How I Build Practice Plans Based On Statistics

All righty, what's going on guys? So in this video I'm going to be covering how I build out a player's practice plan based on their statistics. So if you watch the prior video in this series, you'll have seen how I kind of build out the initial statistical profile of a player, look at their numbers, which numbers I look at, why I look at those numbers, what those numbers mean, and how that informs, you know, whether we're going to be working on technical stuff, whether we're going to be working strategy, whether we just need to kind of allocate focus a little bit differently, and how we progress that through time to ultimately become a Division 1 caliber player. So if you guys haven't already watched that video, make sure you go back and watch that. It's going to kind of build on this. And if you're in a position where, you know, you're a parent, you're watching this and you're like, hey, I would like you to do this for my child, there will be a link below this video where you can learn a little bit more about my process and whether or not it would actually be a good fit for your child. So, uh, if you're new to the channel, um, welcome in. Um, this channel is all about helping your junior golfer develop to play Division 1 golf. So if that's you, um, go ahead, subscribe to the channel and leave a like if you enjoyed this video. So this video, like I said specifically, is going to be about how do we take these numbers and actually apply them into a practice that's coherent and actually causes to, you know, improve long term. So, um, and I'm just walking you guys through an example of actually a new student that I'm going to be working with. So I figured that would be the most transparent way to kind of show you guys what this looks like. From my end, a lot of time when I'm working with a player, they're not going to see all the kind of like legwork that goes into it. There's going to be like, hey, here's what your numbers are, let's go. Because a lot of the time when I'm working with a player, I don't want to firehose them with all this type of stuff. This stuff can be great, but to be frank, some of this stuff is a little bit complicated and I want things to be as simple as possible for the player so they don't have to have it like figure out what I'm trying to say to them. They can just go out there and execute on what I told them to do. So a lot of the time, that's kind of what I find is the best, especially work when I'm working with, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14-year-olds. Um, you know, it's going to be a lot easier to say, hey, I want you to do this, and then we check in every single week to make sure that, you know, they don't have any questions or like things that pop up that are going to kind of push them off of this kind of, you know, path that we've already laid out in front of us. So let's go ahead and kind of dig into this stuff. So the first thing that I like to do is I like to have a profile for the player. So in this case, I like to pull in their scoring average. I'm gonna pull in their scoring differential. So when you guys see me doing stuff like, oh, my player's improved by, you know, 3.35 shots per year, I'm able to measure that because I actually measure them, um, just statistically every single, um, every time we're checking in here. So again, these are kind of like the basic things that I want to have is just kind of like where we're starting here. I also like to have a pulse on how much golf they've, they've been playing here. So in this case, this player is relatively new into this particular stat profile here. So I think we've got 8 rounds if I'm reading that correct. Looks like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. All right, so we've got 9 rounds of golf here. Maybe we entered around the other day. Yep, we did. Okay, cool. So we got 9 rounds here. Or we've played 9 rounds, I should say, in the last 3 months. Tournament scoring, we've got our strokes gained, we've got 1.5. Tournament scoring average is 1.56 over. All right, practice. I always want to look at practice as well, just kind of see like how much volume we're doing as far as, you know, reps logged, but also I want to look at how is it comparing to tournament performance. So in this case, this player is underperforming in practice versus competition, which is actually, in my experience with better players, fairly normal, um, because you're going to try certain shots that you wouldn't otherwise try. So anyway, all right, cool. So now that I've kind of got that initial stuff kind of logged out, so we're going to see this number change as we kind of like make new adjustments. I always like to timestamp this, and I'm very adamant that, um, one of the reasons that I love this tool is I can look at specific date ranges and see how these numbers change, um, because then I can look and be like, all right, well, you know, since last time we said we're going to do this thing, did this practice work? Um, which is really, really important. Otherwise you're just doing random stuff. So anyway, after that, I like to see what's kind of our biggest opportunity, kind of going back to this exercise. So again, I'm looking at this and saying it's probably 3-putting. So we're going to move 3 putts. Right now it's 8.05%. I want to move that down to 3.05%, and that's going to be worth about 0.9 shots, right? Second biggest opportunity, always kind of— everyone's always going to ask, so it's like, okay, what's the next biggest thing? It's 3.05%, right? So it's going to be going from— I'm sorry, it's going to be going from 6.11 greens regulation GR to 67— 66.11%, and that's going to be worth 0.69 shots. All right, cool. So if we go ahead and do that, then what we're going to see, we add those two numbers together, is we're going to get a particular pacing here. So again, this would be at 1. 