as it gives you something to focus on each week instead of the long term goals. This will make it easier to keep motivated during the tough times and you are focusing on training each day/week rather than the long term goal at the end of the year. Please contact me via my website or blog if you would like more information on how I can help you with your training plans for 2011.

On a different note I also wanted to update you on three of the Taiwan girls I coached when I was in Taiwan. The three girls, Tsai Pei Ying, Lin Tzu Chi and Hsieh Yu Ling, were the three top ranked female players in Taiwan when I was coach and we travelled a lot together and had some great results in different tournaments.

Well, now they have moved on from Amateur golf in Taiwan and have all turned professional. They have all been practicing hard and all three of them attended tour qualifying tournaments at the end of 2010. Through these events all three players qualified to play on professional golf tours for 2011. Tsai Pei Ying qualified for the Japan LPGA Tour and will testing her skills against some of Asia's best players in 2011 while Hsieh Yu Ling and Lin Tsu Chi qualified for the Futures Tour in America for 2011.

All of these players are young and it is a great effort for them to qualify for these tours for 2011. I am very proud of them and they all should be proud of themselves as well. I will keep you updated with their progress this year through this blog and hopefully report on some good results.

Until next time,

Brent

Evaluating Your Game

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

Tour Standard Fitness

This week was the monthly fitness training session for my elite students held with Scott Williams at the home of the PGA at Sandhurst Golf Club. This session is great for my students as there is usually a mixture of tour players, Golf Australia squad members and regular golfers looking to improve their fitness levels. Scott has developed a series of exercises that the golfers complete that measures their golf specific fitness levels. Scott has particular levels that he believes players need to be achieve to be golf strong and the golfers compete against these scores as well as their previous monthly results.

There are fifteen tests that are used during the session and they measure things such as endurance, strength, core strength, rotational speed and rotational strength. Some of the exercises are shown in the pictures in this post and they are a really good indicator of a golfer's golf specific strength and endurance.

After each of these training sessions, each participant gets a written report which includes their scores in each of the exercises completed during the session. As well as these basic scores each golfer also gets a plus (improvement) or minus (decline) percentage score against their previous score, their evaluation test score and the tour standard score.

It is a great session and well worth the time for anyone looking to see how they measure up, fitness wise, with the best players in Australia. Contact me via my blog or website if you want any more information or you can email Scott Williams by clicking on his link here.

Until next time,

Brent

The Importance of Lie Angle

When I am club fitting, the first thing that I check is what lie angle my student should be using in their clubs. As you can see in the picture to the left, if the lie angle of the club is not correct, the ball will be influenced off line. Basically, if the club is too flat (the toe is hitting the ground) the ball will be influenced to the right of the target and if the club is too upright (the heel is hitting the ground) the ball will be influenced to the left of the target. As you can also see in the picture, the ball is influenced more offline in the higher lofted clubs. The distances in the picture are assuming the club face is square when you hit the ball so you can see that even with a perfect swing, and a square club face, the ball will still go offline if your lie angle is not correct.

The next obvious question is how do you know if your club's lie angles are correct? The best way is to have your clubs evaluated by a PGA Professional. They will tape the bottom of your clubs and have you hit balls from a lie board. This board will leave marks on the tape where the club is hitting the ground at impact which will tell the professional if the clubs are correct, too upright or too flat. The mark will also tell the professional how much the lie angle needs to be adjusted. The lie angles need to be checked this way as the lie angle needs to be correct at impact and not at address.

The second picture in this post shows why you should use a PGA Professional to check your lie angles. This picture shows all the different marks you can get from a lie board depending on club path, club face angle and if the lie angle is correct or not. It is important that the professional takes into consideration all the things you do in your swing so the correct assessment of your lie angle can be made.

If you want any more information on lie angles, or you would like me to check your lie angles, drop me an email via the links on the blog or give me a call on 0402 77 55 46 any time.

Until Next Time,

Brent

Want More Driver Distance?

Since I have been back in Australia I have been doing most of my coaching at the Golf Science Centre in Cheltenham. This facility is great and it has some really cool tools and teaching aids that I can use in my coaching session. As we are an indoor facility, the most important piece of equipment we use is a simulator. Our simulator is a state of the art set up which comes from a company called AboutGolf. It is very accurate and basically gives you ball flight indoors. This a great advantage as I don't have to worry about weather when I am coaching. I was always a sceptic when it came to indoor teaching but this simulator has converted me.

Another benefit of using the indoor simulator is it provides me with information that I would not normally get during a lesson. After each shot a screen is shown which shows me and my student their carry distance, total distance, club head speed, ball speed, launch angle, spin rate and club head path. These figures can be used to help coach the student and can also be used when club fitting.

This brings me to the title of this post, want more driver distance? Since being back in Australia I am club fitting again and I am seeing some interesting results during some of my fitting sessions. I have always believed that higher lofted drivers will help a slower swing speed golfer gain more distance as they will launch it higher with a more effective spin rate. What I am seeing now is more loft tends to help most players launch it better and gain more distance. When I am club fitting I am looking for the optimum launch conditions for each individual player to maximise their distance. The advantage in using the AboutGolf simulator is that the facts and figures are right there in front of the student and we can work together by coaching and club fitting to find the most amount of distance for them.

We have a lot of different club head, loft and shaft combinations you can try, I can help you decide between two drivers you already have or I can evaluate your current driver. All of this is a lot of fun and you can see the facts and figures for yourself. The driver fitting matrix in the picture will give you an idea of what specifications might suit you and there is also a great article on my website on the newsletter archive page. You can check out my website here. If you would like a more personal and detailed analysis just send me an email via the link on my blog profile or call me on 0402775546.

Until next time,

Brent

Fitness Training

I have been helping a trainee professional, Kristian Tribuiani, with his game since I have been back in Australia. I coached Kristian when he was a junior at Rossdale Golf Club and I was the teaching professional there. It is nice to see how much he has developed since I last saw him and how much dedication he shows towards improving his golf game. Kristian understands that there are many parts that need to be addressed to play successful golf. He realises that he needs to have a golf strong body, a flexible body, a strong mind, correctly fitting clubs, a structured training schedule as well as a good quality swing to give him the best possible chance to play good golf.

Before he visited me for a swing evaluation he had already spent some time with Ramsay McMaster and his team at the Melbourne Golf Injury Clinic. During his sessions at the clinic his body was assessed for postural issues, range of motion problems and muscle imbalances relative to golf. Corrective exercises are then prescribed to get his body ready to make effective golf swings. He also spent time with Jamie Glazier who is a mental conditioning coach. These sessions have helped him with the mental side of his golf game.

When he visited me for a swing evaluation I noticed that his body could be stronger in certain body parts which would allow him to swing the club more efficiently. I suggested he take the time to have an evaluation with Scott Williams (pictured above) from Ocean Fitness in Sorrento. Scott is great at what he does and the session was very valuable for Kristian's training.

Scott took Kristian through a number of evaluations to determine areas that needed improvement and showed him a variety of exercises that he could use to strengthen his "golf muscles". The photos show how some of the exercises replicate the golf swing movement while some are used as general strengthening exercises. You can also have a look at a video on my facebook page.

The session was very thorough and beneficial for both Kristian and myself and I am already seeing the changes to Kristian's body being reflected in his golf swing. I will keep you posted with Kristian's scores as we continue to work on his game.

Until next time,

Brent