How I Dropped 4.39 Shots Off My Average Score Playing Only 1 Day Per Week

All right, what's going on guys? So hopefully the, uh, the connection stays pretty solid today, but I want to share this with you guys. This is pretty crazy for me. If you guys have been following me for that long, you know that I don't get to play a ton of golf, but kind of because of that, I've gotten some very specific opinions about how it is kind of best to practice for that because I've been able to see some pretty big jumps in my game. For not really a ton of time being put in. And for the most part, that's, you know, a good bit ahead of where most juniors are. So that's why I kind of wanted to jump in here and share that. So I'm going to be covering how I dropped 4.39 shots off my scoring average by only playing 1 day per week. Um, that's just out of, you know, restraints for my schedule and just stuff I've got going on. Um, but I want to share kind of like what I found with you guys dig into the numbers and help you guys understand kind of how to do this for your own game, for your junior golfer's game, and to really understand like here are the variables that we're pulling. And then I'll also be sharing with the actual changes that I made that kind of resulted in this most recent kind of shift. So go ahead and pull up the, the page here. So this was my data so far up until about the 1st of December. So I started playing golf again in October, had a long period where I was not able to play golf, uh, just moving and a bunch of stuff moving around. Um, but picked it up again in October. So over these first several rounds, I want to say we played 3 18-hole rounds and a bunch of 9-hole rounds. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. So this is about 10 rounds of data. Over that period of time. And so I was losing about 8.39 shots versus Division 1, um, which was not really the level of golf that I want to be playing. Um, 8 over. Um, this golf course I was playing is about 7,000 yards at sea level, averaging about 4.5 over for 9 holes and a little bit better than that for, uh, 18 holes. That's in part because the backside's a little bit easier, and so obviously I played a little bit more on the front side. You can see my numbers here. So I was losing about 2 shots off the tee, almost 3 shots on approach, about 2.5 shots chipping, and about 2.5 shots— a little bit better than 2.5 shots, um, putting. And then you can see that as kind of how it bears out versus Division 1. And then you can see I was hitting about 51% of my greens, give or take. I was converting on my birdies about just under 20% of the time. And one of the things that really stands out to me Uh, is this par 5 scoring average is just not good. Par 4 scoring average not very good. Par 3 scoring average is okay. And penalty shots is just astronomical. I've taken a little bit of a deeper look in here. I want to understand how often am I getting up and down in these scenarios. Hang on one second. I guess that's what happens when you do this stuff live. That's crazy. All right, so I'll put a note in this so when to skip ahead to, but if you're watching this live, just bear with me for a second. Pulling up the date range again. Let's see if I can pull it up. All right, let's try this again. So I'm gonna go over to the putting here. Um, so putting inside 5 feet was reasonably solid. Need to make a few more 4-footers, but not too crazy. And then I was 3-putting about 12% of the time, which is no bueno. And I see a lot of these 3-putts happening in kind of this 10 to 25-foot range, which again, you know, if I'm 3-putting over 25 feet, you know, whatever, but inside 25 feet, like, we got to be a lot more solid than that. So those are kind of like my big takeaways here with this kind of data set. Now I'm going to show you guys pretty much all the golf that I've been playing in December now, and you guys will see the, uh, the difference here. So only losing about 4 shots rather than 8.5. Um, scoring average went down to about 3.5 for 18 holes, that's over 2 rounds, and then about 2.7 over the 9 holes that I played. So this is 3.5 or 3.5 full rounds of golf. So not small, not big. I definitely want to see more data, but I wanted to share this with you guys because it was such a big jump in, in trends. So here you can see where I went from losing about 2 shots off the tee to losing almost nothing off the tee. I was losing about 3 shots. I'm losing about a shot, and I'm only half a shot versus Division 1. Um, short game got a little bit better, and putting got a little bit better. And so when we look at that, we're gonna see now I'm hitting about 65% of my greens. I'm converting about the same number of birdies, but my par 5 scoring average got better, my par 4 scoring average got better, my penalties went through the So that's kind of what this ends up looking like. And then you guys