5.9 shots if we improved these two things to this kind of recommended benchmark here. We can't improve everything all at once all the time. We can really get focused into a few things. If you guys are watching this, maybe you have a business or something like this, you guys probably know that if you try to pursue 10 different options, you're not really going to get quite as good of results as if you just pursued one thing, right? So this kind of follows the same principle here when I'm working with my students. It's not just, hey, which drill to do, or here's, you know, this, you know, quick fix or whatever. It's really prioritizing, like, all right, What's going to have the biggest impact for the least amount of effort and then working our way down that list. You guys are not going to see me talk a lot about swing mechanics because— not because I like don't have background in that or I don't think it's important or anything like that. It's just a lot of the time swing mechanics, it can be difficult to change a player's swing and the relative impact can be low, right? So if we have all these other things in place, well, then we go and change the swing or we make an adjustment in the swing. We get really quick results, which in general is kind of what I've seen with the best swing instructors is is they want their players to have really high golf IQ first, so that way when they, you know, fix their jacked up swing, now they just instantly start shooting 65 because now they kind of have the pieces together. In the same way with my students, I want to make sure all the groundwork's in there before we start screwing around with the golf swing. Otherwise I'm going to get a situation where there's out there banging 7-irons trying to make their swing look a particular way instead of going out there consistently shooting scores. And now the swing is just a little bit more functional to be able to execute on the things we've talked about. Alright, cool. Hopefully that makes sense to everyone. So when I'm doing this, I'm going to go back to kind of my initial data here. The first thing I like to do is I like to make observations, just be like, what's going on here? So if I look at this, you know, I want to see, you know, par 5, par 4, GR needs to go up. Putting inside 5 feet. And I'm referencing some stuff from the prior video, so again, make sure you guys go walk, you know, watch that video just so you kind of know what I'm building on here. Putting outside 35 feet needs to improve, needs to improve. And those are kind of like the big things that are jumping out to me. Par 3 is excellent. There's also a probability here where I look kind of like at this, you know, statistical profile. Um, and we could have a scenario here where par 3 scoring, you know, GIR drops off a little bit. I'm not going to necessarily say, hey, we need to go get it back up to 70%. So part of this could result in better, you know, par 4 over, you know, par 4 greens regulation over a period of time. It allows us the space that our scores aren't going to mirror too much when par 3 greens regulation drops off a little bit. And these are all valuable things to know, especially if you're working with a kid or if your child is like moving up in distances, you know, maybe they're 11, 12 years old and they're trying to go play in like, you know, AJGA Junior All-Star stuff. Well, then that's a time where you kind of want to know and be like, all right, we're going to have 25 yards per hole longer in, like, how's that going to impact our scores? Like, are we going to be competitive? Um, these are all things by having those statistics you're going to know, you're going to be able to calculate the stuff out and say, hey, where should we put our attention based on that information? So, um, yeah, adjustments here pretty much going to follow the observations in this case, you know, uh We want to improve essentially 125 to 175 yard approaches. Again, this is referencing the prior video. Um, then we're going to want to improve make rate from 3 to 5 feet. We're going to improve lag putting from 35 feet. And that's pretty much what we're going to hang out with for now, I think. All right, cool. So when I have a practice plan I don't like my practice plans to go over 2 hours. I want them to be simple. I want them to be able to each have kind of a standard that they're performing at based on their statistics, and I want that to be easy to implement, right? So my, my practice plans tend to be somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours, and so that kind of allows us to have maximum focus and also maximum effectiveness. I also want the player to touch every part of their game because One of the things that can happen is if you only work on, let's say, your approach play for a period of time, then your putting drops off. What are you supposed to do with that? Like, it's not helpful. We didn't move forward, right? So we need to keep all parts of our game sharp, even if we're already performing at a high level. Um, and so that's why I like to structure things the way that I do. So I'm going to start here with off the tee, since that's in general