Friday, January 30, 2009

It's Not Sexy to Be a Mover and a Shaker When You Putt

Unnecessary body motion is a common fault in putting. The more you move about during your stroke, the more you will reduce your chances of holing the putt.

A fundamental of a sound putting stroke is keeping your lower body and head steady. You should maintain throughout your entire stroke what Dave Stockton, author of the book "Putt to Win", refers to as 'legs of granite'.

Another analogy that putting instructors use, is for you to imagine that your lower body is set in a barrel of concrete.

On the Tour a number of professionals quieten their lower body by widening their stance. This has the effect of stabilising their centre of gravity.

Putting is contrary to all other aspects of how the game is played. The grip, the stance, the swing, the position of the head and arms, the use of the wrists - all demand a different approach.

In reality this means that learning to drive or play an iron shot does nothing to prepare you for putting. The last thing you want during your putting stroke is the body motion of weight transference that is necessary in the full swing.

Putting is a simple activity. So childishly simple is its appearance, few golfers ever consider a putting lesson. Through omission they never learn that an important fundamental of consistent putting is to quieten their body and their mind.

Studies have shown that the best performances where accuracy is required occur when the heart rate decelerates.

The biathlon combines the two disciplines of cross country skiing and rifle shooting. Competitors must learn through rigorous training the ability to control their heart rate. Unless they can slow down their heart rate before shooting, their shots are unlikely to find their targets.

In the same way you cannot expect to putt consistently with a racing heart and an over-active mind. Any unwanted body motion during your stroke will lead directly to a breakdown in your distance control and a lack of accuracy.

The most obvious movement in putting is when you prematurely look up to observe the outcome of your putt. The act of turning towards the hole draws back your left shoulder and changes the angle of your putterface at impact.

Remember the old African-American spiritual 'Dem Bones'. The song recalls how everything in our anatomy is connected. What this means is that moving one part of your body will also cause another part of your body to move.


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Neville_Walker

Does Practice Always Make Perfect on the Golf Course?

Golf is a game played with the body but won with the mind - so you need to practice both areas because remember what Einstein said - the definition of insanity is to keep doing what you have always done and expect different results.

So New Year - New Golfing YOU!

My aim here is to not tell you how to practice or indeed to give you some advice on the skills and techniques you need, but to get you to appreciate why practicing is so important. It will be the mind that usually talks you out of practicing with a ton of excuses as to why it isn't necessary or important.

It's a New Year, so it is a great time to have a plan (especially over the next few months) before the golfing season starts properly in March/April, so you can head out knowing that you are firing on all levels with your golf.

This article is not going to concentrate on your plan, or with any technical areas - I suggest you book a session with your Club Professional and get him or her to help on that one. Make sure though you review all areas of your game, from your swing to putting, and create an action plan that will help you to work on those areas you feel need the most attention over the next few months. Winter is a great time to practice - summer is the time to play and enjoy!

What I want to concentrate on in this article is the importance of practice from a psychological stand point and how it will help your confidence. We all know we play better when we are feeling confident about ourselves and our game.

First of all, one of the pitfalls is that it is human nature to practice that which you enjoy the most - that is why you see so many amateur golfers down the driving range slugging away with their driver. This does not necessarily make them any better off the tee but boy is it good fun!

This of course is not going to help their score card in the least but as a stress buster it is great - the problem is the amount of times I hear - 'Why can't I hit it off the tee like I can at the Driving Range?'

The main reason for this is there is no consequence to hitting balls on the driving range and if you get one wrong you just go onto your next ball out of a basket of 60! From the point of view of the mind it is not like hitting the ball in a round of golf or during a competition at all because you only have ONE BALL and that has to get into that hole in the shortest amount of shots possible. You cannot say 'Oh not happy with that one I will take another shot off the tee!' That is why it is difficult to translate those shots from the driving range to your game on the golf course.

There are ways you can practice at the driving range to make the conditions as real as if you were playing a round. Again ask your Club Professional as they will be able to suggest ways to make your practice sessions more realistic.

So why is it then that those areas of your game that you aren't good at are those you will most probably practice the least? Why do we avoid those things that we know we are not good at, yet these are the skills we should be practicing the most?

The simple answer to this is - getting better at something takes time, hard work and effort.

We all know the importance of practice, so in this section we are going to look at the mental blocks that often get in the way of us practicing and more importantly, practicing wisely. It is also my aim that by bringing awareness to you, you can start to change some of the beliefs you have created that support your reasoning that "practice is not important or not needed".

If you are expecting me to wave a magic wand on this subject, then you are going to wait a long time. I am afraid in this particular instance nothing can make up for putting a bit of time and energy into a plan that will help keep you on track to achieve your golfing goals this year.

I want you to ask yourself the following question - if you made a conscious decision to spend some quality time practicing how would that help your game this year? Self-reflection is one of the key qualities that make a true champion.

So back to the subject of practicing; the reason why I think it is so important to think about this subject now is because it will not only improve your skill set but when your skills improve so does your CONFIDENCE!

The real key here is practice by its very nature is repetitive so when done correctly it will help give your sub-conscious mind the support it needs to make good play as automatic as changing the gears on your car. Your mind absolutely loves routine.

