What’s the Difference Between Practising & Training?
Understanding the science behind the art of preparing for golf can help you use your precious time more effectively
There can be no other sport where so much effort in practice goes so unrewarded in the game itself.
Many golfers spend their entire life working hard at their game with little to no actual progress.
This cannot be because we don’t have the ability to move our body in a certain way. It certainly isn’t the equipment, which is so very much superior these days. For us, it is to a large degree because golfers have no real idea of how to train effectively..
Instead of thinking you are going to go practising golf as you have always done, when you think in terms of training for the game you open up a whole new dimension. A surgeon will train to become a surgeon and then he or she will practise surgery. A lawyer will train to be a lawyer and then he or she will practise law.
We want you to shift your mindset completely so you train to play golf and then go and practise being a golfer on a golf course.
You become a golfer by creating golf shots in the only place that really matters – the golf course.
Go on YouTube and there will be hundreds if not thousands of experts telling you how you should move your body, what positions the club should be in, using all of the fancy terms for angles and planes, yet we promise you very little video space will be informing you of how to train in a way that will maximise your return on investment both in terms of time and money.
The research is very clear: if we want to take our golf game onto the course itself we need to understand how we learn, we need to understand how to transfer skills but above all we need to learn how to train effectively. The most exciting part of this adventure is just what could be possible for you in the future. We firmly believe that no matter what your age is you could, in the next 12 months, transform your game and release the golfer in you that has been hiding away all of this time.
When you fully grasp the concept of training for golf you will get the opportunity to write a completely different story. You will become the director of your future golfing performance.
Do you feel you have spent a good part of your golfing journey hitting the ball reasonably well on the range and yet the ability you show doesn’t ever seem to transfer to the golf course when it really matters? Join the club.
So many of us have lived through the endless frustration of not being able to take our range game with us to the course.
We have a golf lesson. We get told to do something in our swing.
We go to the range and start to work on this new move. After a while we maybe start to hit the ball better and we feel like we are getting somewhere. All we have to do is then take this particular swing thought to the course and we will be fine.
We get to the 1st tee and try to think about the same swing thought that worked so well on the range. Yet the swing doesn’t seem to feel the same and the ball certainly doesn’t behave in the same way.
We start dropping shots and we get frustrated. We try harder to make the swing thought work. We get worse. We go back to the range to work on our swing a little bit more. Sound familiar?
It is perhaps the universal complaint of golfers all over the world.
We can either keep doing the same thing and hope for a different result or we can step out of the loop of insanity and do something different.
The key concept to understand is that of transferability.
Does the work you do on the range, putting and chipping green actually stand a chance to transfer to the golf course?
The Lost Art of Playing Golf
This excerpt was taken from Gary and Karl’s book, The Lost Art of Playing Golf which is available in hardback and Kindle formats.
