What I Learned From 85 Minutes With Sean Foley Edited

What's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be sharing what I learned from spending 85 minutes with Sean Foley the other day. So, um, yeah, yesterday I had the opportunity to be able to listen to Sean and be able to ask him a few questions. I was part of a golf group that I run with my golf coaching mentor, a guy named Jeff Smith, but we help coaches become better coaches, essentially. And so, um, Jeff knows Sean, and he was able to bring him on to the call, which is, which is really awesome. I've never had the opportunity to talk to Sean before, but I figured that I would kind of share with you guys what I learned from that call. Um, so kind of start with, uh, with the basics here. Obviously, I've got to do all the YouTube stuff, so if you're new to the channel, um, please, uh, if you enjoy this video, leave a like. And if you want to see more videos like this, normally I'm focusing on junior golf specifically and helping junior golfers develop to play college golf. So if that's something you're interested in, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. I'm just going to show you when I publish new videos every single week. So anyway, let's go ahead and jump right into it. So, uh, if you guys don't know, if you've been living under a rock or something like that, Sean Foley was Tiger Woods's third professional swing coach. Sean had the awesome opportunity of being able to work with Tiger after the whole, uh, 2009 incident happened for, for Tiger. So it was a really tough, tough situation. But as you guys may or may not know, my biggest thing, the thing that I really focus on, is, is practice, right? Um, and stats. So it's like, how do our numbers impact our, our way that we should practice? And so, you know, some of these more old school guys, it's really interesting, um, to look at and be like, how did they practice? You know, what did they do differently? Than, you know, just kind of everyday players. And so I think a lot of the times when players look at a guy like Tiger, he's almost kind of presented as like the model workhorse of just somebody who's just, you know, perpetually works out, perpetually working on his game. And that's something I notice a lot with junior golfers specifically, is they will just grind all day. Like, they'll, you know, go for weeks and weeks and weeks just like grinding on their swing or something like that. And they're not really knowing if they're improving because they're just going out there hitting I'm shooting lower scores. And so it's always a question for me of how do I optimize a player's practice and how do I get them focused on the right areas of their game. Now, you know, I do that with data, so I have all my students track their stats, and then I have a sizable amount of data where I can make a decision and say, okay, cool, here's how I want you to practice, here's the way that I want you to format this, and then I can actually measure their progress and results over time. Now, um, obviously back in the day, you know, people didn't have, um, that much data, you know, even when back 2009, 2010, I'm sure there was, you know, kind of the beginning of Stroke Gain, but for the most part, people are still trying to figure out TrackMan, which is obviously, you know, an important kind of benchmark here. In my opinion, I think that, you know, that's obviously really, really important, and that's really great stuff. I just like to go a little bit past that and kind of look at big picture data numbers, because personally, I believe that if I know your data and I can use your data to predict what you're shooting right now Well, then I know if we change what you're shooting right, or what your data says, you know, what your particular skills are showing, then we're going to improve the scores. And so that, that's how I coach my students. But again, if you have the opportunity to talk to someone who has been around the GOAT, um, you know, the greatest golfer of all time, you know, probably next to Jack Nicklaus, what did he do? That was, that was the number one question I wanted to ask. I kind of started off, I was just like, okay, well, like, how do you practice, you know? Kind of in these, all these scenarios. Now, the first kind of caveat here is, you know, when Sean was around Tiger, it was post, you know, kind of like all the chaos. Um, he wasn't invincible anymore. Um, he had all sorts of crazy stuff going on. And so for him, it was still kind of, you know, an interesting thing to see. So I wanted to share this with you guys because what he said was he's like, Tiger would get up in the, you know, get up in the morning, do do his workout, you know, pretty standard stuff. And then what do you do is you go to the golf course and you hit balls for, you know, or you like work on a particular area of his game for about 45-ish minutes. He— one of the things that he said that I was like very interested in, I thought, I thought was very interesting, is he would do things very, very slowly. Um, so you'd have a lot of like slower reps, um, time in between hitting shots, um, working on a particular feel or something like that in slow motion are all things that Tiger would do. And he was also very, very aware of when he was mentally checked out, um, where he's just like, all right, cool, I've done enough, take a rest. So you go back to the golf cart. And the other thing that he would do is he, you know, when you do that, he'd go and play 6 holes or something along those lines. So again, he'd have a little bit of practice, you know, 