Things You Can Do Now

TIP 1: Make any practice situation as realistic as possible. When practicing your short game or putting use only one ball and always have the intention of getting the ball in the hole as if you were playing the shot. For your tee shots and irons ask your Club Professional to set goals to practice on the driving range which will emulate the sort of pressure you feel when playing a round.

TIP 2: Get yourself a hard covered journal to write in and get into the habit after every game of writing down and re-living your best shots. This will help you gain confidence in how you play and give your sub-conscious mind the chance to remember the good shots. This will make it easier to visualise playing well when you need some positive mental in-put the most - during play!



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gail_Smirthwaite

How to Stay Focused on the Golf Course

When we are born we enter this world without fear and full of hope and innocence. What then happens as we grow is that our minds are filled with the rules and beliefs of others - parents, our friends, teachers and so on.

This is the way we learned our beliefs through childhood. We are basically the sum total of what others think. What we perceive as right or wrong, good or bad, what is acceptable and what is not has all been programmed into us by others. Is it little wonder that so few of us do not have a strong sense of 'self'. Golf is a truly amazing game because for you to excel, that is precisely what you need.

What happens though, is if we are not careful we become victims of other people's opinions. Is it little wonder that whilst we have been growing up, that listening to others has become an acceptable way to learn. The difference is when we are children although we have the opportunity to choose what we want to believe we just simply believe everything an adult tells us.

As adults, however, it is a completely different story. We do have the choice not to listen to others, but after a lifetime of taking in information this way we have lost the ability to trust our own feelings, thoughts and reactions.

We train our children much like we would train a pet dog. We use a system of punishment and reward. If you are a good boy or girl you received praise and good things, if you were bad then you were punished. This is how we learn to 'people please' as we quickly understand that the rewards are far more enjoyable than the punishment.

The rewards would take the form of getting positive attention and the punishment would most certainly include some form of rejection. Rejection is the NUMBER ONE fear of human beings. It has been so successfully used in our formative years that it is difficult to break the beliefs that have set us up for a lifetime of pleasing others.

We understand that if we go against these 'rules', then we suffer. Unfortunately, by the time we are able to take back the control in our lives and decide for ourselves what rules we want to live by we have been programmed into a certain way of thinking and behaving.

How important someone else's opinion is to you will directly affect your self-esteem and confidence. By giving someone else the POWER to build you up or knock you down with a single comment, opens you up to a lifetime of low self-esteem and poor confidence.

This is never more true than on a Golf Course. You have the choice to allow someone else to affect your mood and how you feel about yourself.

So what can you do about it?

It's up to you to catch yourself when someone has made a negative comment that could potentially change your mood. Ask yourself whose opinion matters the most, 'how you feel about yourself or what Derek may or may not think!'

The first step is to NOT TAKE ANYTHING PERSONALLY!

This is a new skill, so please do not be too hard on yourself. It takes time to stop reacting the way you always have done. It is up to you to make a conscious decision that you want to change how you feel about yourself and then to take the steps to do something about it.

The only person you can CONTROL in this process is YOU! If someone makes some comment that is not out of care and respect for you and could potentially make you feel bad about yourself - it says more about THEM than it does about YOU.

Maybe they are having a bad game and indirectly they are having a go at their own abilities. Whatever the intention it is not up to you to analyse it. This is time consuming and based on ASSUMPTIONS! We all know what can happen when we make assumptions. This type of behaviour will do nothing to help you build up your self-esteem and work on your own confidence and above all else it will take your mind AWAY from the task in hand. Staying focused on playing a great shot.

Also remember when you are standing on the first tee, I assure you the golfers around you are worrying about their first tee shot as much if not more than you. We humans tend to get wrapped up in our own 'personal importance' far too much. This is the greatest expression of selfishness as we feel that everything is about 'me'.

It may come as a shock to you but those watching you tee off are living their own 'personal importance' nightmares. Comments from them about you are only highlighting their own fears and beliefs and are not a personal attack on you!

If you start to take on everyone else's emotional garbage then it will become yours. You will then be stuck in a cycle of personal self-talk that will try and support what you think they should believe. Whilst you are trying to control what others are thinking and believing (incidentally YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DO THIS!) you have once more given away your control. Your need to be right and to change the minds of others will create one more nail in your coffin of low personal self-esteem.

In the same way, as what you say and do to others is a reflection of your personal rules or beliefs, these have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

REMEMBER: It is not important what someone else thinks of you - it is important what you think of you. If you know WHO you are and WHAT you want, then WHAT someone else thinks about you does not matter. If you remove the need to be accepted your self-esteem and confidence will soar.

TIP: The next time some says or does anything that offends you say to yourself -

'I am not going to take this personally. Whatever you think about me is your problem. It is based on your own personal rules and beliefs that are not mine, which is absolutely fine. I know that with that comment or action you are dealing with your own fears about yourself. Nothing you think or do is about ME it is about YOU!



