One of the things I have gone backwards and forwards with over the past 2 years is how many stats to keep track of on a round of golf. It is difficult for 2 reasons:
1, You actually need to capture the information which can mean writing down quite a lot about each shot
2, It is best to play each golf shot in isolation, so if you are about to play your second shot from a bunker - but remembering you need to write down the bad tee shot that got you there, it can only have a negative effect.
The kind of information I have tracked before include:
- fairways hit
- where ball finished when going for green
- distance of putts
- clubs used for each shot
and quite a few more
Then there was the job to put all this information into one of the online systems and it would come out with some information for you. The most interesting was where the ball finished when going for the green eg on green, left, right, long etc
Why is doing this kind of thing good? Well when I went for lessons, and Neal would ask how I was playing my usual answer was "hmmmm kinda good, been striking it well" and if he asked about shot pattern I'd say "some were straight, some were pushes and some were pulls"! Not very helpful comments really for someone who is then to try and help me improve! Showing Neal the stats though gave him a lot more information to go with and certainly did indicate to us the areas I needed to work on most.
Keeping these stats and inputting them after every round is a big commitment, and as I mentioned above just having my mind on keeping track of these stats while playing wasn't a good thing.
So I managed to narrow down what I wanted to keep track of
1, Stroke Score - obviously needed as part of playing golf! :-)
2, Whether the fairway was hit from a tee shot - sometimes I am quite liberal with this as a drive that just rolls into the first cut of rough may still be a great drive that doesn't cost you a lost shot.
3, Greens in regulation
4, Putts per hole
These allow me to keep track of how I am playing generally, and give me little targets to work on while playing other than just the score. One more important thing I started doing last year...
3 Great Shots
In my journal I started writing down 3 great shots from each round I played. This tip came from the great book Mental Ketchup - which I'll be doing a review of later. When writing down the 3 great shots you need to put down as much information as possible - the thought process you went through before playing, the conditions, how you felt after executing the shot. The idea is that you will build up a memory bank of great shots so that when you have a similar situation your brain will be able to retrieve the memory of a good shot and help you execute it again.
If I wrote a great shot down 9 months ago and read it now I know exactly which shot it was and can completely visualise it and play through it again in my mind. Very powerful and useful stuff. I made a habit of reading through some good shots the night before a tournament at the weekend last year and it really helped.
What stats do you keep track of that help you to improve and practise ?