Many of you will be setting a season-long goal of getting your handicap down or breaking your best score, and with that in mind, you will no doubt be spending a lot of time on the driving range.

But unfortunately, for most of us, the many hours spent practicing, is simply put, A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. As each year passes, how many of you feel like you are a better player, but this isn’t reflected in your scores? This is because your practice is not as effective as it should be.

The golf industry has a tendency to want to fill our heads with thousands of tips that will quickly transform our games. Pick up any golf magazine and you will find endless technical drills and training aids available, which will (supposedly) quickly shave strokes off your handicap. But this is not what they achieve. Instead, they create a golfer full of doubt and fear, resulting in poor golf scores and frustrating rounds. With such self induced over-complication of the golf swing, there is so much that go wrong. And most golfers practice and play in fear of it doing so. This is obviously not the way golf is intended to be played and is not why you devote so much of your leisure time to it.

My advice to you for the new golf season is this: stop looking for the quick fix and breaking your golf swing down to a million moving parts. The most important factor in playing better golf and reaching your true potential is learning to trust your swing. Building confidence in what you have is far more important than trying every possible swing drill. Perfect the fundamentals, yes, but make your practice about experimentation and learning to synchronize your body and mind with one clear goal.

When you are on the driving range, start to become aware of how shots feel (try to hit as many different shots as possible). See the shots you want to hit, and then feel what your body needs to do to execute them. Try not to consciously think about what your body is doing, just feel it. Honing your senses of visualization, feel and building a trust in your body to execute golf shots is the most effective way to improve. Quit the technical over analysis and start to play sensory golf.

Continuously learning new techniques completely disconnects you from visualizing and feeling good golf shots. What will help you most on the golf course, is believing you can hit the shot you can see in your mind, not the quirky swing tip you picked up from this month’s golf magazine. When we practice in the right way, we ingrain good golf shots in our minds and with a good shot routine, we can find them anywhere on the golf course. As Bobby Jones once said, “the golf swing is too complex a movement to be consciously controlled”.

Make golf a simple and enjoyable game of visualization, feel and trust and you will learn quickly how you can reach your true potential. Why not set yourself this goal for this season: To have at least one round of golf where you don’t think about anything technical. You see the shot, the target and just hit it there! Golf is a game of confidence and this is exactly what you will achieve when you change the way you practice.

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Most of us are obsessed with swinging the club in the “correct” way. We get caught up in swing mechanics instead of increasing our awareness and feel for different shots. In my opinion, once the fundamentals of the swing are correct, there is no right or wrong way to swing the golf club. The most important factors of a good golf game are visualization and feel, which we can learn with some simple awareness exercises.

This drill will help you have some fun in your practice but will train your body and mind to know exactly where the club-face is, increasing your ability to hit the shots you are visualizing.

Try hitting shots you would not hit on the golf course. Open your stance and close the club-face and experience what that feels like. Open your stance open the club-face. Try hitting a complete variety of shot shapes with a different stance and club-face angle. Try to visualize it and then feel the shot with the club-face. Although it is unlikely you will hit these shots on the golf course, this is not the point. You are learning new sensations and your awareness of what you can do with the club increases.

Try as much experimentation as you can when you practice. It makes it more fun and increases your subconscious trust in your body to execute the shots you visualize. Through practice with this technique you will start to move away from the complex technical game, and conscious control of your body, and more towards a simple visualization and feel based game and better golf.

Jack Nicklaus said that once he knew his fundamentals were correct, all he worked on was feel.

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In life, we generally become, or “live into” what we visualize for ourselves in the future. The same happens in golf. If we focus on what we don’t want to happen in the future, we have a tendency to fulfill that image. Since the body responds far greater to images than it does to words, positive visualization becomes a key factor in our success in golf.

For example, imagine yourself standing on the tee with out of bounds on one side of the fairway. If you let your mind focus on not hitting it out of bounds, rather than on your target and the shot you WANT to hit, you will invariably produce the shot you fear. Such thinking causes the body to try and steer the ball away from the danger, resulting in a bad swing and the ball going exactly where you didn’t want it to.

We need to learn how to replace these negative images with positive ones. The focus always needs to be on a precise target with a desired shot shape.

