Tyler reporting from paradise again on the eve of another great potential learning experience.  Tomorrow I am attending a two day seminar on JR training and I just found out that 14 of the TPI advisory board members are going to be there.  I’m pumped and I’ll set goals for what I want to accomplish this weekend, but let’s start with what you are going to try and accomplish this year.

It is amazing to me how quickly my clients forget everything they have done successfully when they start focusing on golf.  One of the area’s that I see the biggest deficit is in goal setting.  That could be for a lesson, a tournament, a season – whatever it is, you need to have a plan before you take that first step.  Here are some quick keys for setting goals and how we can apply this to golf.

Tip #1: Make your goals S.M.A.R.T

I learned this one in my undergrad and have stuck with it anytime I want to accomplish something.  Your goals must be S.M.A.R.T.

Specific – this means you are going to address all those W questions.  Who, What, When, Where, Why, Which?
A bad example is “I want to hit the ball farther.”  A better, not great, goal would be, “I want to hit the ball in the air 245 yards at my driving range by September 15th.”

Measurable – figure out the right scale to monitor your progress.  I have had clients say that they want to hit the ball further, only to be disappointing when they are hitting it further yet still scoring the same.  This one is easy to ensure, just make sure you can answer the question, “How would anyone know when I’ve accomplished this goal.”

Attainable – I always thought this was thrown in because they didn’t want the acronym to be S.M.R.T.  Attainability helps shape your mind to look for opportunities to help make this goal a reality.  Don’t set a goal that you don’t truly believe you could achieve.

Realistic – to be realistic, the goal most represent something that you are able and willing to do.  That willing is the key phrase.  Don’t say that you want to lose 10 pounds if you are not willing to make any sacrifices and don’t say you want to be a scratch golfer if you are not willing to practice more than once per week.  There are lots of happy 10 handicaps in the world, set a goal to be one of those if you are not going to take it seriously.

Timely – this one is easy.  By when?  If you are a 15 handicap and you tell my that the big goal is to be a 5 handicap I will say by when.  You will get frustrated and look at me crossly, but I will insist that I will treat you differently if this is by the end of the month compared to if it is by the end of the year.  By when?

Tip # 2: Have a goal sheet including short term and long term goals

The best example for this is weight loss goals.  I want to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year is a good long term goal (there are better as you’ll see in the next step).  A good short term goal would be I want to lose 2 pounds this week.  Take your long term goals and lay them out with a series of short term goals and it will be a lot easier for you to stay committed.

Tip # 3:  Make your goal Process not Outcome focused

I usually get compliance on tip number one and have to fight a little bit harder on tip number two.  This is where goals can either be lost to the land of “wouldn’t it be nice” versus “I can do this.”

I have deliberately thrown in some bad examples because I didn’t want to complicate the flow and I’m sure a lot of you have poorly organized goals that are too general to ever work.  Here are some examples of outcome goals that I don’t like as short term goals.

• I want to hit the ball 10 yards farther
• I want to be a 5 handicap
• I want to have less than 30 putts per round
• I want to hit the ball straight

These goals are great as long term goals but as short term goals they are way too outcome focussed.  Good short term goals have actions tied to them.  Some examples of GOOD short term goals would be

• I will practice putting 3 times this week for 30 minutes
• I will go to the gym 3 times this week and do my personal fitness routine
• I will avoid watching the golf channel or reading a golf magazine and stay focused on what my coach has told me to do
• I will read 1 chapter in Zen Putting each night instead of American Idol

Can you see the big difference between process and outcome goals.  It is no different than in your job setting.  You can say I want to earn 1 million dollars next year.  But that won’t make someone give it to you.  If you stick to the process goals that are S.M.A.R.T and have both short and long term goals then just staying on the path will get you there.

Good luck golfers.  Try and set a good process goal for this weekend and tell me on Facebook if it worked out.

Tyler reporting to you from gloomy San Diego. Yes, gloomy. In May and June they have this cloud they call the “marine layer” that in from the ocean every morning and then goes back out to see as the day warms up. So don’t worry, the sun will be back later. Enough meteorology.  Let’s get on to the post.

Last time I talked to you about Kenny G and that basketball player who’s name I won’t be mentioning for a while out of respect. In doing my research for that post I came across an interesting interview with Kenny G before the Honda Classic this year. If you want to read the whole article, Here it is, but I’m going to comment on the one comment that I found most interesting.