35-45 minutes work on something, whether it's, you know, wedge play or chipping or putting or, you know, hitting longer shots. But you do that and then you go play golf and then you come back to work on something else for, you know, 45 minutes or so, take a break, go play again. And it was kind of that, that, that was his process for kind of like rinsing and repeating his, uh, his practice. And so it's a little bit different than I approach it, but it was kind of fascinating because again, One of the things I always emphasize with students is if you're out there for, you know, working on something for 3, 4, 5 hours, like, it's just way too much. If you have golf balls for, for 3 hours, like, that's just insane. It's just way too much. You're not— the quality of your reps goes way down. Um, so typically when I'm talking to students, when I'm working with them, the most we're ever going to spend in a particular area is about 45 minutes. Sometimes it's less. To be quite honest. But a lot of the time we do kind of live in that kind of 45-minute range, especially around the ball striking. That's going to be the most intensive— ball striking, putting, both are going to be around kind of 45-minute benchmarks there. Drivers are a little bit shorter than that, chipping's a little bit shorter than that, but that's kind of the gist of it. And it's kind of interesting to look at a guy like Tiger that you would think it's like, oh, we're just out here 8 hours a day every single day, you know, just grinding. And it's a lot more methodical than you might otherwise think. So that's the first thing I want to share with you guys is just like, if you're— if you've got a junior golfer, they're out there grinding every single day and they don't really have a plan for what they're doing, that's not what the best players in the world are doing, plain and simple. You know, the best players in the world are a lot more methodical, um, and the greatest player ever is a lot more methodical than that. Um, And so that's part of the reason why I spend so much time helping my students on that particular area is because if you just go from like 3 hours of garbage or not really, you know, high quality, high focus performance to, you know, let's say 20 minutes of focused reps, 30 minutes of focused reps, 40 minutes of focused reps, that's a lot more realistic. That's a lot easier to do. And odds are, even if you've got a a younger kid, you know, maybe they're 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, they can probably still focus on something for 40 minutes. Um, that's still kind of like within, within range. And then the other side of that coin is you got to go and play golf. And just like, keep in mind here, even if we're in a cart, like let's say we're playing really fast, we're in a cart, I always talk about a ratio of at least 1:1 play to practice. So we're going to go work on something, we want to go see how it translates on the golf course. You can kind of see Tiger's following that same model as well. Um, where he's practicing a little bit, go to the golf course, see how it performs, go back, work on something else, go to the golf course, see how it performs. Now, he might be doing that the same day. Um, typically I'm going to split that up for players where we're going to have one day we're focused on practice, next day we're focused on playing, so on and so forth. But again, big picture here, that is a format that you guys want to stick to. And so if you have got a junior golfer where they're just going day after day after day working on stuff, but they don't go play golf, for a score, that, that's gonna like run into some problems. Um, they're not gonna perform as well. They're playing every single day and they're just like mentally gassed. Odds are you can actually do addition by subtraction, just cut out some of the stuff, get them a little bit more focused in their practice. Make sure that you understand their stats. Again, this is why I collect this stuff. Make sure you understand their stats so you can organize that practice effectively. But less is more, uh, is pretty much the takeaway there. Now there are two other, uh, big things that I heard that I thought were quite interesting. Next one is, so one of the things I was trying to pull out is just like, how did Tiger, you know, go about his business on the golf course, uh, when he was like playing a round of golf? And what Sean said is he's— he'd play a ton of worst ball. There's actually something I want to go test out, you know, over the coming weeks, um, because if you don't know what worst ball is, it's pretty much you take— you had two shots and you play the worst one. And what that really forces you to do is it forces you to understand like how bad shots you can hit, um, are, and and it requires you to be a lot more disciplined to actually do that, to play for a score. You have a tee shot, it's not how do I like thread the needle up there? It's like I gotta hit 2 balls and both of them have to be usable. I can hit 2 approach shots, both of them have to be usable. I have to hit, you know, 2 chip shots, both of them have to be usable. Where, you know, same thing with lag putting and so on and so forth. Both of these shots have to be usable. If I make a 15-footer, I have to validate it. So it really cuts off your opportunity to make a lot of kind of like random birdies. But the other thing it does though is it really forces you to be a lot more conservative in your decision-making. And so something I want to test out, because the caveat to that is if you go out there and shoot a