Mental | Golf Box Usa

Golf Mental Tips To Help You Reduce Your Scores

September 16, 2020

The game of golf is one of the most mental games in the world. It is one of the few sports where you control when you make a play. The ball just sits there on the fairway or green and it is up to you to take as much or little time as you want to hit it. Most other sports you are forced to make a play due to pressure from the competition. Learning how to master the mental game is perhaps the key to unlocking your unlimited potential as a golfer.

The best players in the world have learned to master the mental game of golf and that is what makes them great. Positive thinking and confidence are critical in becoming a great player. Of course, you will need to still practice regularly on the mechanics in order to maintain your skills. However just working on mechanics alone will only get you so far at the game of golf and you will reach a plateau.

In order to break through that plateau you must develop the ability to maintain and build confidence regardless of what happened on the last shot good or bad. Maintaining confidence is a great challenge however there are many things you can do to become a more confident player.

The first step is to see yourself as a great player. You need to remind yourself regularly of all the great shots you have ever hit and all the great putts you have ever made. Take a few minutes out of each day to think about your top five greatest shots ever and also see yourself playing well in the next round you will be playing. Be realistic, so every now and then you may picture yourself missing a green or fairway but then also picture yourself recovering and making those shots back in the next few holes.

The way you think as you are about hit the ball is very important. You must learn to trust your mechanics and in your ability to execute mechanics without consciously thinking about it. Instead you need to stay focused on the targets you select and block out other thoughts. A good exercise to help you to develop this focus is by concentrating on the tip of a pen. Try only to think about the tip of the pen and nothing else. If other thoughts enter your mind then return your focus back on the pen.

Learning about proper course management is also essential in order to play better golf. Many times you will be tempted to hit shots that are too difficult based on your current skill level. You must resist this temptation and hit the shot you know you can hit and that you have hit before several times in practice.

Sometimes laying up on a par 4 can often be the best option in order to shoot low scores. Rely more on your short game to help you make pars and as your long game gets better you will inevitably make more birdies. When picking clubs make sure that you select a club that you can comfortably swing to get the ball to the hole, if you have to take an extra club if it means being able to make an easier swing.

Do not get caught up in what your playing partners are doing and try to match their distance. Also remember that golf really is an individual sport so do not try to beat your playing partners but rather focus on playing the course and shooting the lowest score possible on that day. Use some of the mental strategies to help you lower your golf handicap.

 

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Golf Psychology Improves Your Golf Score

August 26, 2019

GOLF PSYCHOLOGY is not just about managing your mind it is also about having a common sense approach to the game. That is why golf psychology is becoming a very important topic these days. This is what the mental game is all about.

Golf

Golf happens in the mind, and it’s not just a matter of good or bad thoughts, because there is a crucial time period in every shot when ANY thought will ruin your game. Golf is about managing your mind and your expectations. When a professional golfer is under pressure, the last thing he can afford is a shred of doubt in his mind. Doubt ruins the golf shot because doubt is a conscious thought and ANY conscious thought good or bad is your enemy when it comes to movement, or the swing portion of the golf shot.

 

Tiger Woods is a perfect example of the importance of the mind in golf. He has the ability to not think of anything during the swing. Unconscious sabotage (in golf psychology), is caused by the mind sending negative ‘signals’ for the body to follow during the swing on particular shots. Your own unique brand of golf psychology will permit you to gain a clear path between your unconscious mind and your physical game.

Training

Listening to “Motivational and training material” EVERYDAY is one of the ways to improve your golf psychology. The reason you don’t hear many successful golfers talk about their mental training is because they know how powerful it is. The main thing to know is that mental training and golf psychology is a secret weapon which can transform your results very quickly, and overcome problems which you may have been experiencing for years.

Online

Online golf instruction is becoming a popular search for the new golf enthusiasts who may not be interested in much more than improving their game. Of course, with the plethora of e books and online texts out there that claim to teach you the various methods involved, no doubt you’re a little overwhelmed. There are a wide variety of golf guides online and there should be no difficulty finding one, however, you need one to include the finer points of golf psychology.

Conclusion

Golf psychology is the mental aspect to golf which most players overlook in their quest to improve. For me, golf is about being prepared and ready on the course and automatically doing the right things using the power of your unconscious.

Here are a few recommendations to get your brain in the game!

 

 

 

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How to Find Your Natural Golf Swing!

August 17, 2019

I would assume that if you play golf, you have gotten the idea of how to swing a stick at a ball and hit it. I don’t take that statement lightly. It’s not an intuitive act, and you have to learn how to do it. Turning that into a golf swing is the next step.

Everyone has a different golf swing. That’s because everyone has a different body structure, different strength, different flexibility, different personal history of movement. You can go the beauty parlor and get a hairstyle just like your favorite movie star, but you can’t go the the range and have the pro give you a swing like your favorite golfer. There’s a swing based on who you are, and if you find it, you’ll play good golf.

Get a hand towel. Wad it up in a ball and hold it in front of yourself with both hands. Stand like you’re about to hit a golf ball. Calm your mind and let go of any thoughts about hitting golf balls. Bring your arms back and “swing through,” letting go of the towel as you pass the bottom of your swing, as if you were tossing the towel to a friend standing a few feet away from you. In effect, throw the towel using a golf swing.

It will help to turn your head and look where you’re going to throw the towel as you actually let it go. By throwing the towel, you’re finding out how your body wants to move when you make the turning and directing motion that the golf swing is. After a while, you should be settling into a movement that feels natural and effortless, and your own. It will also have nothing to do with golf, and that’s good.

At that point, get out an 8-iron and begin again. Calm your mind and let go of any thoughts about hitting golf balls. Now swing the 8-iron in the same way you threw the towel. Just don’t throw the 8-iron, unless you’re (a) outside, (b) won’t hit anything that shouldn’t be hit, and (c) don’t mind walking after it every time.