A good practice regime involving visualization and feel exercises (which you can find in my audio teaching the Golf State of Mind), will teach you how to you can eliminate focus on negative outcomes and synchronize your body and mind with a clearly defined positive goal.

On the driving range, get into the habit of using your imagination and visualizing shots before you hit them. Develop a routine of hitting a complete variety including fades, draws, low and high shots. This will not only increase your awareness and feel for those shots, but it will get you into the habit of positively visualizing shots before you hit them.

The first step towards better golf is improving your state of mind for golf. It’s really the only thing holding you back. I’m convinced that whatever your handicap, you have the ability to become completely absorbed in a positive process for every shot and live into your future as a very good golfer.

Where do you see the ball going on this hole?

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During the press conference ahead of the WGC Bridgestone Invitational, Phil Mickelson gave us an insight into how he stayed sharp during his 6 week break from the game. He explained that “mental rehearsal is just as important as physical rehearsal”. He went on to describe how, although he was not able to swing a golf club, he was able to keep his touch by visualizing shots and feeling them with his practice swings. He was actually able to practice, without being on the driving range or golf course. This tells us a lot about the application and power of the mental game for the world’s best. They know how important a strong routine of visualization and feel is to their game and they continually work on improving it. Simplify your game by thinking more in this way, instead of always working on technique. This has nothing to do with your physical ability, it’s about learning to synchronize your body and mind with a clearly defined visual goal. This is the way to play better golf. As Phil explains, this is something you can work on without a golf club, so there is no excuse for not practicing a better mental game.

* photo courtesy of Daily Mail, UK.

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Good golf is about developing strong mental habits. When we are on the golf course, we naturally feel more pressure than when we are practicing, so our practice time needs to be spent ingraining positive mental habits, so they become part of our subconscious thinking on the golf course. If we can continually perform a routine of analysis, visualization, feel and commitment during our practice, we will reduce the number of careless shots we play on the golf course and play better golf.

Jack Nicklaus once said:

“I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp in-focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie. First I “see” where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I “see” the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there’s a sort of fade out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.”

Johnny Miller said that he even saw how many bounces the ball would take on the green before it stopped and which direction it would bounce. This level of positive visualization is what we are aiming to achieve, so it is important we take every opportunity to practice it. Of course we are not going to start hitting every shot as we visualize, but being able to see a clear picture of the shot will make us commit to it, which reduces doubt and produces a better execution.

Everytime you practice, develop the habit of meticulous visualization of what you want the ball to do for EVERY shot. This will help us do it subconsciously on the golf course. As Golf Psychologist Bob Rotella tells us, every shot should have a purpose. Before every shot, ask yourself what you want to achieve with it. Most golfers have a tendency to start trying to correct technical faults in their swings on the golf course, which takes focus away from the purpose of the shot. NEVER have technical thoughts while swinging. Focussing on a positive visualization will also work towards reducing other negative interferences such as how you look in front of other players or focusing on hazards. This is one of the elements of my mental game audio teaching.

On the range, try to hit as many different shots as you can, instead of thinking about technical drills and hitting to the same target. This will develop synchronization between your mind and body. Your body will start to learn the feelings associated with shot shapes and you will improve your visualization skills. Hit high shots, low shots, draws and fades. This will encourage you to get into the habit of picturing the shot in your head before swinging. Then you can feel that shot with your practice swings.

I’m not saying your shouldn’t practice the physical game. Pick a fundamental to work on during every session. Whether it be grip, alignment or posture, this is where your technical focus should be. The rest is about visualization and feel. The more we can learn these valuable skills, the more shots we will have in our repertoire for the course, which is the key to scoring well.

David MacKenzie is a mental game golf coach to both professional and amateur golfers.

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I’ve called this article “The Art of Putting”, because if you want to get better at it, it is imperative that you think about it as a visual art and not a technical science. Good putting is performed with the senses, which we can heighten every time we play. You need to see and feel everything and learn to trust your instincts. The more intense your focus is on the line and the greater your commitment to it, the better you will putt. Developing and practicing a solid routine of positive visualization, feel and trust, will give us the structure we need to become better putters and lower our scores. This is what I teach my students through my coaching and mental game audio session.