going to be kind of the easiest. We're going to go ahead, go over into our off the tee stuff, and I just want to see like how often are we hitting the fairway. Um, it's just kind of like a starting point here. So we got 64.29. Let's go ahead and move this over. 64.29. And then we're hitting our 3-wood and other clubs, 67.86. And then the same for the 2-iron. You might have a different club. I just want to make sure that we're hitting our tee shots, right? If we only hit driver, what happens when we have to hit a 2-iron and we're used to it, or 5-wood or whatever. We want to know which direction those clubs go because we're going to have to lean on those because it'll set up the entire hole. So after I've got that, I like to round up. Um, so I like to round whatever our numbers are. So in this case, this would round up 70%, this would round up 70%, and this top one round to 60%. So if I'm having him hit drivers, the way that I like to look at this is we can't hit an unlimited number of balls. I like 10 balls as kind of like a starting point because we can be focused, hit 10 shots, and we can hold ourselves to a particular standard to say, I'm gonna hit at this target and I'm gonna hit this many balls. I'm gonna count how many balls actually was able to accomplish that goal. That's very similar to what happens on the golf course. And so it has a very high translation over to how we're gonna perform on the golf course. And so we're able to do that in practice. There's a high probability it's gonna be able to transfer to the golf course. A lot of the time when junior golfers are like, oh, or golfers in general are like, oh, well, you know, my game doesn't translate. I hit it so good on the driving range. They get to the golf course, That's actually not true. It's just there's a bias in our minds that says, you know, ignore all the bad shots on the driving range, um, and just remember the good ones. But those like 2 bad balls that you hit out of 10, it's like on the golf course, if those are gone, they're gone. Those are double bogeys, right? So being able to have the attitude of like every shot matters, um, and really being attentive to that has a very good translation over the golf course. It also puts you in a situation where, let's say In this case, the standard will be you need to hit 7 out of 10, kind of an imaginary 30-yard wide fairway. Well, let's say you miss the first 1 or 2 balls. You have to be very attentive to be like, okay, how am I going to do this? Like, what is the shot shape? What's the pattern that I'm comfortable with here? You can't just go out there and be like, oh, trust the process, and bang, you know, 5 left. Be like, no, like, you got to figure it out. And so it, it has a much better kind of translation rate Again, and sometimes you're going to underperform, and that's okay. You're going to go out there and you need to be— you're performing at 10 or 7 out of 10 and you perform at 4 out of 10. You're like, wow, okay, that, you know, red flag here. You know, we need to improve that, or we need to be a little bit better there. It might not be the main focus, it might not be the biggest deal in the world, but it's something to be aware of that keeps you sharp through the rest of your game. Make sure that you're not just forgetting about stuff. It also makes it so that you know, you, you have to deal with the psychology of like sometimes you don't perform at the level you'd like to. It also puts you in a position where if you go out on the golf course and you outperform that, that's a nice feeling because sometimes you're gonna have bad practice sessions and you're gonna follow up with a great round, right? And it's, it's important to know that. So when you have a bad warm-up session or something like that and you're like, I know it doesn't affect my scores, right? So it's, it's about the long-term progress rather than the short-term, you know, round-to-round stuff, which can be really, um, crazy for junior golfers. So Again, go ahead, 8 out of 10 for these other ones. And that's going to kind of form our off the tee section here. Um, for the approach shots, we're going to break this into about 125, you know, probably 135, 150 yards, somewhere in that ballpark. We're going to do that for 175. We're going to do, let's see, 100 85, and then 200 yards. Okay, and then what we're going to do is we're going to go back into our statistics and say, all right, for those approach distances, where are we at? So we've got— is this for— this based on— all right, cool. I always want to make sure I'm looking at consistent data sets. We're looking at the last 5 for this one. Um, And so 58.33. All right, so 58.33. And so our standard here is gonna be 7 out of 10. So each one of these shots, again, we're hitting 10 balls, we're going to try and hit 7 out of 10. In this case, it's not going to be onto an imaginary fairway, it's going to be onto an imaginary green. So again, it's going to be roughly 20 yards wide instead of 30 yards wide. Not a big difference, but that's kind of where We're starting there now from, let's see here, from 150 to 175 versus 175 to 200. We could go either way on this. This is one of the things that I'm probably going to talk to the player about because on the one hand, we could say let's focus on, you know, 150 to 175 if that's kind of a predominant number. The other side of this is like one of my kind of outstanding questions here is why is par 3 green regulation so high? Because normally I would think that, you know, normally I would think