The Practice Routine That's Holding Your Junior Golfer Back

What is going on, guys? In today's video, I'm going to be talking about why your child's practice habits are most likely holding them back from improving faster. If you're new to the channel, all we talk about is helping junior golfers develop to ultimately play Division 1 golf. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. It's going to be a really good one, a really important one. So just go ahead and jump right into it. One of the most common mistakes that I see among players, even players that I work with is really not understanding how they should be practicing, um, in an effective manner. So obviously when I'm working with a player, I have a little bit more of a heavy-handed situation that I have where I can get them to do a specific plan, and I actually know whether or not they're actually following through on that plan. That becomes very, very, you know, helpful for me. Um, but it still becomes an issue of we need to make sure that we're focusing on the right stuff, right? Because even when I'm working with a player, there's no magic by behind that, right? It's just because I'm going to be able to tell them what to do, and what I'm telling them is proven off of a tremendous amount of results. So I have a high degree of confidence that when I say, hey, do this to improve this skill, that's actually what's going to happen, right? And so one of the most common misconceptions I want to make sure I address in this video is more time on the driving range or more time practicing in general does not translate to lower scores. I think this is one of the myths that really gets pushed out there by some of, you know, unfortunately some of the greatest golfers of all time, um, which, you know, makes me feel kind of silly. But at the same time, I've done this myself, and I've worked with literally dozens and dozens of students, and I've seen this proved out, not just for the students that pay me to work with me, but also just people watching my videos, um, and engaging with me on, you know, on Facebook, Instagram, what have you, and applying the stuff that I talk about and actually seeing results from it. So I think it's chronically, um, kind of overdiagnosed here, where it's like so many junior golfers think they're not working hard enough and that's why they're not getting better. And at the end of the day, we've all heard the kind of expression You know, it's not about working harder, it's about working smarter, right? And so when we think about that within the context of practice, you can go out there and grind and grind and grind, but that doesn't mean that you're going to shoot lower scores. You have to work on the right things in order to shoot those lower scores. One of my favorite examples to give is when I was a junior golfer, I would play in tournaments, um, and if I played poorly, there are two things that would happen. I would either hit balls out of bounds or I would 3-putt. What do you think that I went and worked on after I got out of those rounds? Give you guys a second here to, to guess, come up with some ideas. If you guessed that I went and started hitting 7-irons on the driving range and checking my, my swing mechanics, you would be correct. Hopefully you can see how absurd that is as a strategy to get better. You know, like, hey, we've got this clear— clearly this glaring weakness that causes you to not be able to score. Why aren't we hitting either tee shots or putting, or even better, sitting back, looking at the data and saying, hmm, why are these things happening? Why am I struggling off the tee and why am I struggling on the greens? And is there a strategy that we can create to become more effective at both of those and then implement that particular strategy? So that's obviously not what I did. And I say that because I know that there are so many junior golfers that have that exact same mistake. I, I know that, you know, if you're watching this, odds are your child is doing the exact same thing where they go and they're playing tournaments. They might have one area of their game that, you know, costs them, you see repeatedly costing them, but instead they focus on a different part of their game. You know, maybe it's, you know, they want to make sure their swing mechanics are better. Maybe that's what their coach is focused on because that's the lens that they see things through, but they're not actually taking a step back and looking at it from the big picture of saying like, okay, like What are my statistics when I go out there and play? And if I could do one thing, like, what is going to have the biggest impact? And so this is just so crucial to, to understand, um, that you can't just go out there and work hard and expect to get better results. Now, how should you be practicing? I think this is the next important question here, is we want to make sure that we are practicing with the, like, You know, there's an expression, you'll begin with the end in mind, right? Our goal, if you're watching this video, is to shoot low scores in tournaments. And so in order to do that, there's a certain set of skills or shots we need to be able to have in order to compete in those tournaments. So one of the common mistakes that I see is kids think that they need to be able to hit every single shot, and that's just not true at all. There's a bunch of shots you don't need to be able to hit at all, and you can still score really, really well because they're just so uncommon, they're infrequent shots. And so We want to think with the, the perspective of I want to get my practice as close to