will also see here that my 3-put rate drops down to only 8%. So still not where I'd like it, but when it goes from, you know, 12% to 8% over the course of, you know, a month on you know, 3 months of data, then that's kind of something that stands out. So I wanted to make this video to kind of share that with you guys and quickly kind of highlight the stuff that I really focused in on in order to, to make that happen. So the first thing that I did a little bit differently is I started hitting more knockdown shots on approach. And so I kind of did this out of necessity, and that's one of the reasons that I always believe that you guys should be playing lots and lots of golf. On a regular basis is because you kind of work through problems on the golf course and you figure out, okay, how do I go out here and shoot a score without embarrassing myself? And so what I ended up doing was I really focused in on and said, okay, cool, I just need to be able to hit the ball solid because I was not super confident with the way I was swinging. I was like, I just need this ball solid. And kind of what I ended up figuring out is if I could just hit the ball solid, it was a lot easier to control the distance and it was a lot easier to control the ball in the wind. It was easier to control the shot shape, I knew which direction the ball was going to curve, and I was pretty much able to really figure out how to manage my distances and my lines extremely well just by hitting a little bit more of a knockdown shot. So that was the first major change that I made. The second change that I made was instead of trying to try and force a shot off the tee, so saying like, oh, I'm gonna hit it off that bunker and it's gonna curve back into the fairway and we're gonna hit a fade, what I pretty much did was I just focused in on and said, okay, cool, I just need to hit myself to a distance bucket. And the way I was kind of thinking through this was I knew that if I wanted to be able to shoot reasonably low scores, I needed about 70% of my greens. And so the way that I mapped that out for myself was I was like, okay, cool, well, if I hit 100% of the par 5s, which I pretty much should because I should be leaving myself a wedge or I should be getting there in 2, and I hit like 50% of the par 3s, which again is fairly reasonable, you know, I've got longer irons into those holes, but if we hit 50%, then we just have to hit 7 out of 10 of the par 4s, and that should leave me with about a 72% greens regulation number. And so rather than looking at, let me hit it as far off the tee as possible, um, I started looking at it as like, well, if I can just get myself to a yardage bucket that I can hit 70% or higher on par 4s, then I've pretty much succeeded off the tee because I've just moved myself into a position where the probability that I hit 70% of my greens is high, and I can just go ahead and execute on the shot. I don't have to really think about Hey, you know, let me hit a good shot and whatever. It's just like, just make a good swing, you know, aim the ball. And like, that's, that was pretty much it. And if my approach distance wasn't good enough, if I wasn't actually hitting a high enough percentage, then what I needed to do is get better at that particular number. I didn't have to really do anything else. It was like, okay, cool. And then knowing for me, I had a lot of wedges into these holes. I had 150 and less a lot. And so if I wasn't hitting the green, I was like, okay, cool. Why can we not hit a wedge on the green? Right? So it really kind of narrowed down my problem for me. And I think this is just kind of a highlight for a lot of you guys. One of the things that really gets a lot of players is trying to do too much. And when you try and have all these shots in your bag and all these things you're trying to do, what ends up happening is you're not really good at any of it, and you put a lot of strain on your game rather than just saying, let me just focus on what are like the minimum things that I need to do. So anyway, going back here, What I did was I really focused on off the tee. I just need to make sure that's in play and in one of those yardage buckets. If I can do that, great. And the other thing was, if I'm hitting 7 out of 10, I'm actually getting better than 70%. So that means I can hit like one tee shot in the trees, pitch out, and I'm still fine as far as hitting my goal. And so that really kind of de-stressed my situation where I could just say, okay, cool, let me just focus in on hit the ball in play into that bucket. And that was the only thing I was trying to do. And if I needed to lay further back, then I could know, okay, cool. Well, maybe I'm not laying myself to a spot where I'm gonna hit 70% or 80% of my greens, but maybe I'll, I'll still hit 60% or 50%. And it might just be a scenario where I was a little bit uncomfortable off the