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gail_Smirthwaite

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Details on How I Can Improve My Golf Putting

Golf putting tips are important for any golfer because of the fact that nearly half of your game is based on how well you can putt. It won't matter how far and how straight you hit your driver or irons, if you can't putt well you can't score well. You may ask for golf putting tips from your friends or some type of a professional players. If they watch you play it would be really educational and useful for you if they analyzed your style and suggested golf putting tips for an increased game production.

Over 50% of your golf score comes from putting. If you want to improve your golf score and eliminate the three, four, and even five putt greens, you must improve this part of your game. The position of your hands on the club can also have an impact on your putting skills. You must hold the club just right to achieve your perfect putt. When you lose that confidence in your putter, it really makes it difficult to do anything and obviously you feel like all you did was miss on the green all day.

One such solution involves having a routine which allows you to calm your nerves and block out the distractions around you. Putting is about feel and the less tense you are, the more fluid your putting stroke will be. Therefore, it is imperative that the correct practice methods and routines are followed.Trust is a critical component to consistently great putting and most putters get the jitters when they start to doubt their putting game.

It is important to train your stroke and then to trust it when it comes time to use it on the course and in competitions or just playing your friends you want to beat. Care should be taken not to grasp the club in the palms; it should be held, like the other clubs, along the base of the fingers, with a firm but not tenacious grip. The elbow-joints, like those of the knees, should be bent and fairly loose.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Greg_Wadel

Get More Distance With Your Driver - Pin Pointing the Info You Need

If you really want to get more distance with your driver, you need to know how to turn up reliable info on how to accomplish it. The average golfer won't get it done, though. Instead, most of us end up with a bunch of conflicting knowledge on how to do it, with no way to tell which stuff is better to rely on. Here's how to avoid this mess, while finding info on how to get more distance with you driver that has worked for others in real life.

That's basically what we all need, right? Who really wants to try out a bunch of random, conflicting tips, techniques and guides on how to get more distance with your driver? That's exactly what a lot of golfers are doing, though. The internet is filled with great golfing knowledge, but is also filled with a ton of fluff. Most golfers don't know how to tell the good info from the bad info, though.

Do you know why so much of this happens? Basically, it all happens because 90% of golfers will strictly use some sort of search engine to look for how to get more distance with your driver. Long story short, it's just not working. In fact, it's the number one reason people get overwhelming with conflicting info on how to improve their game!

How do you know which sites on the list have reliable knowledge that has truly worked for other golfers who have used it? How do you know which tips you are going to try is going to end up being completely useless, with nothing to show for it but wasted time on the course? That's the problem so many golfers face in the age of the internet.

Here's how to completely avoid much of that nonsense, while finding the tied and try knowledge, tips and guides on how to get more distance with your driver. It all starts and ends with the use of golfing forums. You may have scanned through one or two in the past for various things, but you need to use them more.

Most of the better golfing forums will be filled with topics on this very subject. It's where you are going to be able to see exactly what other golfers have done to improve their distances, You'll see what has worked for them and what has been completely useless. You can weed out the bad stuff on how to get more distance with your driver and see the ways, tips, techniques and guides that have gotten the job done. It takes all of the dreaded guess work out of it for you. It's as simple as that.

Every golfer has a dream to get more distance with your driver, but many will struggle needlessly through tons of random, conflicting reports on how to get it done.

Here is the revolutionary, most original tutorial/guide which includes step-by-step ways to get more distance with your driver.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Adam_Woodham

Golf Basics For Beginners - Where Can You Find Reliable Knowledge?

There is no doubt that finding good golf basics for beginners will speed up the process of having consistency on the course. With that said, golfers will have a very hard time finding reliable info, tips and guides on the web because there is just so much conflicting information on the subject. Not all knowledge is created equal and you need to know which golf basics for beginners have really worked for other people and which ones are complete duds.

This is an issue that many golfers face when looking for this type of knowledge online. Sure, the web has an overload of golfing info, but how do you know which websites have the "tried and true" info and which websites are just putting up a bunch of fluff that doesn't really work on the course? What makes it even worse is the fact that 9 out of 10 golfers will try to find golf basics for beginners by using some kind of search engine.

Long story short, this just isn't going to work very well. As a matter of fact, this is how so many people wind up with tons of conflicting info on the golfing subject they are looking into. How do you know which tips, guides and techniques have even worked for others? What if the random search results you try out end up to be useless and you just wasted a whole bunch of your time trying them out?

What you need is a better way to pin point the reliable info. The good news is that there is a better way. If you want to find golf basics for beginners that have gotten the job done for other real life people, spend a little time sifting through some good golfing forums. Maybe you have looked through the before for various things, but they are filled with useful knowledge for a beginner golfer.

Off the top of my head, I know for a fact that many golfing forums out there have tons and tons of past beginner related topics. You can see the golf basics for beginners that other people have used ad if they were successful. You can see which sites, guides, info and knowledge has done the most good for them. It beats the heck out of randomly trying things that search engines throw at you. It takes the guess work out of it for you.

Getting a good set of golf basics for beginners goes a long way toward becoming consistent and having fun out on the course.

Here is the revolutionary, most original tutorial/guide that teaches you the perfect golf basics for beginners. Including tons of step-by-step instructions, videos and tips.


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Adam_Woodham