tournament golf as possible, right? And so when I think about that, what does that mean? What are the shots that I have on the golf course? I'm gonna have a lot of tee shots, right? So I should have a section of my practice that is built around tee shots. And I don't want to just have random tee shot drills that I'm going ahead and doing. I want to make sure that it's modeled based off of something that's realistic on the golf course. One of my favorite drills to give students off the tee is to have them have an imaginary fairway that they're hitting into, and they are starting their driver on either the left side or the right side, realistically right fairway or right rough, left rough, and curving that ball back into the middle of the fairway and establishing one direction of curve with their driver. Why do I teach that? Well, it's because when you go to the golf course, guess what? You're gonna have to hit that shot a million times, and you got to be really good at it. You can't have an occasional just terrible shot. You have to know, okay, I can curve my driver reliably. Maybe it curves 20, 30 yards— that's totally fine. Um, you know, if you have proper strategy, you should be in a situation where you've got 70 or 80 yards from hazard to hazard. So realistically, if we're picking good targets, there's just— you know, we shouldn't be screwing that one up. and we should make sure that our practice is mirroring that. Now, just to be clear, I'm going to go through a bunch of stuff here. I'm going to go through a bunch of different drills, and there's going to be plenty of drills that I know that I'm just not going to go over in this video. Um, if this is something you guys want help with directly, you want to work with me directly, you want to have your junior golfer work with me directly, I've got a link below, um, where you can apply to do that, where I'll build out your child's entire practice plan. I'll even build out their tournament schedule and all the other stuff that goes into what they'll need to do to shoot lower scores and ultimately play Division 1 golf. So there's a link below, there, um, there's an application Or if you're just kind of curious about, like, it was the first video for me you're watching and you're curious about what it takes to play Division 1 golf, what you actually need to do, there's another video, uh, below or a link below titled How to Guarantee Your Child Gets the Attention of Division 1 Coaches. You can go ahead, click that, and there's a video that you can request. So walk you through how Division 1 recruiting actually works and what your child needs to do to be in a position where coaches are actually going to reach out to them. Anyway, back into the video. So long story short, when we look at those tee shots, right, it allows us to be very specific about what the player needs to work on, right? So let's say your child struggles off the tee and we say, okay, cool, we're going to go ahead and start using this drill format, right? We're going to have our 30-yard fairway. We're going to— let's say they hit a fade. We're going to start the ball down the left side and we're going to see this ball curve some amount. We're going to make sure every single ball curves. Now they might get up there, start trying to hit those shots, and there's a couple different things. They could start hitting that shot and, you know, let's say they struggle with it, right? They've never had to try and do that, and, you know, they'd go out there and they're trying to hit that particular shape, and, you know, it's just, you know, excessive curve, right? Maybe they're starting all the balls right and it's curving too much, and they're doing everything they can to try and get the ball to start online, but it's just, you know, starting too far to the right, it's curving too much to the right. Well, at that point you have a very clear problem here, right? You say, okay, cool, we're struggling to start the ball online. What do we need to do to make the adjustment to be able to start the ball online, right? And so that's when we get into something like swing mechanics, right? But it's, it's within the right prism, right? It's just within the right viewpoint. We're not going in there and saying, hey, let's just go arbitrarily look at your driver and like start making changes, right? That doesn't make a lot of sense. What makes sense is to say I've got a particular ball flight problem and I'm going to look at my mechanics to see why is that the case, and then I'm going to make an adjustment to my mechanics with the goal of solving that problem, right? So maybe the position at the top— I'm just going to kind of digress here a little bit, but bear with me. Let's say we're a little bit across the line at the top, and so that sets up a really big shallowing move. Club gets kind of under, face kind of lays open, and we pull it around the corner and we hit the ball high right, um, and, and kind of cutty, right? So one adjustment that a player might make, they might look at that and say, okay, if I could get the club face a little bit more laid off and I could get it kind of more on plane on the way down, kind of kicking out more in front of me, that face is going to be a little bit more organized, and all of a sudden the ball is going to start, you know, further down the left-hand side, right? All of a sudden we're probably hitting a more functional fade, right? So you can see just right away how that's a much more targeted approach to improving their game. And here's the best part: now we have a feel that goes with the ball flight that we want to have, right? So not only do we have our thing we revert into, right? Let's say they have a tendency to get across the line and they have to be mindful to try and get laid off, right? Well, now when they go to the golf course and they start blowing it right, guess what? We don't just say, oh, I need to go see my swing coach and get a lesson. It's, okay, cool, I need to feel a little bit more laid off. To get this ball starting left, right? Okay, I'm gonna feel that. Now the ball's starting left again. Okay, perfect, solved my problem, right? And this is one of the things that I just think is so overlooked in, in, you know, junior golf and player development in general, is just like being able to attach these feels to particular ball flight outcomes. Because everyone's so focused on trying to hit the ball perfect, they're, they're not actually looking at this strategically. So from a practice perspective It's important to say, okay, I'm developing that skill so I can translate it to the golf course. It's also important to be able to see, like, let's say your child does that drill and they just, they crush it, like they do really, really well, and they do it in the format that I just described, and then they go to the golf course and it falls apart. Well, then that's a different problem, right? Because if they can do it really well on the drill and they can't do it on the golf course, and it doesn't make sense to keep grinding on the drill on the driving range, it makes sense to figure out what changed. Maybe it's an alignment thing, right? Maybe they can't figure out their alignment on the golf course, and that's where the focus needs to go. Or let's say they can do it really well at their home golf course, but then they get to a tournament, they struggle. That's a different problem, right? And so when you think about player development, saying, hey, how do I get better, it's important that we're clear about what is the actual problem we're struggling with so that we can be specific about what the specific action is that we're going to take that's going to change that. And that's part of the reason I think I've been able to have as much success as I've had with players, because we can get very specific about like, here's the thing that's holding you back, let's make that adjustment, right? And so it's a little bit like the old analogy of how do you eat an elephant? It's one bite at a time. And golf is very much the same way. There's so many different skills that go into this. I'm just talking about drivers here. Think about all the things that go into putting or your approach play or short game that I haven't even considered yet. But being able to, to focus on the right thing when you have unlimited options is so, so crucial to really understand. So that's just, you know, one of the first things I want to impart on you guys is you want to make sure practice is as close to tournament conditions as possible. This is one of the reasons why I don't like 9-hole rounds. I don't like random 3 or 4-hole stretches. I don't like the random shot thing on the golf course. I understand people do it. I understand some people like it. I think that if you go out there and practice and you're playing on the golf course, you'd be shooting, be shooting for a score. And if you're not shooting for a score, really what you're doing is practice. And so in that case, it needs to be, what are we trying to do specifically? So I'll, I'll give you guys an example of the time I'll, I'll break this rule is if I don't know how far my clubs are going, right? So if I say, hey, I'm not really sure here, I might hit a couple balls to see how far is the ball flying. Right? That might be something that I might get recalibrated with. You know, if I have a different feel and the ball's flying a little bit differently, that's something I might take the time out on the golf course to figure out because I'm not going to be able to do on the driving range, right? But at the same time, as much as possible, I want to have to play for a score. Because if I always play for a score in a competitive sense, then I'm going to translate that very easily to a tournament because it's going to be like, okay, yeah, we're playing for a score. It's like, yeah, duh, what's new? Like I also have to like, you know, fill my divots, you know, it's like not a thing. Right. And so it's, it's just so crucial. You know, sometimes I hear people talk about like the mental side of the game and it's like, oh, well, you know, you need to be more relaxed in tournaments. And that's just not realistic at all. You need to be more deliberate and focused in your practice so that you're prepared to be deliberate and focused in tournaments. Right? So that's just a super, super important thing to kind of keep in mind here. The last thing that I want to throw at you guys is the importance of using statistics to be able to model out where your focus needs to go. Because if you're going out here and you're saying, hey, you know, I'm just going to go work on these things because I think it's a good idea, in my opinion, it just doesn't make a ton of sense, right? We want to be able to look at and say, What is the last 10 rounds telling us? Not the last round or the last 2 rounds, otherwise you're gonna end up playing whack-a-mole where it's like, hey, you know, we had this one part of our game, there's a problem, we worked on this thing, we fixed it, now there's something that's a problem, right? So we want to be able to have, uh, a clear perspective on enough rounds of golf to understand where our focus needs to go and see what's really holding us back and what was just, you