Stay At Home To Improve Your Golf

Sometimes when you’re just not ‘getting it’, your A game I’m referring to, it seems like no matter what you do, nothing improves. When you’ve got it really bad and every club feels like a bent lead pipe in your hand, and you haven’t swung that bad since playing rounders on the school sports field you first picked up a golf club – it’s sometimes time for a break.

Now, many Pro’s will tell you it’s time for a few lessons at this stage – and sometimes they are definately correct in this assessment, and if I’m honest I don’t take enough lessons myself, but I am of the opinion that sometimes when things just won’t click in your game, that a short abstinence from playing can give your muscles time to forget how to wildly slash at the ball the recent bad habit(s).

I’m no Pro, I’m not a teacher and I’m not professing to be, more over I am just highlighting observations from own experiences – which may or may not apply to you too. This has happened many times to me, and it isn’t picky when it happens – sometimes you can get the bad when playing three times a week or once a fortnight – I’ve lost count of the amount of times I took a month out and came back to play out my skin, and the converse has also happened but normally my own bad starts when I’m sneaking off work early in the summer on a steady increase of playing more often. All of a sudden you have two or three consecutive bad holes and it feels like you’ve had a bad for a lifetime, not only that, the consciousness of it seems to embellish it and amplify the presence of something bad right in the forefront of your mind. You try to visualise the next shot you’re about to hit and it’s like someone tattooed the vision of a vicious great boomerang shot onto your eyeballs.

You’ve had it yourself, you’ve been playing well and then all of a sudden a bad appears and you don’t deal with it, at least not correctly – I do this far too often.

So how do you know when to take a lesson and when to take a break? Well that’s a difficult decision, I’ll be up front and say that more often you will need a lesson – it may be a certain type of lesson or even some time out on the course with your local Pro, this will normally be the answer but there are times when a week or two out of the battle will drive the bad away, like a bad smell that sometimes you don’t know where it’s come from but no sooner it’s come than it’s gone away again of it’s own accord.

If I take a break, then how long Should I take one for? Personally my mantra is practice-practice-practice, this is what you will normally hear or read from me. But sometimes you just need to unlearn to get rid of the bad and apart from some midnight putts on the living room carpet this means totally abstinence – you need to decide yourself on the length of time, all I will say is that with myself it’s normally around a couple of weeks but has been over a month.

In fact these days I don’t tend to play too often in the Winter which sometimes causes the opposite effect in that positive changes I’ve made that I introduced towards the end of the season can be difficult to resurrect if they haven’t had enough time to bed into my game or my memory, I’ll be writing a special post on this very experience and observation shortly.

At the end of the day improvement or maintenance of your game relies on your own pragmatism, you know you well so don’t go against the grain and waste money on lessons when a break would do, and likewise don’t waste money on bad rounds when a lesson would make them into good rounds. You decide.

What are your experiences? Do you agree with post or not? Let me know..