tee. I was just like, you know, I'm gonna prioritize hitting it in play off the tee. Maybe I hurt my greens regulation a little bit here, but as long as I just don't do anything that crazy, I'm still probably gonna be fine. And that's kind of how I just started like mapping it out. And you can see what that did for my, my tee to green stats. I essentially dropped about 4 shots just right there. And so that was just a major, major shift, um, in the way that I was approaching things. The other thing that I made an adjustment on was the way that I was practicing my putting. And so I, you know, was kind of struggling with my putting a little bit. One of the things that I didn't like about the way that I was practicing was I wasn't doing much uphill-downhill. It was just either uphill or downhill, but not both. And so I switched back into doing that where I was really focusing in on kind of the 20, 30, and 40-foot putts and trying to get them in kind of a circle around the hole. Because the way I saw it was, if I'm going to hit a ton of greens, then I'm probably going to 3-putt more. So I need to have better lag putting. And what I ended up doing was saying, okay, well, every time I'm on the green, I've pretty much accomplished my goal, you know, tee to green, and I just need to be able to 2-putt. And if I can 2-putt consistently when I hit the green, every now and then I'm gonna make a birdie, um, because I'm just gonna roll one in. Sometimes I'm gonna hit, you know, the par 5s in 2, so there's a birdie. And when I missed the greens, I was just like, okay, cool, let's just do the bare minimum. Like, let's just get this ball on the green. And then if I hit a good shot, I make par because I got it close. Or if I just get it on the green and make a putt, now I made par. And as long as I get it on the green, unless I 3-putt, like, I'm— the worst case scenario is I'm making bogey, which is going to happen. And that just kind of bears itself out in my scrambling rate. And so really simplifying the game for myself like that actually had a pretty massive impact on my scores. That, you know, one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of tracking numbers is because you're actually like able to look at it and say, okay, well, what are we actually doing here? What are we not doing well enough? Hitting 50% of greens is not good enough to shoot, you know, 74 on average, which is my goal, because that's what it is for the kids. And, um, that's what I want to be able to hold myself to and make sure the stuff I'm telling you guys is actually being validated. Um, so that's kind of what I focused on is just really keeping it simple. So just to kind of give you guys like the SparkNotes on this, I think that the core engine of this is understanding what your core yardages are going to be, especially on par 4s, because you're gonna have the most par 4s. Par 5s, you should have less than the par 4s, right? So that should be even easier. And then you have your par 3s, which are a little bit of a crapshoot, especially depending on how long they are. Um, So it's understanding that number. If you can get that number to 70%, and again, you have to track to do this, that's kind of where you want to be. Because if you can say everything inside this number is 70% or better, then it is very freeing when you have your tee shot to say, okay, cool, I just need to get in this bucket somewhere. If I can accomplish that, minimize the danger, I'm going to be pretty successful throughout this round. And then every shot is just like, okay, let's just do the bare minimums. Once you get it on the green, all right, cool, let's make sure our lag putting is really sharp. Let's make sure our short putting is really sharp. You're not going to really 3-putt that much. You're going to make birdies every now and then. And then when you miss the green, just get it on the green. Um, you know, it sounds like really, really simple, but that's— it's kind of because it is. Um, and I think the hardest thing to do in golf is trying to convince ourselves that it's okay to do less. And I think it's always, you know, we see these guys hit these crazy shots and we think that that's how we're gonna be able to shoot you know, better rounds, but it really isn't. It's doing the really, really simple stuff and just minimizing danger and making sure you do the bare minimum. So, um, hopefully this is helpful for you guys, just kind of like see what the numbers look like and also just kind of the thought process behind, you know, that level of improvement. Um, hopefully you guys kind of follow that as like, oh, this actually like is something that materially changed. Um, otherwise I wouldn't be showing you guys me shooting, you know, 80. Um, but like I said, hopefully this is helpful for you guys, and if it was, awesome. And hopefully it helps you guys and your kids shoot better scores.