Trump National Jupiter: Joel Baxter 2 - Ernie Els Foundation

We are so excited about the Els Center of Excellence groundbreaking recently in March of 2014. Joel has been attending the Renaissance Learning Center and will be going the Els Center of Excellence when it opens. This school is going to be world renowned and such an important part for so many families with children on the Autism Spectrum. We are inspired by the work his school is currently doing to help our son reach his goals and want to continue to raise money for the Els Center. Joel is the team captain for the Trump National Jupiter team of Peter and Rona Spina. Last year we finished in third place overall nationwide in fundraising out of all of the events that were held. We want to beat that this year and send them to the Finale in Las Vegas in October. Help us reach our goal and support the amazing vision and dream of Ernie and Liezl Els since the creation of the Els for Autism Foundation in 2009. Here is the link to our team page below:


Trump National Jupiter: Joel Baxter 2 - Ernie Els Foundation

Why You Have to Put Pressure on Your Practice

If you practice and don't test yourself with simulated pressure, it will be tough to transfer your game to the golf course. Instead of grading your practice by how well you struck the golf ball, after you have practiced and are hitting the ball well, you should then add more pressure to simulate what the golf course will be adding.  It's not enough to stand there and hit great shots one after another to make your ego feel better. How many times has it stayed with you when you went out on the course? The reason is how you practice.  Most amateurs can't accept a bad shot.  "What am I doing incorrect"? Isn't that the typical internal dialogue? If you ask that after every shot, you really can go down an erroneous path.  Once you are hitting the ball consistently for your skill level you need to change your lie, change your targets and go through your routine. If you want the skill to show up on the golf course, you have to expose it during practice to different simulated on-course variables that you will encounter. You have to practice from bare lies to fluffy lies.  You have to practice to different targets and practice full shots and in between yardage shots.  The secret is adding variability because that simulates what you will be having to calculate when you are on the golf course facing the same situation. You want the shots that you practice to be a set of different variables each time.  Then you can add the pressure to your practice which is easy to do. Set a goal for the shot you are practicing and establish a consequence for success or failure or you can make a bet with a friend.  The pressure that you add will enhance the transfer of the skill to the golf course.   When you are in the comfort of the practice range, the flaws in your game are not so apparant. When you place pressure on your practice, suddenly your weak link will be exposed and usually whatever is your weakest link will break down.  That's why when you go to the golf course anything that adds a little bit of pressure can expose your weaknesses, for example, a four foot putt to win a bet with your friend, wind, a hole that is intimidating, anything that puts a mental strain on you during the round. Most people assume they are choking on the golf course.  What it means most of the time is that pressure does expose your weaknesses and most likely the skill that breaks down on the golf course is the one that is the weakest in your game.  Work on repairing that weakness in your game through practicing by integrating mental demands of decision making, pressure and simulating on course conditions.  Exposing your practice to pressure over time will lead to that skill performing consistently well under pressure and ultimately lead to transferring it to hold up on the golf course.

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Stracka Line App

Stracka Line App

2013 U.S. Women's Open Sebonack Golf Club

What an amazing golf course.  Sebonack looks as if it has been there forever and it's hard to imagine it was opened in 2006. The design of Sebonack with the collarboration between Tom Doak and Jack Nicklaus was meant to combine the " Tom Doak look" with the really good strategy of Jack Nicklaus. They also wanted a golf course that is a lot of fun to play, doesn't torture the members, has good greens and resists scoring.  All of that with amazing views on 13 holes that are either on the water or have a water view.  One of the finest golf courses to hold a U.S. Women's Open and this week should be amazing.

Here are some pictures that show those great views and some of the undulating greens players will have to contend with this week.  The scores will all depend on the wind, how dry the greens get and where the USGA decides to put the pin positions. 

 

 

 

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Do You Play Golf or Golf Swing?

Do you practice pure mechanics or do you work on controlling distance, direction and trajectory in all the parts of your long game and short game? The ability to control your golf ball instead of worrying about perfect swing mechanics is what you should be focused on. Most players have become so mechanical that they are working solely on their golf swing on the course and can't score, and they never learn or practice shots they need on the golf course. For example, most of the time on the course it's rare to end up on a perfect yardage each time you are playing. How many times do you practice the shots that are less than a full yardage? Did you just practice it once or did you get good at it? Here is an example of a situation on the golf course maybe you have encountered. You hit a drive straight down the middle; it's a good golf shot, and you are happy. Then, the next drive was thin, low, didn't feel very solid but still went pretty straight and ended up about the same distance as the other drive and didn't cost you anything. If that happens a couple of times a round and doesn't cost you any strokes, does that mean you change your swing because the ball flight didn't look or feel perfect? Sure, we all want to hit every shot solid, but where do you draw the line on making a change to try to have a flawless golf swing or accept shots that don't look perfect and don't hurt your score.

As Jack Nicklaus said in his book My Story about Lee Trevino, "He discovered what worked best for him and stuck with it through hell and high water. He learned golf by instinct, mimicry, experience and hard work.  The key to Trevino was that he had the intelligence and strength of will not to abandon his own techniques for what so easily could have seemed more correct, better or orthodox ways of playing. He was quite smart and secure enough to put scores ahead of style."

Focus your practice on scoring. The ability to control your golf ball instead of worrying about perfect swing mechanics is what you should be focused on. Evaluate your game based on the trends you are seeing that are costing you shots. Put more time into controlling the golf ball by practicing distance, direction and trajectory. Spend the time that you do have to practice on strengthening the other parts of your game that are hurting your score.