IMPORTANT! Swing it the same way you threw the towel. DO NOT think to yourself that since you now have a golf club in your hand you have to go back to your idea of what a GOLF SWING is supposed to be. That’s what this exercise is trying to get you off of.

Just swing the club, no ball, like your threw the towel. For the fun of it. Because it feels nice. For any reason that you can think of besides that it’s for hitting a golf ball. Just swing the club.

The next step is to hit a golf ball with this swing. This will be fairly easy to do, much easier than it has been to make your practice swing your real swing. That’s because in the old days, when your mind switched from your practice swing to your real swing, you would start to think about a bunch of technical stuff that didn’t fit and never would fit in with the way you move.

Therefore you had no subconscious trust in what you had learned. And the reason you didn’t trust what you had learned is that it was someone else’s idea of what they needed to do. Had nothing to do with what you need to do. Nothing at all.

With this new towel-throwing swing, since it’s natural for you, you can trust what you’re doing regardless of whether there’s a ball there or not. That is the key to playing good golf– trusting what you are about to do, having confidence in it.

Now this won’t take an afternoon’s work and you’re set for life. It takes lots of repetitions to replace an old habit with a new one. But if you make on swing change this year, make it this one. Just work on this, and you’ll get the results you’ve been looking for all along.

 

Expert Author Bob E. Jones

Bob Jones

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Why Most Golf Swings Are Inconsistent

August 4, 2019

Ask almost any golfer what they would like to improve on and they will say they would like to have a more consistent golf swing. That’s a great goal. What they don’t realize is that they already have a consistent swing. It’s just one that delivers inconsistent results.

You get inconsistent results because you are not able to put your best swing on the ball time after time. You don’t have to be off by much for a good swing to turn into a bad one. Most of the time it’s not a technical flaw. It’s because you’re not paying attention to the fundamentals of the golf swing, which are: a calm mind, setup, tempo and rhythm, and impact. Let’s go over each one.

The mind leads the body. The state of your mind is reflected in the condition of your body. When the mind is calm, the golf skills that you have practiced will come out. When there is worry or doubt or distraction in your mind, your body will not perform the way you trained it to. You take a calm mind to the course if you have one in your daily life. Practice not getting easily upset, distracted, or stymied by obstacles. Getting good at this takes as much practice as any golf skill does.

Any pro will tell you that the setup is the entree to a good golf swing. They work on their set up constantly and the setup is the first thing they check when their shots start going awry. Good shots flow out of a good setup. The only thing that comes out of a bad setup is luck. See a pro learn the principles of a good setup and practice it continually.

I watched a professional clinic on TV once, that featured major championship winners, and every one that talked about the swing said what they were working on at the moment was their tempo. Not their backswing, not some esoteric swing detail. It was tempo, and every pro said that. Tempo, and the rhythm that emerges from it, is the glue that holds the swing together. Most recreational golfers swing too fast, and speed up especially on the downswing. If you think to swing at the ball rather than to hit the ball, you’ll likely be alright.

Square, in-line impact is what the swing is all about. Every good golfer gets there in his or her own way, but they all get to the same place. And impact isn’t an effect. It’s a cause, and you can practice it as well as any other part of your swing. Take short, three-foot swings through the impact zone, memorize what your body feels like when everything is just right, then build that feeling into your full swing.

To get consistent results, be consistent in how you apply the fundamentals. They’re easy to learn, easy to maintain. When you hit a shot that’s not to your liking, go through the list and see which one you didn’t apply, because odds are that’s what caused it.

Bob Jones is dedicated to showing recreational golfers the little things, that anyone can install in their swing and game, that make a big difference in how they play.

 

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Build A Strong Mental Game In Golf

May 7, 2019

Having the Correct Golf Mentality

 

You may have wondered, in a moment of idle reflection about this game, why more people don’t play better golf than they do. It should be a simple game. You are hitting a ball that doesn’t move.

You are swinging clubs that have been designed with a great deal of care, involving time, money, and engineering skill. No one does anything to hinder you, either, or even to distract you.

One reason most of our scores stay high is our mental approach to the game. We are beaten before we start. The golf game has defeated the player for so many generations that the player now has an inferiority complex that would defy the combined skills of Freud, Jung, and Adler. To the man who habitually goes around in 93, the thought of breaking into the 70’s is the height of absurdity.

A complete reorientation is necessary in golf. This has been accomplished in other sports, particularly in track and field. The four-minute mile, the seven-foot high jump, the sixty-foot shot-put are only three examples. It would take a superman, the track experts said, to run a mile in under four minutes. But once Dr. Roger Bannister did it a new plateau was established, onto which many other milers soon proceeded to climb. Back in 1920 Dick Landon won the Olympic high jump with 6 feet 4 inches. At Rome in 1960 a leap of 7 feet 14 inch was good for only third place.

The point here is that mental barriers were broken, as well as those of time and altitude. The normal golfer has a similar mental barrier, and it, too, must be shattered. Once you believe you can improve your golf game, it will all become much easier.

Naturally, Dr. Bannister and the other pioneers in the track and field record-breaking did not set their marks merely by thinking they could. The new marks stemmed from improved training methods and, especially in the field events, from vastly better techniques. This is true in golf.

Here we come very close to golf. Golf is a game of techniques. Training, in the sense of physical conditioning, is relatively not of great importance, unless we are engaged in tournament play. The average man, once he gets out on the course a few times in the spring, finds no physical difficulty in playing an eighteen-hole round. Often he is fresh enough to play eighteen more holes, or nine, anyway.

So get the best advice and practice as much as you can. