How To Structure Effective Practice

All right, what's going on everyone? So, um, mixing it up today, going with the Masters hat. Um, had a good friend of mine, uh, give this to me, so I wanted to go ahead and rep that. But in today's video, I'm going to be covering how to structure effective practice. So if you enjoy videos like this, go ahead, leave a like. And if you want to see more stuff like this, especially with helping to play college golf specifically if you're a junior golfer or you're the parent of a junior golfer, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Still new here, so every subscriber, uh, really helps a ton. So I really appreciate it. But anyway, let's go ahead and jump into the subject. So structuring effective practice is super, super important. Um, when I look back on my own personal junior golf career, it was something that I really feel like I could have done a lot better. Uh, something that I could have been a lot more effective with, uh, was my time. Because I had the effort, and I think that kind of goes without saying, hopefully, that if you have a junior golfer, or if you're a junior golfer, wants to play Division 1 golf, then you need to have the effort. You need to be willing to put in 8 hours a day every single day in whatever the conditions are in order to succeed at the highest level. That's just par for the course, so to speak, no pun intended there, but that's what is expected. That's what you should have. Now, once you have that desire, you have that willingness, where you direct that desire and how you choose to use it becomes a lot more important. And that's kind of what I really hope to get into in this video today to kind of share with you guys. Because when we're looking at how, how we structure practice, um, it really, it comes down to the idea that you have a limited amount of time and you have a limited amount— you have a limited ability to train and get something in return from that training. And so what do I mean by that? Well, if you went to the gym, everyone would understand that if you just hung out at the gym all day, 8 hours a day, and you lifted heavy weights, that after a couple weeks of that you'd be completely smashed. Like, it wouldn't be that you'd be, um, you know, super jacked or something like that because you spent all this time in the gym. It's like you wouldn't have given your body any time to recover. And not only that, you couldn't have focused on, hey, I want to get this muscle bigger or this muscle bigger as opposed to this other one. You wouldn't be able to do any of that. And so if you just went in the gym saying, oh well, I just want to get strong at everything all at once by working really, really hard, everyone who knows anything about fitness would be like, you're an idiot. That's not going to help you accomplish your goal. But for some reason, a lot of time in junior golf, we look at it just like, yeah, work really, really hard because I heard that's what Tiger did, or that's, you know, what, you know, Ben Hogan did, or what have you. And while that is something that, you know, elite players do— Kobe Bryant, you know, famously worked out, you know, 3 times a day starting at, you know, 6 AM. Um, that isn't necessarily the most efficient way to improve and also maintain your sanity in the process. Now, obviously, those elite athletes, they have a crazy ability to recover, probably, you know, most of all. Um, we only have a limited amount of time. If you're a junior golfer, you got school, uh, you've got other things going on in your life. Your golf cannot be your entire life. And even if it could be, it doesn't really behoove you for it to be that way because you don't give yourself enough time to rest. And so that's kind of what I'm going to get into here. So key ideas, first one: less is more. So when you're going out there, don't think that by doing more drills or making more putts or hitting more golf balls that you're going to get better results. It's not really how it works. Don't think that by playing more golf every single day, um, that's going to get you to your goals faster necessarily. There is kind of a minimum amount that you want to play but just pushing more and more and more for the sake of it is oftentimes counterproductive. So that's just something to kind of like big picture principle here to keep in mind is you do not want to just go practice for the sake of practice. Pretty simple, but it's gonna kind of color everything here. Next one is you wanna practice with a purpose. And so this is kind of a cliché, right? It's like, well, what does that mean? When you go and practice, you wanna be really clear about, Why are we practicing? And this is, this is a question to actually ponder for a second. So if you're watching this, you can go ahead and pause the video, think about it for a second. Why are you practicing? All right, cool. So hopefully you took a second to think about that. The reason you should be practicing is that you can shoot better scores in tournaments when it matters. That's the whole point of your practice. And so when we practice, when you think about how do I want to set up my schedule for the week, how do I want to organize, you know, Which parts of my game I'm touching? How do I want to, you know, prioritize drills and parts of my game that I'm really working on? We want to think about it through that lens. And so if you're not already doing this, absolutely crucial is tracking your stats with some type of stats tracking tool, whether it's— I like Draw More Circles. I think