Kenny G is part of a select group. There are probably only a small group of people who have been able to experience immense pressure in more than one venue. Kenny has played concerts for tens-of-thousands of people and played in golf pro ams for tens-of-thousands of golfers. When asked about this, he responded.

Q. How do the nerves of playing in a Pro-Am, whether it’s people lining in the fairway, compare to a packed arena?
KENNY G: The golf is a lot tougher, way tougher. I mean, on the saxophone, you know, if you practice — here is the thing about golf. You can practice and not get better. (Laughter) You really can. If you practice a musical instrument, you’re going to get better. It almost doesn’t matter how you practice, but just practice. But golf, if you practice golf incorrectly, you can make yourself worse.

So when I step up on a stage in front of a crowd, and I grab my saxophone, I kind of know that if I put my fingers like this, I’m going to hit an E. It’s going to happen. If I hold a golf club and try to hit I draw starting on the right side of the fairway and bring it to the middle, I don’t know if it’s really going to happen.

. But that’s the difference. So you’re a little more nervous playing golf. I am, anyway.

Ok, it’s no news that Kenny G could get nervous playing in a pro-am. He is supposed to, he is the am. But he has a great insight about practicing and not getting better. I see players all the time who tell me that they practice 4 hours a week and play twice a week and it doesn’t always carry over. My next comment is always the same, “how are you practicing?”  I usually get a less than idea answer.

Kenny G is right, you can practice and practice and practice and get worse at this game if you are not careful.  But how can we avoid that?  Well, Pia and Lynn have a great book called, “The Game Before the Game” that talks about some practice strategies, but here are some general guidelines to make sure what you are doing sticks.

There are 2 ways worth practicing: Block and Random.  Both are valuable but both must be included to have success.  Think of it this way, block is practicing your jump shot, while random is playing in a scrimmage.  Let’s apply it to golf.

Block Practice

Block practice is good for working on swing mechanics, shot shaping, and pre-shot routines. If you are practicing the mechanics of your swing, make sure you have a VERY specific goal with a way of measuring success. If that is a shaft in the way to keep you on plane, then success is not hitting it. If you hit for an hour and I come over and ask you how your practice session went and you respond with something like, “I got it, if I just relax my index finger on my right hand I hit it great” then consider this practice session a waste. What you did was find a rhythm to help make your mechanics work today. Those rarely carry over day to day, and usually result in solidifying your swing faults.

Random Practice

This is where your money is made on Sunday. When a golfer is learning to compete, not just play, the recommended breakdown is 30 percent block practice and 70 percent random. Do the math really quickly. Let’s say you go to the course for an hour. That means if you are training to score 18 minutes of that hour would be spent hitting the same club in succession, at the same target. This applies to the whole practice session and includes putting, chipping, pitching, bunker etc. I see far too many golfers virtually skip this part of practice and then wonder why their swings get better but the scores don’t drop. If you want your scores to drop, make random practice a priority.

A quick way to make random practice part of your routine is to play holes on the driving range. Here is how you play. Let’s say the first hole at the course you are playing this weekend is a par 4, that means the first shot you will hit will be your driver. If you hit a good drive, then guess how much you will have left into the green, pull that club and pick a new target. If you miss hit that iron shot, then hit a pitch shot. Consider the wasted ball to the driving range a penalty for miss hitting your shot. Go through your preshot routine on every ball and give yourself 2 putts for every green hit and 1 putt for a well struck chip/pitch. I would do this for weeks before important tournaments and found great success in the comfort it provided me.

To quote my mentor, Greg Rose, “Try it at home for a better golf game.”

Here is the last post from Dee for a couple weeks! Enjoy!

Well all my friends and hard working clients…it’s time for a vacation!

Off to Rome, Florence and finally Venice where my parents will renew their vows after thirty years of marriage on gondolas!

I am excited for the break, but also look forward to coming home where all kinds of good things will be going on…

1. 3D Motion Capture comes Friday, June 12th and Saturday June 13th! We will be the first company in the US to bring 3D to the public this way!! Be a part of it for only $350 (or so). It will be a HUGE player in your game going to the next level in a short amount of time!
2. We are designing the Colorado Golf Club Gym facility
3. Trish will be getting back from TPI Junior Level 2- so we will be the only company in the US with two level two Junior certified pros!
4. Trisha is playing in the Colorado Open at the end of the month where there are rumors of me caddying for her!??
5. And more “secret” cool things going on!