that from 120 or 175 to 200 yards is gonna be our standard par 3. Well, if that was our standard par 3, like let's say in an AJGA event, well, this would be a real problem. Like, these are really going to hurt our scores. So in that case, I would put a lot of emphasis into that, into cleaning that up. So just for the sake of this example, that's what I'm going to do. Um, and then again, our standard is going to be reflective of like where we're at on the golf course. So in this case, it's 2 out of 10. Yeah, if that's really easy, great, this number should improve. And, you know, if we're in a situation where it's not improving, then we want to be able to look back on this plan and say like, what happened? Like, what— why is it not improving? And that's, you know, that's part of why I talk to all my students once a week. Um, so that's kind of what their practice is going to look like on approach shots. This is 60 balls. It's going to take probably about 30 minutes. It's going to take about 15 minutes. We've got about 45 minutes of ball striking, half the practice, which is about appropriate. If we do a lot more than this, we're going to start running into mental fatigue. I mean, like, we're talking about 6 different challenges. Like, that's a lot. Um, I wish that these were even tighter ranges. I wish it was like plus or minus 10, um, to be really exact on this stuff. But, you know, we got to work with the tools we've got right now. So That is the approach practice here. Short game, I like to keep it really, really simple. Um, there's some variation you can do with this. I think short game drills are super overrated. Um, if you guys watch my last video, I, I don't think very highly of short game in general as far as driving actual scoring. Um, I know that a lot of tour players, that's kind of where they're focused on, but again, they've kind of maxed out all these other variables that, that I'm going to talk about. Most junior golfers happen— so what I like to see is being able to carry the ball a specific distance. So whether it's 5 yards, you know, 10 yards, 15 yards, I want the player to be able to do that like on command. I don't need to hit, you know, 6 different trajectories. I don't need to hit the super spinning one, the running out one, all that stuff. I need to have a basic shot that when I miss the green, I'm gonna be able to reliably hit the green, carry it a specific distance, and give myself a good shot getting up and down. Really simple stuff. So that's probably going to be, depending on where the player's at, that's probably going to be 15 minutes. I'm not going to be too crazy. I don't get too meticulous on short game. You can also throw in bunker stuff as well, but again, you know, a lot of times that's not where players need to put the most time. So now we're kind of into the last one, putting. Putting often gets forgotten or not considered that well. There's, there's kind of 3 drills I'm gonna put into putting. So the first one I call it the mirror drill. I want to make sure that the players are setting up consistently because that's going to dictate our ability to hit the ball online, right? So if we can do that consistently, we're going to be able to start off with a really good foundation. You're going to see a lot of tour players, if you watch them on, on the putting greens, they're going to start off like this where they're just going to make sure their stroke is solid. So that's fundamental to every practice session we're pretty much ever going to do, because if you're setting off like wide open and like you got weird shoulders, it's like, yeah, like I understand that there are some guys who can do that or girls that can do that, but you at least got to be consistent with it. And so that's kind of the first one I like to see, a 5-foot putt on a straight, um, on a straight 5-foot straight putt, and I want them to make 20 in a row. That's enough where we're going to get a really good sense of, you know, being able to, you know, make the putt. But it's not going to be like 100. Like, 100 is kind of stupid because you're just on autopilot, you're going to wreck the greens, greenskeeper is going to hate you. It's not a good way to go for this particular player. Because I know that I want to improve his putting inside 7 feet, and specifically from 3 to 5 feet, he is, you know, kind of underperforming here, and that's hurting his ability to, you know, consistently 2-putt. Next drill I'm going to do is called the 3-4-5 drill. Um, this is kind of adopted from my golf mentor, a guy named Jeff Smith. I rate our golf pro on Instagram, but it's an amazing drill. That is essentially a clock drill. It's got, you know, 12 tees around the hole, and it makes sure that the player is able to make, you know, putts from different breaking— different breaking putts in all directions, uphill, downhill, from 3 to 5 feet. So these two drills are going to kind of compound on each other. It's going to make sure it's like, can we set up consistently and are we making our short ones? And so we're gonna have to go into that drill and say, all right, we need to be able to make our short ones. Then the last drill I'm gonna throw in here I want to sharpen up the lag putting. So what I'm going to do is call it the 20-30-40 drill, or also known as the 10% drill. So what that's going to be is we're going to set up tees from 20 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet. We're going to set them up on either side of the hole. Ideally, this is on a slope. We're going to be