they're great. I'm not getting paid to say that. I just, I use them. They're great. But there's other stuff as well out there. You can find stuff that works for you, but my recommendation is Draw More Circles. Um, you want to have that, you want to have that foundation so you can actually see, okay, cool, when I'm playing in tournaments, what are the parts of my games that, that breaks down? What is keeping me from shooting better scores? Because not all parts of your game are equal. For example, just so that everyone can have kind of a simple perspective on this, if you hit 90% of your greens— just take an extreme case, screw it, 100% of your greens, just, just for the sake of clarity— if you had 100% of your greens it is completely pointless for you to work on your short game because you don't miss the green. So it doesn't matter whether you can hit a chip shot, you don't have to, so it's not worth your time. What is worth your time is spending a lot of time on the greens and being really good at your lag putting, making sure you're making your short putts, making as many middle distance putts as possible, right? So that's just kind of like a simple perspective here, but we want to say, okay, big picture here, we want to shoot better scores. That's the whole point of it. And so if we're not measuring that, we're just wasting— we're just going out there and just doing stuff, right? We're just going out there and wasting our time. So you want to be able to practice in an organized way. So you want to be able to say, okay, I'm going to practice this many times and I'm going to play this many times, and I want to be able to prove to myself and my performance in both practice, you know, practice rounds and in tournaments, that this practice format, the things that I'm doing, are actually causing me to shoot better scores. If I can't prove that I'm just wasting my time. Um, and unfortunately, that's where, that's where most junior golfers are at. You know, they work all week, they grind on their swing, they go out into a tournament that is— pray to God they shoot something good. And that's just not the way that you should be approaching your practice. And so I know I haven't talked about a single drill. I haven't said, hey, go hit this many golf balls, any of that stuff, because this stuff is quite honestly more important than that. It's making sure that you understand these principles so you can apply them appropriately. Right? So that's our goal. Big picture here, we want to structure our practice around those things. So when we're looking at how do we want to allocate practice, right, we want to say, all right, what are the things that are holding me back? So I'm just going to— let's just say for the sake of this, we need to hit more balls in play, right? We don't necessarily need to hit every single ball in the fairway. We can hit some balls in the rough, that's okay. But we need to be able to hit the ball in play. We need to have a line at the green on our second shot. We need to be able to hit the ball on the green on our second shot most of the time. We need to be able to— or around the greens, we need to be able to chip the ball onto the green. You know, maybe, maybe we're close sometimes, maybe we're not. Depends on kind of where our second shot landed. We need to be able to chip the ball on the green reliably. We need to be able to have a 30-footer or a 40-footer and roll that 3 or 4 feet. And we need to be able to make our 3 or 4-footers. That's just kind of like a starting point here. And so if we're going to design practice around that, I would say, okay, cool, well, I want to hit some tee shots. I want to hit a specific number of ball— a specific number of tee shots in kind of a target zone, right? I want to be able to hit those in play because that's what I'm practicing, right? I need to be able to line up on every tee, know which direction my ball's curving, and go ahead and hit that and be confident that, you know, all my feels are going to work and I'm going to be able to hit a reasonably solid shot most of the time. Sometimes I'm going to hit a bad one But most of the time I'm going to be able to hit it pretty well. I'm like, got a limited number of balls because that's what I'm gonna have on the golf course, right? I'm not gonna be able to hit every single ball perfectly. I'm not just going to go out there and wail on golf balls because everyone— you, you already know you can do this. You get a bad tee shot, you drop another one, you flush it, hooray, you still made double. You know, like, better to hit a crappy ball that still kind of ended up in play and then make par, birdie. So again, when we're practicing, we wanted to mirror what we're doing on the golf course. We wanted to mirror what we're doing in competition. So off the tee, we want to make sure that we structure that in a way to say, okay, cool, I need to hit this ball in play and I've got this many balls to do it. My default number, I like to start with 10. 20 drivers, a lot of damn drivers. 