Building a Pre Shot Routine
September 04, 2020
SAVERS
These are six easy to follow steps for building a new pre-shot routine. By following this method, you will save shots on the course and have a more focused approach to your practice. I learnt this from Rob Dial – Host of ‘The Mindset Mentor’ podcast. He uses this practice to build the perfect morning routine but I think we can employee his teachings to help encourage more positive thoughts pre shot and enable us to leave the course with better data in order to utilise whatever amount of practice time you may be lucky to find. For those ‘unplanned’ early finishes when you just so happen to have the clubs in the car as you conveniently pass the range on my way home.
Silence
It’s time to silence that voice in my head. The one constantly reminding me that I haven’t played the 7th & 8th holes well the last few rounds, the one that yell’s mid downswing “don’t go right” causing me to hit it 10 yards left of very left. Let’s smash that negative voice out of bounds. As I stand surveying the shot in front of me, I will listen to the wind, the rain and the hail on a beautiful British summer’s day. I’ll count my breaths, in for the count of four, pause and out for the count of four. As I rest my club behind the ball I look to the point I am aiming to land this sweetly struck 7 iron. Aim small, miss small. The golf course is one of the most peaceful escapes and your clubs are the ticket to an afternoon in the company, relax and enjoy the time out there.
Affirmation
Over the course of my golfing travails I will have holed every putt that I will face in my next round. A left to right 10-footer is the same out there as it is on the practice ground or as it was last week when I felt like I couldn’t miss. Stand up and tell yourself you’ve holed that putt a hundred times already. Even when you were playing your absolute worst you still smashed a drive up that last hole. So, just because you are on a good score it doesn’t make that fairway any harder to hit today. A clever bit of positive affirmation before you step on the course will give you the confidence you need to commit to every shot you hit. Telling yourself that you can pull it off will allow your body to relax meaning you’ll naturally swing it better. For me the shots which creep in to spoil an otherwise flawless round are usually due to a negative thought which causes a sudden mid-swing correction or poor timing as I try to ‘ease’ one down there. In some cases where I feel like I am struggling a little bit I will say out loud the shot I want to hit “300-yard carry over that hazard, onto the green” …it’s also a good chance to sense check your course management.
Visualise
This is perhaps my favourite step to the guide and is one I picked up years ago from Darren Clarke’s ‘Golf – The Mind Factor’ - the only golf book I have ever read, but still refer back to. As I stand behind my ball counting my breathes, I picture my ball fading softly off of the green side bunker and landing safely in the middle of the green. It’s a shot I’ve hit well a hundred times before I tell myself as I focus intently on visualising the flight of my ball after a committed swing and pure strike.
Exercise
The Easy part! Grip it and rip it! Put all of the steps above in place and now we are ready to execute with no doubt or negativity in our minds and our objective is clear. There have been numerous occasions where I have found myself cursing the course for punishing me for a ‘good shot’. When really, although I had hit a good shot because I’d failed to assess the situation and set my clear objective, I fell straight into the trap of my crushed drive being gobbled up by a well-placed bunker. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail! If we can get all the facts right before stepping up to the shot, we will make exercising our practice a whole lot easier.
Read
Don’t wait until you get to your ball on the green to start reading your putt, its easy to miss things when you have a much narrower focus stood behind your putt. I’m not one for looking at a putt from all angles but I do think we could all take in a lot more information as we approach the green. Whether the back of the greenside bunker affects our putt or as we place our bags down and walk back to our putt; does the green slope front to back? - or left to right?
Scribe
Of course, there are lots of great shot tracking apps available but, are you using them? - Neither am I! But, what I will do is on my way home I’ll replay my round in my head. What side did I miss on the most today, left or right? How many putts did I have? – Remember, when you putt from the fringe it doesn’t count to your putting stats. The reason I don’t track these in an app is because I could see myself becoming obsessed and it might be the final nail in the missus’ golf tolerance coffin. What I will do is pick three positive moments from my round and one moment or area I want to work on. Even during my worst rounds if I really think about it there are lots of positives; a miraculous up and down, a putt from another area code or just that one strike that made me think ‘I have to keep coming back’. And the reason I only takeaway one thing to work on is to keep my practice simple and focused. We could probably all pick more things we want to work on but that won’t help the mindset.
I can’t stress enough how helpful it could be for your golf game to follow a repeatable process before each shot. It’ll make all those tricky shots or high pressure moments a lot more manageable and will lead to an improvement in your scores.
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