million, that could be a little bit emotionally demoralizing. But on the other side of that though, if you go out there and you can shoot, you know, 78, you know, 75 on a worst ball, especially if you're a junior golfer, like that's incredible. And when you go out there and just know and be like, even if I hit a bad shot, like I'm going to be totally fine. And you get very, very comfortable just kind of seeing the window that your ball is going to come out amount of curve your ball is going to have. Um, you're playing at a very high level. Um, so that's another one that I want to share with you guys. This may be something if you've never done that before, you want a little bit of challenge, I would recommend this to someone who is already shooting probably 75, 74 on average. So we're talking about a plus handicap realistically. I would not do this if you're shooting 90 on average because you go out there and shoot 110. Um, don't do that. Um, but if you've got good control of your ball flight, you feel like shooting solid numbers and you want to, you know, get better and challenge yourself, Worst Ball is a great game. Play. The last one I'm going to share with you guys that I'm, I'm very excited to try out, um, I thought was super cool, is, um, he would play essentially 3 balls on one hole. So he'd play from the tips, from the middle, and from the front tees. You get to play 18 holes in like 6 holes. Um, and if you think about that, depending on how far you hit it, you're gonna be hitting completely different shots, you know. So I'll give myself as an example. I hit the ball reasonably far. I hit it about, you know, 320. Um, so I'm gonna play a lot of golf courses, they're gonna be like 7,000+ yards. That's gonna be kind of where I should be playing. And so if I'm hitting driver, you know, I might have a situation, right, driver, you know, pitching wedge or 8-iron or something like that depending on how long the hole is. Um, I might play a 600-yard par 5 where it might be hard to get to the par 5 in 2. Um, and those kinds of scenarios, right? Then I'm going to play from the middle where it's like I'm probably going to be hitting myself to maybe have sand wedge or a lob wedge. I'm gonna have to get good at those shots. And maybe instead of hitting driver off the tee, I might be hitting 2 irons off the tee because maybe a bottleneck or something like that. And then from the women's tees, or like from the all the way up the front tees, it's like, okay, well now I'm looking at driving every single green, and if I miss the green, then my chip shots have to be really solid. And then I'm looking at like, okay, I'm gonna make a lot of birdies, um, And so, you know, looking at that, it's like you might have a card where you're shooting 64, you know, 69, and maybe 74, um, and as kind of a way to evaluate yourself. But it kind of hit me, I was just like, man, if you can do that, then you really have to have all the shots. You got to have all these different scenarios, um, and you also have to have extra work as far as the psychological, like, toll of, um um, the, the toll of the decision-making that goes into each one of those shots. Because if you're talking about, okay, cool, we've got, um, you know, drivable par 4 versus like, hey, lay up to this spot or hit your driver and play— like, those are completely different scenarios. Your second shots and third shots and so on and so forth are completely different scenarios. So, um, that's one I'm very excited to start testing out. I, I'm gonna have to figure out how to collect data on it because Every stats tool pretty much lets you take in one round. I think I'm gonna have to take it on my scorecard, um, and then put it in afterwards, but it should be pretty quick to test. I want to see, um, everything that I do, I always look at it from a perspective of like, does this cause better performance? So if I go out there and I start doing Worst Ball and I get worse, I'm not going to do Worst Ball. I'm not going to recommend my students do Worst Ball. Um, that said, if I'd go start doing Worst Ball and my scores come way down and be like, okay, well, you know, maybe we Maybe we do that as a default. Um, I think the 3-ball thing is cool. You probably can't do that if you got a busy golf course. Um, but if you come out at the end of the day, um, I know a lot of junior golfers end up doing this really— it's like really slow. Uh, maybe you're just a single, uh, maybe you're walking and you're just like, man, I got 5-somes ahead of me of, you know, guys who can't play golf. Um, what should I do? This is one that I'd recommend you, you try out. You probably got to mark your balls differently so you know which one's which. Um, but play 3 different tees. Play front tee, back tee, and a middle tee, and see what you can shoot on each one of those cards. Because essentially you're playing— you'd be playing 54 holes if you played all 18 holes. If you're playing 54 holes over the course of 18 holes, it would be— it require a lot of mental discipline, um, and focus. So again, this is not something I would necessarily recommend if you don't want to challenge yourself. I'm expecting to be challenged by this, um, but I just wanted to share with you guys a few things that I learned from, from that time with Sean. And hopefully you guys can kind of implement some of this stuff as well in your practice and your mentality. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you, if you did, please leave a like, and if you want to see more stuff like that, go ahead and subscribe to the channel as well. See you guys in the next one.