Tips to Play Better Golf Under Pressure
PGA professional and Superstition Mountain golf instructor extraordinaire, Dan Williams, recently shared tips for playing your best under pressure. Some of them might surprise you. Read on to find out why he thinks you shouldn’t practice.
Most golfers have been in a situation where the stakes are high. We always want to play well but there are certain times when we really, really want to play well. Maybe it’s the Member Guest tournament, Club Championship or a match against a buddy you really don’t want to lose to. For whatever reason, this round just matters more. The day of the round comes and you end up playing much worse than expected and it’s devastating. Here are some ideas to make sure you can play your best when it counts.
Process Over Outcome
Golf is a hard game for a number of reasons, but one of them is when we focus on our desired outcome more than our process, we tend to miss the shot. Think about the golfer that is saying to themselves, “don’t hit it in the water, don’t hit it in the water,” and then they hit it directly in the water.
In this situation, it’s important to maintain a pre-shot routine and not get into your head. A pre-shot routine shouldn’t be complicated or hard to remember, just a consistent procedure you do before each shot. An example would be: stand behind the ball and look for a target, take two practice swings, walk to the ball and aim the face, set your feet and swing. This process doesn’t guarantee that you’ll hit a great shot, but it will assist in distracting you from the external factors that make you nervous.
Embrace Your Miss
Okay, I know this sounds funny … you don’t want to miss, nobody wants you to miss, but we sometimes have tendencies that make us miss. Maybe you battle a slice or a fade. Some hit fat shots or top the ball frequently. When consistent misses happen, you have two choices – try to fix the miss or play it. For the sake of becoming a great golfer you should be working to fix your mistakes and improve your game. But let’s be honest, if you haven’t already fixed it the chances of fixing it on the course are not great.
So, if you’re trying to play your best round today, embrace your miss and work it in your game plan. If you tend to hit high fades that miss the green to the right, aim for the left side of the green and maybe you’ll catch the right side. If there’s a nasty bunker on the left side of the green, aim right down the middle and if you fade it right, so what? You have a basic chip shot instead of the difficult bunker shot.
We all want to hit great shots (it’s not realistic to hit great shots ALL the time) and if you know what your miss is going to be, you know where the ball is probably going to go. Use that to your advantage. When it’s time to fix your misses, check out these tips from Dan for How to Fix Your Golf Slice, For Real This Time. As he suggested here it includes advice to embrace the miss - play the curve and focus on short game and course management.
Protect the Ball
Like many sports, losing your ball is the fastest way to lose the game. When you get into situations where there is out of bounds or penalty areas, you need to avoid them the best you can. We don’t have to be ultra conservative, but if there’s a hole where you always hit the water with your driver, maybe tee off with a fairway wood that won’t reach the trouble. This sounds a little boring, but again, we’re talking about playing our best today! Sometimes playing safe is playing smart.
Warmup Don’t Practice
Many golfers don’t practice, or at least rarely practice. They come to the range and hit a handful of balls – if they hit any at all – and go right to the tee box and play. But then when the round matters more, they get to the course an hour early and try to figure out how to hit their driver straighter or fix their misses. This rarely works, and when it does it’s probably more of a coincidence than science.
Whether you like to practice on off days or not, your pre-round range session should be a warmup. This is the time to get your body moving, remind yourself of your fundamentals and see where the ball is flying. If every shot on the range is hooking a little bit, there’s a good chance it’s going to do that on the course. Warmups help you see what you’re about to do, not fix your swing.
Lastly, understand that playing your best doesn’t mean you shoot your lowest score. Playing your best means you get the most out of your game, put yourself in good situations, avoid bad situations and don’t compound mistakes. Make sure your standards are based on your game and goals, not somebody else’s. If you stick to your process, know what your miss is, take care of the ball and don’t try to reinvent your swing the day of your round, you still might not break any course records, but you’re probably going to have a good day out there! Want more tips from Dan? Members of our Arizona private golf club can reach out to the team at the Golf Shop to schedule a lesson or join one of his popular clinics.
