Effective practice - Andrew McHardy There are many ways to practise golf effectively. Repetitive practise is one which requires a golfer to stand on the range and repeat a certain action, so the swing change becomes an automatic movement. Repetitive practise tends to be technical and requires a lot of thought about the mechanics of swinging the golf club.
When someone hits a bad shot in a lesson they often say, “I over thought that one, I was thinking too much”. I would agree to a certain extent that this may have been the case, because when you are thinking about something so much, you tend to lose your rhythm, which of course is a key factor to a successful shot.
What I would ask you to remember is that as the individual shot result does not matter when you are practising, it is all about making the right swing movements.
Most golfers’ judge their swing by the result of the shot. We all play our best golf when we aren’t thinking too much about what we are doing. The lower our confidence gets the more we tend to think about what we are technically doing.
Many golfers do not practise enough, they do not practise effectively, or they do not practise at all. If this is the case, then they must do their technical thinking on the golf course, sometimes even in competitive situations.
It is said it takes anywhere from 6-10 years to become great at something, depending on how often and how much you do it. Some estimate that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but I think it varies from person to person and depends on the skill and other factors.
Playing a round of golf on average might take around 4 hours. That does not mean those 4 hours count towards improving your golf swing. Those 4 hours should be all about getting your golf ball around the course in the least amount of shots, this is a fact.
So why do people spend a lot of that time trying to improve their swing whilst playing, it just isn’t going to happen.
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