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Golf Myths About Practice

What are some typical myths in golf that keep us from improving?  We have all heard over the years how we have to make our new swing changes become muscle memory.  Do muscles really have memory?  Does practice make perfect? Reps, Reps, Reps. Not all reps are created equal. There are so many ways technology is assisting in helping us learn the right cause and effect of errant shots. Is that enough? What makes a swing change last and how long should it really take to get it to where you can consistently take it out to the golf course? We need to bust the myths of what most players think they need to do to make a swing change.

First, there is no such thing as muscle memory. Muscles don't learn. It's really a motor program that you are creating through practice to produce a new habit. There is a big difference between learning an athletic skill and learning a piece of academic information.  An individual can learn to solve a problem in one day because this involves cognitive learning, not motor learning.  If a coach asks a student to do something different in their backswing that's a mechanical movement, turning a physical movement into a motor program that is stored and able to be called upon under pressure will require lots of repetitions.  Golfers do not want to hear that they have to perform these repetitions.  It's the brain that learns from biomechanics and the behavior of biomechanics. It's more about strengthening your brain and training your brain not your muscles. We all know that it doesn't do you much good to be great on the range, but when you get on the golf course, your game goes south.  The truth is that most golfers do not improve because they never fully learn what they were attempting in the first place. Maybe they tested it a few times, but they did not store it in the brain and make it a part of their motor programming.  They did't train and get feedback on the things they were working on until they fully learned it. They also mistakenly practice without doing their pre-shot routine: they hit shots from flat, perfect lies; they hit shots with the same club repeatedly, practice putting from the identical spot, use artificial aids to align the shot and most of the shots are without a specific target.  How is that in any way similar to what you do when you play?

 If this sounds like you, you need to change the things you are doing in your practice and make it like how you play.  That means you need to simulate the on-course conditions in your practice.  Let's taking pitching for example, when practicing pitching, you need to make sure you are practicing on lies that are similar to the golf course, change your lie and target on each shot so you are forced to make decisions about the shot and vary your strategy each time in addition to going through your pre-shot routine.  This is how you will make your practice more like how you play. When you practice this way and keep training and getting feedback until you fully learn the skills you are trying to improve, you will be on your way to successfully transferring those skills faster to the golf course.

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What's New in Golf Instruction for 2013?

GOLF COACHING:  Coaching golf is about much more than perfecting the swing. There are tour-tested, sport science-based strategies that coaches use to help tour players score at the highest level.  What the focus will be is differentiating coaching from teaching, practical applications of motor learning & motor performance, using feedback to accelerate learning all of which are used to help the best players perform under pressure.  Most amateurs are just concerned with changing their golf swing.  We need to make the shift from perfect technique to learning how to score.  How do you turn that knowledge about your swing as a habit so you can transfer it to the golf course. You need to be able to control the golf ball and have enough technique to hit different shots to get around a golf course. It doesn't make much sense to try and swing like Tiger, its not about getting your swing to look a certain way, how does that help if you don't have a technique that will help you score.  The constant fallacy is that the reason you shot a high score is because of some technical issue in your swing you need work out on the range.  This isn't necessarily the answer to why your score added up the way it did. What other skills in your game are lacking?  How often do you get up and down?  How many 3 putts did you have? Do you hit enough fairways? Its about putting the ball where you intend to put it and having practiced the skills to do so.

As an LPGA Tour Player, for me to compete every week against the best players in the world requires highly finely tuned skills in each area of my game and a precise practice routine to be able to take those skills and have them come out under tournament pressure on the golf course.  I had a team that I worked with of golf instructor, golf fitness professional and golf coach/psychologist. What most amateurs aren't aware of is that becoming a good scorer on the course requires training that is geared toward transferring skills to the course. This is much different than standing on the driving range hitting balls and changing swing thoughts on every ball.  There is no correlation to taking that out to the golf course.  Just because you did it on the range doesn't mean it will immediately work on the golf course. There is science based on this, and it is called motor learning and motor development.  You will begin to hear more about golf coaching now, finally, thanks to Dr. Rick Jensen and Henry Brunton.  I worked with Dr. Jensen starting in 1993, and he helped me successfully get onto the LPGA Tour and stay out there. He changed me from playing golf swing on the golf course and taught me how to score through getting out of being such a technical expert with my swing; we worked on all the skills of my game to tour level and managed my game on the golf course, through strategy, how I practiced simulating golf course conditions and shots I would face. We put pressure on my practice so it would be no different once the tournament came, I had prepared for that.  He currently has developed the Golf Coaching Track for Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) and now golf instruction can finally shift out of all mechanics and into how to get the ball in the hole and transfer the swing you are practicing on the range to the golf course. This is what golf coaching is about. It's a long term understanding that making a change in your technique requires different practice than just beating balls on the range.

 To be able to take it to the course and own it so it will hold up under pressure, there is more to it than understanding the cause for the problems in your swing and what to do to fix them.  Since golf is a motor skill and requires not only repetition to store the skill as a habit,  you must also practice it and have feedback from your coach, once you are training the skill with that feedback, then you need to expose it to different conditions to simulate those you would encounter on the golf course.  Can you perform successfully from all kinds of lies and conditions?  When you first attempt to do this, it will be difficult because it will take many repetitions to get rid of your old habit to develop the new skill enough to see it come out on the golf course.  This step will take some time and is where most golfers give up or switch to another thought because they don't think it is working.  That is why they never get any better, they abandon it before they have trained it well enough through all the conditions necessary. This is such and important part of skill development where if you continue to build that skill under these conditions, it will transfer to the golf course and if most amateurs understood this about how a golf skill is learned they wouldn't abandon it looking for the next quick fix. Once you have transferred it to the course, and you can draw upon it under pressure you know you have completely learned the skill.  This is the essence of golf coaching; you learn that quick fixes are an illusion, it takes time to master a skill and how to train it to hold up on the golf course; you will have the skills to play to your potential.


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