know, potentially bad luck. It's one of the things that's really hard to understand with, um, large amounts of data is— or that we can only really solve with large amounts of data— is saying like, what's luck and randomness versus what are the actual underlying skills? And so that's one of the reasons we get this illusion that we can hit good shots intentionally. It's not actually true. It's just we can have a round where we hit a lot of good shots and they happen to finish close, but you're not considering all the times where you've hit flush shots and they're like 40 feet right? So it's, it's important to understand what you can actually do out there, what you can't, and use data to really understand that rather than just your own opinion, right? Because if you go into a tournament, you think, oh, well, I can shoot these really low scores, and then you don't, and it's like, well, maybe, you know, what— for example, let's say you have a scoring average of 78 and you go out there and shoot 72, which is completely reasonable, and you turn around at a tournament, shoot 79, and you're like, oh, I didn't rise to the occasion, or whatever. Um, the reality there is like you shot your average essentially, and it's just like you had this illusion in your head that you should have done better. And odds are you're probably going to make a bad decision on the golf course out of the frustration that you're not closer to your perceived target, right? And so long story short here, in order to have the most effective practice possible, we need to make sure that we're working on the right stuff based on our actual data. It's not just guesswork, right? Um, two more things I want to leave you guys with. Um, I know I said I only have one more, but hopefully you guys appreciate the additional stuff. Um, number one, make sure you're touching every area of your game per practice session. And this is just super important because we don't want to— like I said, we don't want to have that whack-a-mole situation. We want to make sure we're hitting our tee shots every practice. We want to make sure we're hitting our approach shots every practice. We want to make sure that we're chipping every practice, right? We don't want to have really great short game and then not pay attention to it and have it fall apart. I want to make sure that we have those same basic shots. We want to be practicing our putting every practice, right? We want to make sure that our mechanics are solid, that our lag's putting, our speed is solid. I want to make sure that we're doing those every single time. And the last piece that we really want to consider here, and we want to make sure that we're doing— this is so crucial, this is one of the things that I feel like I'm more or less known for, is we want to make sure that for every practice session we're playing at least one round of golf. We need to have— I cannot stress that enough, because the point of practice is to shoot lower scores, not to go out there and do a bunch of hard work, right? The point of it is so that the scores go down. And how do we know if the scores go down? We have to go out and play and prove that the scores are going down. And more importantly, part of the reason you need to track your statistics is we want to make sure that the particular statistic that we're focused on is actually improving, right? So if I'm trying to improve my ball striking, I'm trying to hit more greens regulation, I'm at 48% and I go out there and I shoot a good score, but I am at 45%. Did I do good? I'd say no, right? You got lucky, right? So if we say, hey, I've got this particular statistic that I want to focus on, that's going to give us a much clearer barometer on are we actually improving the things that we're putting in work for. If I'm working on hitting more greens regulation, it should translate into more greens regulation on the golf course. And because if I hit more greens, my scores will go down, that's how I'm going to see my scores go down, right? So hopefully you guys can kind of see how if you want to practice more effectively, or if your child's struggling to practice effectively and see real results, they have to have their tournaments and their performance at the golf course interconnected with the way that they're practicing. It can't just be a bunch of random drills that sound like they're good and hard or whatever. It can't just be a bunch of hard work and then just praying to God that you do well in tournament because you put in the work. You need to make sure that the, the shots you're hitting, the way you're approaching your practice, is reflective of the shots you actually have on the golf course, and they're based in reality with actual data. So hopefully this all makes sense. Hopefully this is helpful for you guys if your child is struggling here. Once again, if this is something that you need help with for your child and you're looking at all of this, maybe you're watching my other videos and you're just like, whoa, this is a lot, and you'd rather I just guide your child through this and tell them exactly what to do, um, there's a link below where you can apply for my coaching program. Once again, if you're new to this space and you don't really understand what it actually takes to play Division 1 golf, like I said, there's the other link there where you can learn how to actually put yourself and your— or your child in a position where college coaches will reach out to them, and you guarantee that you're actually getting attention from those coaches. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, and I'll see you guys in the next one.