Have a great ten days, train hard and we’ll see you after the 19th!

In the meantime, Tyler will be updating here a few days a week, stay posted for the most current information in golf and fitness!

Tyler again.  Dee is still having trouble posting because he has a windows computer.  But hey, lucky for you all, my Mac is unaffected so let’s press on.

Today I’m going to shed some light on what makes a good golf workout for me.  This post is in response a conversation I had with a client of mine about wanting to be sore the next day following a workout.

Do you have any idea how much trouble Arnold Schwarzenegger has caused me in my career?  Ok, it’s not just Arnold, the whole body building community that has brainwashed the average athlete into thinking that no pain no gain is the only way to train.  It’s not!  Here are, in no real apparent order, my thoughts on the effects of muscle soreness as it relates to golfers.

When I am referring to traditional weight lifting techniques, I am referring to 3 sets of 10-12 reps of 60-70% of your 1RM, performing each set, resting 30-45 seconds, then completing the second set of the same exercise all while fighting for those last couple reps. If your trainer has you doing any of the above and calling it golf fitness ask for your money back.

Traditional weight training techniques do not help golfers (with the rare exception of an ultra elite golfer needing a hypertrophy phase in a periodized plan but even then I would recommend only during one microcycle during the early offseason).   Why does the average golfer want to train differently?  Lets start with your purpose of working out.

Body builders are training for aesthetics while athletes are training for performance.   So if we have different goals then we should train differently, right?  Golfers need power, stability, flexibility, and balance in a much greater demand than they need strength.  I can hear the strength coaches cringing.  Yes at the elite level you will reach a power plateau until you add strength.  So lets say we do need strength.  Is that what 3 sets of 10 will get you? It’s not.  3 sets of 10 will make you bigger, slower, and sorer.  Talk about your lose-lose.

So most of our weighted golf exercises fall into categories and this is how the set reps adjust for each:
•    Power or maximum strength – we are looking at maximum of 5 reps leaving a couple good reps out there (not training to fatigue) and aiming for more sets 3 – 8 depending on phase of cycle.
•    Stability – we are looking at 10-15 reps usually around 30% or less of 1RM.  Tyler you just said you don’t train 10-15 reps didn’t you?  Look at the percentage, we are usually challenging the stabilizers and putting the weight in a range that won’t over tax the brain.  These are more for activation and coordination then they are for strength.

The other tip I can recommend when it comes to avoiding soreness is the circuit the exercises.  You want to be fresh when you come to the physically demanding exercises.  If you put in some fun “fluff” exercises you will avoid wasting your time will still not exhausting any particular muscle.  By fluff, I mean the stuff that doesn’t seem hard, muscularly, but is great for your golf game.  Single leg activities, stretching, and swing drills make great fluff in between your heavy sets.

I’ve attached a link to my good friend John Novosel Jr.s blog.  He is a competitive long drive guy.  Check him out in the gym by watching the videos from May 5th and May 6th. Golf Strong

He bench presses like a girl, but he hits the ball out near 400 yards.

Good luck golfers.  Keep your pain to the golf course, not after the gym.

I wanted to expand on my most recent article about Kenny G and Charles Barkley.   I have received a lot of positive feedback and questions about the importance of past sports in the development of a golf game and I wanted to take another stab at how I’m using this data.

The golf swing is an incredible balance of cause and effect pushed to their limits.  Determining the CAUSE is a real problem for golf instructors because of how varied the effect can be.  Here is how I look at a simple example of a slice.  By the way, I’m kind of like a computer in these cases.

Input:
The golf ball sliced.  The golf ball sliced because the face was open and the path was coming from outside to in compared to the target line as the golf ball was struck.

Analysis:  This could have been caused by a physical restriction.  Or poor technique caused by a misconception. – I need more input to figure out which bucket to put this golfer in:

Search for more input:
Physical: The right shoulder is tight.  The thoracic spine is tight.  Both hips are tight and the glutes are inhibited (the light switch is broken, not just the bulb).  This is easy.  I can test for each of these capabilities and any one of these COULD cause the swing fault and shot patter that I discussed.  But what else?

Conceptual: The golfer may think that the clubface should stay facing the target for as long as possible instead of rotating around the curve that the club is swinging on.
Or, the golfer may think that his or her best way of creating speed is to chop the arms down like chopping wood.