5 drivers, not very much. 10 is a good number. So that's kind of, you know, where I like to start here. Approach play, same concept. We need to hit the ball on the green. Which distances do you struggle with that, right? Because you might be good at hitting a 7-iron but not good at hitting an off-speed pitching wedge. You might be good at hitting, you know, a lob wedge into the green and not be good at hitting a flighted 60-yard shot, right? It depends on kind of where your game is. And again, this is the importance of statistics, right? So again, build it around that. Look at your numbers and say, hmm, where in these numbers is there a major drop-off on just the number of greens that I'm hitting? right? Because that's going to be the simplest thing. Sure, we can look at proximity if you're a PGA Tour player, but if you're just trying to, you know, shoot in the 70s or, you know, shoot in the 60s every now and then, well, let's start by just hitting the ball in the green. And so again, you can do that without a TrackMan. You don't have to have hardly anything. Side note here, if you're a junior golfer and you go out and hit balls in the driving range without alignment rod, you're not serious. So, um, make sure you're doing that. All right, moving on. Short game, you want to be able to carry the ball specific distance, right? You want to be able to hit the ball on the green. So you got to be able to say, hey, carry this ball 5 yards, carry this ball 10 yards, hit this landing spot. You should kind of know how you do that. And so a real easy way to do that is to say, okay, I've got this amount of loft on my club and I'm going to rock my shoulders. I'm going to take, you know, same golf swing mechanics. I'm going to rock my shoulders. I'm going to see how far that— I'm trying to hit the ball solid to see how far the ball goes. Take note of that. I'm going to take a little bit bigger swing. How far does the ball go? Pretty soon you're going to be able to have a catalog of exactly how far the ball goes, and you'll be able to hit all the touchy-feely shots because you'll have a sense of how far I need to move the club. Moving on to putting, with our short putts, we need to be able to start the ball in line, right? So we need to make sure that our eyes are in the right spot, our shoulders in the right spot, our setup is good, solid, using some type of a mirror. And then for our lag putting, we want to make sure that we're able to, you know, hit the ball within a reasonable distance, we need to be able to do that uphill and downhill, right? I like 10% as kind of a rule of thumb. If I have a 20-foot putt, should be finishing somewhere in within 2 feet. And so that's, that's the way that you really want to be approaching practice at a small level, so you can say, okay, all these basic pillars of my game are going to be really, really solid. And you can get more and more granular in those of how you kind of focus those drills. But if you follow a practice session like that, you're gonna be somewhere in like hour and a half, 2 hours, which you can be focused in. If you have a 6-hour practice session, you can't be focused. By the time you're at hour number 6, you're gassed. And you're not doing that days in a row, right? So if you just go out there and say, hey, hour and a half, 2 hours of focused work, then you're done. So don't, don't go on, don't play golf, you know, etc., etc., because there's a big difference between when you go out there and practice and when you go out there and play golf. When you go out there to play golf, you're trying to shoot score. And so your warm-up on the driving range is a warm-up. You're trying to get your back loose because you don't know what you've got. You don't know what you've got until like the 4th hole. So don't Waste all the energy. At the same time, if you're going to go out there and practice, practice. Have an agenda, do it. And then think about this like you've gone to the gym, you've lifted some heavy weights, you need to let your muscles adapt and rest. And that happens through sleep, right? And so in the same way, you go out there and you do your practice session, leave the golf course, decompress, and sleep and rest. Let your body just kind of be like, okay, cool, I know how to hit a golf ball. Now we kind of zoom out here, move on to the next phase, which is the schedule, right? How do I schedule this stuff out? There's no one way to do this, but my general rule of thumb is if you practiced one day, the next time you go to the golf course, you should be playing golf. You should go play 9 holes or 18 holes in general, especially if you're serious. You should be playing 18 holes Saturday and Sunday if it's possible for you, or back-to-back days at some point during the week, because you're going to be playing tournament golf. And tournament golf, unless you're, you know, 11 or 10 or younger, is going to be 36 holes or more. If you're 11 or 10, then just have it whatever be whatever the corresponding number is for you. If you play 18-hole tournaments and that's, you know, maxed out, then you need to play at least 18 holes once a week. If you are, you know, 7, then you should be playing 9 holes. So it's like, if you're watching this, you've got a 7-year-old, and it's like, what's— what amount of golf do they need to play? Well, let's say they practice on Friday, play 9 holes on Saturday. That's enough. They're going to get better. They have 52 opportunities to improve every single year. Now, that might seem extremely low. That's kind of the point, is that you can actually get a lot out of not very much if you know what you're doing, if you're focusing in the right areas. Obviously, this is something that I help players do. I help them start their stuff, structure their stats, understand what they should be looking at, what to do, so they don't have to like puzzle all this stuff together. I just tell them what to do. If that's something you're interested in, I'll have a link below, um, where you can, you know, jump on a call with me and we can talk through if that's something you guys want