putting downhill, um, one side, uphill the other side. From 20 feet, we're going to need to roll it inside plus or minus 1 foot, so 10%. That's, that's the name of the drill. From 30 feet, 3 feet, or plus or minus foot and a half, 40 feet plus or minus 2 feet. You gotta roll 3 in a row into that kind of window, and then you go to the other side. Once you've done it, you know, 3 in a row, you're done for that one. All in all, this drill takes about somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes. Now that's kind of how I'm starting off this kind of initial practice plan here, and that might seem relatively simple, but this is the stuff that, you know, What I found works really, really well. Um, I, you know, I was a junior golfer once upon a time and I did not do this. I just kind of went out there and banged balls. Um, so just having this kind of discipline of looking at like, here's what my numbers are, here's kind of what my main priorities are, um, gives me a really good window to figure out like, why are these problems? Because, you know, this player goes out here and, you know, he's hitting these shots and he's just, you know, struggling. Well, then now we can have an intelligent conversation about like, why are we missing the green? Is our contact not good? Or is our start line not good? Is our, you know, our curve not good? Now we can have an intelligent conversation about if we have to tweak something in swing, what do we have to tweak and why based on the ball flight and the end result, right? Let's say this player struggles to hit a start line. Well, then we can have a conversation about like, okay, here's what's going on in your swing. Here's why you're struggling to hit that start line. Here's the adjustment we want to make. And then while we're working on that feel, we're able to still perform to the standard, or at least pushing ourselves to perform to the standard, which again, is based on how we're performing on the golf course. So in theory, this shouldn't be that hard. Um, but in theory, if we can do this on in the practice, then we could also do it on the golf course. And if we're struggling there, again, it might be other things. It might be we're not getting the correct distances, or we're not kind of accommodating, you know, what's our short number, what's our long number on the green as far as like, you know, front, back numbers, middle pin, etc., etc. All other things that I get into with my students. I can't get into all those like little details in a YouTube video because specific to each scenario. Um, but this is just kind of how we start off the practice stuff. Again, if you guys want me to do this for your junior golfer, if you're interested in this, then there will be a link below this video where you can learn a little bit more about my process, um, and how, you know, we can work together, or if it's even a good fit to work together. So, um, and again, that— just to be clear on that, that is for your child if they want to play Division 1 golf and they're essentially between 10 and 16 years old. Um, outside of that doesn't work super well, but 10 to 16-year-old That's the sweet spot. So if that's you, definitely check that out if you're interested in just having me do this for you. So that is how I build out a player's practice plan. Then I will also, based on that, build out their schedule kind of based on what their things look like. Typically, I'm going to stick to a rule of thumb of I don't want you to practice more than you play. So if you go out there and you do one of these practice sessions, I want you to go and play and log it. Um, in your next practice session or your next session outside. The reason for that is the whole point of us putting in this effort is to change these statistics, right? And so we want to be able to measure, is this causing improvement or not? Because if we get on a call in a month or two or three months and we've got another 10 rounds and these numbers are not improved, well, that's a problem. Uh, we need to be able to adjust something. We need to change stuff. And so by going through this process, we can be very meticulous about like, all right, here's the big picture, but then here's like the marching orders. And then when I get on my weekly calls with my students, it really allows us to say like, all right, what's kind of going offline? What are the problems that are coming up? And then address those so we're able to continue kind of like moving in that straight line toward our goals. So hopefully this was helpful for you guys. Hopefully you guys learned something. Um, again, if you're new to the channel, go ahead and subscribe if you have a junior golfer who potentially wants to play Division 1 golf. That's what this channel is all about. And if you guys enjoyed this video specifically, please go ahead and leave a like. It really helps push it out to more people in the YouTube algorithm. So I hope you guys— it was, uh, this was helpful for you guys. And in the next video, I'm actually going to be covering tournament selection, kind of how to think through that stuff. So if you guys have enjoyed this one, go ahead and watch that one as well. That'll really help you guys kind of understand how to navigate that, makes decisions there. And if you guys wanted to learn more about statistics, watch my prior video where I kind of show how I map out all my student statistics before I go into building this practice plan. So hopefully this was helpful for you guys, and I'll see you guys in the next one.