Putting is where scores are made. If you are an 18 handicapper and you make 36 putts a round (2 per hole) this represents 40% of your total number of strokes. So clearly it is worth dedicating at least as much practice time here as you do on your long and short game. This time is not about simply about perfecting your stroke, it’s about developing acute positive visualization and feel with every putt.

The most important factor in putting well is visualizing and committing to a line. Only you know how hard you are going to hit it, so only you can determine the the line you are going to hit it on. Reading the slopes and understanding how different grasses affect the putt will simply come with experience. The body performs better when the mind is focusing on visual images, instead of words or technical instructions. The mind needs to tell the body what it wants to do, not how to do it. Developing acute visualization of the ball rolling on its line into the hole will give your body all the information it needs to execute a putt well.

With your practice strokes, get into the habit of seeing the ball go in the hole. Whether you pick a spot to aim at or you see the whole putt, ALWAYS visualize holing every putt. Tiger believes he is going to hole every putt no matter how far away he is. If you have read any motivational books about the secrets of successful people, it is having a very positive image of this success that typically differentiates them from people who do not achieve it.You need to start believing you are a good putter and convincing yourself of a positive visual outcome before you strike the golf ball.

If we think about lagging it to the hole, we will miss more putts. I’m not saying you need to be so aggressive that you blow every putt 6 ft past the hole, but always focus on making it. We need a vivid a picture of the ball following its line and dying into the cup. Be so precise that you see the side of the cup the ball will drop in. You are actually playing the putt in your head before you hit the ball and seeing it go in a couple of times will increase your confidence and give you a far greater chance of making it. Use this mental imagery to feel the speed with your practice strokes, which will pre-set the right tempo. Once you are over the ball, you can be confident in the fact that your mind has all the information it needs to allow the body to hit a good putt. Then let the subconscious mind take over and concentrate on a solid strike.

If you can do all these things during your routine, you will have hit a good putt whatever the outcome. Your power of positive visualization will intensify with every putt. Overtime, this process will no doubt lead to better putting, greater confidence and lower scores.

For more information on how you can learn mental techniques to improve your game every time to you play or practice, please visit www.golfstateofmind.com

Copyright Golf State of Mind, Ltd 2009

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Learning how to practice the inner game is the key to playing better golf. Afterall, it’s your mind that controls your preparation and your swing, and it’s your mind that has to process the outcome of a shot.

Good golf is about learning positive visualization and feel, and responding correctly to results, whatever they are. Being able to do this has a massive impact on our performance, whatever our handicap. This is easy to say, but how to we learn it?

The first part is simple. Make your practice more about being creative, rather than learning new techniques and hitting to the same target. Learn to heighten your senses and make a complete variety of golf shots part of your instinct. Introduce different shot shapes to your mind and make your body work to produce them. This will act to increase your power of visualization and ingrain those swings in your long-term muscle memory. Gary Player (arguably the most diligent golfer ever) said that practice should involve hitting as many shots as possible to different targets – hooks, slices, fades, draws, low and high shots. This is what I teach my students through my coaching and mental game audio session.

Enjoy the adventure of being creative. Tiger Woods says that creativity is the 15th club in his bag, and anyone that has seen him play knows this to be true. This is because he continually learns and practices positive visualization and feel, through hitting different shots. Most amateur golfers think they have mastered the game on the range, because they see the ball flying to the same target shot after shot. This is not the most effective way to practice. Your body puts that same shot in its short-term muscle memory and its repetition becomes subconscious.

We need to use our minds to keep our body learning the feel of new shot shapes. This is what will make you a better player. On the golf course you are not going to be faced with same shot on a level lie, time after time. Every shot is different. Using the driving range to ingrain a variety of shots into your subconscious mind is the most effective way to practice and get closer to your best golf. Better players simply see and have more shots.

Don’t be afraid to experiment – it will sharpen your senses and make you a better player.

This is the first part of a Mental Game Teaching series from
www.golfstateofmind.com. The next part will explain how a disciplined shot routine will take you into the correct Golf State of Mind for each shot, reducing negative interferences and increasing positive outcomes.

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