help with. But anyway, back into this— shorter practice sessions are better. Um, I've kind of already touched on this a decent amount, but less is more. And so if you're ever in a situation where you do need to do back-to-back practice sessions, you could split it up or say it's like, I'm going to spend an hour on my putting And rather than following that up with an hour on short game, hour on ball striking, so on and so forth, where you get this kind of long, cumbersome, you know, practice, say, okay, I'm gonna spend an hour, hour and a half on my putting, that's it, I'm done. Um, but again, you need to have the time to rest and recuperate. And so if you don't have that time to rest, your brain doesn't really learn. Um, you just kind of tore a bunch of stuff and you didn't really do anything. Everyone who's watching this has played golf at a high level, you know what I'm talking about, right? You just grind and grind and grind and grind. You're just like, I'm completely lost. It's like you, you did too much, you lifted too much weights. And so shorter is better. Um, last thing here, and again, this is kind of like, you know, coming back to some of the things I've already said, is you want to make sure that you're not just going out there and just working on stuff. You want to be able to look back on your rounds and be really based on your data, be able to say, this is a shot I don't have that's keeping me from scoring, so I need to get better at the shot so I can score. And this is why you need to play that round of golf after you've practiced, because you say, oh, I can't hit a 60-yard shot. Okay, I'm gonna go to the driving range, I'm gonna spend 10, 15, 20 minutes figuring out how do I hit a 60-yard shot. I'll have to take the club here, I have to put the ball position here, I have to feel like this. All right, great. Can you do it on the golf course under the gun? If you can, congratulations, double down on that. Keep doing those feels, keep doing that. Don't, don't screw with it. You don't need a lesson from your coach. You just need to put the time in on the right thing until your stats say, hey, you're pretty good at that, you don't need to do that anymore, you need to do this other thing, right? You need to focus on this other part. This other thing is holding you back. Repeat the same process. Go into that, say, okay, cool, this is a shot I don't have. My lag putting is really bad. All right, cool. I'm gonna put in time on my lag putting and I need to get better at that. I'm on the golf course, does it translate? And you can always look back and say, if you actually know what you're practicing, you know how often you're playing, you can say, hmm, I made this change but I actually got worse, which is going to happen sometimes. That drill is not effective. Or I did this thing and I got better and then I hit the ceiling. All right, now I have to adjust. And you can always have this dynamic practice that isn't just based on, oh, I need a new drill because I got bored. That's a dumb reason to change your practice out, because if you're doing really great, don't change anything, keep getting better. And if you're bored, go play more golf. Go play enough golf to where you actually run into some problems. You're like, oh, I'm not bored anymore because actually I'm not that good at this thing, so I need to focus on it. Um, that, that is the way that you want to be thinking through your practice. So I know I haven't gone over, hey, you need to do this specific drill in this way— touched on a little bit— but that's not really the important stuff here. And if you want to have effective practice, it isn't about finding a new drill. It's not about approaching things, um, you know, more, you know, block practice versus, you know, skill development practice. It's being able to identify what are the building blocks in my game, what are the specific skills I need to improve in, What are the specific shots I don't have under pressure? Going out, putting a small amount of time, because again, 10, 15, 20 minutes of focused time beats the heck out of 6 hours of just grinding, right? And that sounds fake, yeah, I know, but I used to be an 8-hour-a-day guy, and now when I go and practice, it's, you know, I'm not hitting balls for more than, you know, 40 minutes or 60 minutes, and if it's 60 minutes, going through my whole bag. So it, it is so crucial to say small amounts of time, focus on that, get good at those skills, and then go test them on the golf course. Because you're going to have feels sometimes where they just don't translate for whatever reason. And instead of fighting that, just, just flush it, go back to what you're doing, and keep iterating and adjusting until you've got something that works. And then you're good to go. Make it, you know, do that every single time. We can move on to the next thing. So hopefully this video was helpful for you if you're looking to practice more effectively, or if you have a junior golfer that you want to help them practice more effectively. If you enjoyed this video, go ahead and like it. You want to see more stuff like it, subscribe. And if you want direct one-on-one help on this stuff and navigating this and helping your junior golfer translate their game into better practice so that they can improve faster, go ahead and follow the link below. You can set up a time for a us to talk that through. And if it makes sense, I'll kind of, you know, walk you through the next steps on that. So anyway, I hope this was helpful for you guys, and I'll see you in the next one.