Last night I had the pleasure of attending the Trained Brain Peak Performance Seminar with Jamie Edwards at Sandford Springs. Jamie did a session like this last year as well but unfortunately after buying a ticket I forgot to put it in my calendar and so didn’t make it along to the event! I was kicking myself as everybody was saying how good it was. I learned my lesson by putting 1 or 2 day alerts on all my calendar items now. Thankfully Neal arranged Jamie to come back again this year and I made sure I wasn’t going to miss him again.
The seminar went on for 3 hours and I took 6 pages of notes so I’m not going to share everything with you here. If you do get the chance to go and see Jamie speak make sure you take it up as you won’t regret it. I’ll mention just two of the points I took from last night.
Turn Social Games into Pressure Situations
One of the points raised by people at the start was how can they translate the good rounds they have with their friends during social games into good competition rounds. It all comes down to the difference in pressure. During social games you are relaxed and calm where as competitions put you under pressure which affects the way you think and feel. What you need to do is get used to playing under pressure so when a competition comes around the pressure is something you are familiar with.
Golf Mission are a set of cards that give you 6 challenges that will keep you under pressure and concentrating for all 18 holes of golf. I bought a set just after Christmas but haven’t started using them yet. Next time a social game comes about (probably Sunday) I’ll definitely have a Golf Mission card with me to see how things go.
Short Game
We know it is important to have a good short game, but how many of us really (really) do something about it. Spending an hour on the chipping green hitting the same shot again and again doesn’t count as this isn’t like real golf! You only get one chance to hit each shot on the course. I’ve been introduced to Par18 before where you use the chipping green to play 9 holes where each is hopefully just a chip and one putt.
Par18 is good as it puts you under pressure when you are practising. If you’ve played 8 holes and your score is 16 you are going to be under pressure from yourself to get down in two to make the score of 18! This is the kind of pressure you will be under during a competition round so it is a good thing to get used to.
Once you play Par18 you need to record your score. This then becomes a record of your improvement, or if it gets worse maybe an indicator you need to refer to your coach.
Par18 obviously helps your short game, but it will also make you more confident with your iron shots into greens. If you know that statistically you can get up and down from a missed green you are going to be able to make a much more confident swing with your irons, and confident swings will get good result.
I’ve written up all my notes from yesterday in my journal and will keep referring to them throughout the season. Overall I need to stop playing so much social golf without a purpose. As an immediate plan of action I’ve put together a weekly activity card so that I can track my weekly progress with chipping, long putts, bunkers and pitching. I plan to build a small web site to keep track of these stats – more news on that when I have some code down as I hope it is something others will find useful as well.