“Practice puts brains in your muscles.” - Sam Snead
As March comes to a close and we are hopeful that Mother Nature will allow us to return to the weekly weekend rounds with the crew, returning back to old habits become almost inevitable. To get a better leg up on the rest of your foursome, follow these address routines to have a more confident alignment, more repeatable impact, as well as calmer grip for those pressure shots.
Just like any other sport, while on the golf course the game speed is accelerated. There is always that guy in the group that talks too much, stands over the ball for hours, and the player that cracks open his beer right as you are in the middle of your backswing. These interferences produces a loss of focus and unsurprisingly more poor shots created throughout the round. To help find your inner sanctum while playing, there needs to be an added consistency taking our stance, posture, and grip. These added steps will result in better shot making results and added comfort when distractions emerge.
Like Michael Jordan when he takes the basketball at the free throw line, with the game on the line, he follows the same routine he practiced over and over in the gym with his coaches and trainers. In my instruction, I promote my players to follow a 1, 2, 3 address routine. To help this routine, I align the logo of the golf ball with the desired target. This helps the player to start off with the clubface aligning up with the ball at a perpendicular angle. This better improves the comfort in finding the proper stance and posture, as well as prevents the player from adjusting the clubface angle. Next, the player aligns their feet parallel from the target line. When done correctly, the player is better able to see if one of their toes are closer, further away, or perfectly equal distance from the ball. Lastly, and most importantly, the player grips the golf club. The biggest mistake I see with address and alignment, are players gripping the club first rather than last, preventing them from correctly laying down the clubface or see their feet while setting up a correct stance.
The more that this can be repeated over and over during practice, no matter the club, no matter the day, no matter the course the better. Golf is a game of discipline, with confidence coming from becoming more reactionary. Too often players have a laundry list of to dos when setting up, unfortunately done differently from hole to hole. The more a player can enter executing a shot with a clear mind, the more likely they will see consistent results. So next time you are watching the back nine on Sunday of a PGA tour event, watch your favorite players and how they repeat their pre shot routine each and every time.