There could be an infinite list of places where the concept could go wrong so lets jump ahead and just say, this golfer doesn’t know what the hands or body is supposed to do to hit a draw correctly.   So now I apart from the physical fitness, I have to teach him what to do.

The art of teaching is picking which is the important input.  But if you get the right input then the solution is easy.  Ask what sports the played growing up and see how I use that new input a lot now and here’s how I do it.

If a golfer has some success with his stroke then the swing can’t be completely broken.   But in order to fix a semi-broken swing you are going to have to change everything.  A fully broken swing can be caused by either nothing working or two things working in the opposite directions.  If a swing is semi-broken then everything is only partially doing the right things and all parts will need some level of adjustment.

That is the great cause and effect relationship in golf.  If I tell your hands to do something different, chances are the chest is going to have to adjust as well.  To adjust my chest, the pelvis is going to have to do something different, which means the legs and feet are doing something different.  Woah.  Before you run home and throw out your golf clubs in desperation let me clarify my last post.

We, as golf coaches and body coaches, could start to change your biomechanics from either end: the feet (body) or the hands.  Either way, we are going to have to trust that your brain makes minor little tweaks and changes to make it all work again.  So which end to start from has always been a debate among teaching professionals for some time.  Do I get the body in the right place and then just say, “try and hook it with your hands” or do I teach the hands what to do with smaller swings like pitches and chips and then tell the golfer that the full swing is just like that only bigger?  In the first example: the hands are adjusting to a “fixed concept” of the body, in the second example; the body is adjusting to a “fixed concept” of the hands.

Let me bold this statement.  If you want to change a swing, get one part correct and then work on fine-tuning with the other.  If you want to struggle with golf, bounce back and forth making random changes to the grip, set up, downswing, impact etc.

Back to the original post.  I am now deciding which one to fix and which one to leave a variable based on what sports or activities each golfer played before the age of 15 (I just picked a number, test this variable if you want).  If they played a lot of body sports then that is going to be the VARIABLE.  If they played a lot of hand sports then that is going to be the VARIABLE.

An example of this is a good body athlete.  I could spend 5 lessons getting the hands perfect and just give a simple idea for the body to make this new hand movement work.  “Don’t change your hands, try and find a body position that works with what we are now doing.” Then I give my best guess at feelings for the body until we get something that matches.  I am telling you, this works wonders on the learning curve.

Pick the right problem bucket and the solution is easy.  This is just a new way to get into one of a few buckets.

Hope that helps.

Otherwise send me more questions and I’ll clarify on Thursday.

Your Body Faults are Your Swing Faults
By Dee Tidwell

Juniors! One of my biggest frustrations with the golf industry today is its total focus on instruction and equipment only. It has been drilled into our heads that if you don’t get the best clubs and a lot of instruction, then your game will never be as good as it can! Phooey!

While I think this is mostly true, and consider clubs and instruction paramount to success, I believe the missing and most important component to success for a junior golfer is an optimally functioning body! This, unfortunately, is also the least important part of the game that is discussed with the junior golfer, and THE MOST IMPORTANT!

Check this out…most clubs “out play” the player using them…that’s right, your clubs are better than you! Unless you get into better shape, you will never achieve the full potential of your shiny new clubs, nor play up to your ability and potential!

In my ten years of individually assessing every client that walks in my door, my data says strongly that 98% of those tested have poor posture, forward head carriage, a decreased lordosis of the lumbar spine (flatter than normal- looks like a flat lower back), an increased Thoracic spine kyphosis (too rounded in upper middle back), tight hamstrings and calf complex, and a weak core. And these statistics are true for juniors as well!

These problems lead to decreased range of motion; decreased rotation ability; fatigue because the body has to work harder when you have poor posture; decreased respiratory capabilities; internal organ compression; excessive neck and shoulder stress; and pain! Ironically, the most frequent swing faults (those listed below) are caused by the aforementioned body issues.

I have listed three of the most common swing faults that juniors struggle with. So let’s educate you about what causes them from a bio-mechanical standpoint, because if you identify with any one of the three, I advise that you talk with your instructor and a golf fitness professional like myself to create a plan to fix the issue so that it doesn’t become an “ingrained pattern” that will begin to wreak havoc in your game!

So here we go…information gathered by PGA teaching professionals, and research done by Titleist Performance Institute, the three most common swing faults most golfers struggle with are:
1.    “Early Extension”
Defined-
When the hips and spine start into hip extension or straighten up to early in the downswing, it is termed Early Extension. This is where the hips and pelvis move closer to the ball on downswing

2.    “Loss of Posture”
Defined-
Loss of posture is any significant alteration from your body’s original set up angles during your golf swing. This loss of posture can affect all aspects of the golf swing including timing, balance and rhythm.

3.    “Over The Top”
Defined-
Over the top is perhaps the most common swing fault among high handicap golfers. It usually occurs due to an overuse or over-dominance of the upper body on the downswing.  As a result the club is thrown outside of the intended swing plane, with the club-head approaching the ball from the outside in. This creates a pull if the clubface is square or a slice if the clubface is open.

These three swing faults are characterized by the same bio-mechanical (body) deficiencies:

1.    Stiffness of joints in lower body- hips, vertebrae, sacroiliac joints, knees, ankles
2.    Can’t rotate around lead hip (internal rotation)- if the pelvis is unable to rotate around the lead hip due to joint or muscular restrictions then forward and lateral movements will dominate the pattern.
3.    Flexibility in hips and shoulders- in order to rotate around a stable posture, one must have good flexibility in the hips and shoulders. This allows you to get the club into key positions without altering your spine angle.
4.    Inability to separate upper and lower body- and visa versa allows the player to maintain a stable posture and a proper sequence of motion during the swing. Limited trunk to pelvis separation is usually caused by reduced spinal mobility and shortened latissimus dorsi flexibility.
5.    Inability to stabilize core- Abs/Glutes- the ability to stabilize the lower body is directly proportional to gluteal and abdominal strength. A stable neutral pelvic posture helps prevent thrusting toward the ball.

So in the end, we at Championship Golf Fitness believe that the body is a main determining factor to the success and longevity to your game.

If you want to hit it further, be more consistent, shoot lower scores, get a scholarship to play in college, beat your friends, and be a top Colorado junior golfer, then you MUST get a junior golf fitness program as soon as you can!

I know, I know…when are we going to stop picking on poor Charles.  But this isn’t picking on poor Charles, this is about one of the key parts of a golf lesson that I have been playing around with lately.  Doctors make thier assessment in part by taking a history, and this is a very key part in the diagnosis in the medical world but is still very primative in the golf world.

I have recently been taking some extra time looking at a player’s history.  I usually ask, “What sports did you play or activities did you do growing up?”  I usually would listen for key words and phraises.  If I heard “tennis” I knew we were in danger of reverse spine angle/early extension.  I knew if “I didn’t pay much sports growing up” then I knew that we were in for a bumpy road, but I am now looking at it in a slightly different way.  Check this out.

I had a client who was a “good athlete” and was struggling with golf for a while.  Upon investigation I realized that he played lots and lots of basketball, football, and some baseball – but not pitching.  I did some quick calculations in my head and realized that most of his activities were simple hand sports and complicated body awareness sports…

My VERY next client was also struggling with something similar but he wasn’t a good athlete.  In fact, he was the complete oposite end of the spectrum.  He didn’t really play sports as a kid, but was active in music and the arts.  Music, that sounds pretty demanding on the hands.  “He was able to make lots of hand adjustments quickly wasn’t he?”  Hmm….

This got me thinking.

I have spent some time now, teaching the athlete how to use his hands with gentle guidance on the body and the musician is getting lots of body awareness work with only minimal attention to the hands.

I’m now working on trying to categorize sports as body awareness or hand awareness and adjust my teaching accordingly.

Some examples of Body Sports are:

• Basketball,
• Football (except QB)
• Baseball (except pitcher)
• Track
• Swimming
• Weight Lifting
• Soccer

Some examples of Hand Sports are:

• Lacrosse
• Football (QB)
• Baseball ( pitcher)
• Ping Pong
• Music (except singer)
• Golf

Now this is totally primitive, and based on a few people, but it is something that I have had a lot of initial success with and something you should think about.  What part of your golf fitness needs more fine tuning?  Are you more prone to have hand problems or body problems?

Good things for you to know.  For me it is like knowing that your family genetics are prone to diabetes.  If you know that, then you can easily adjust.  If you know that your past is filled with body sports, then you should probably start training your hands in practice and make most of your short term adjustments with the body.

Just a quick thought to get you thinking before the weekend.  Oh and don’t send me hate mail, I will try to leave Charles alone starting now.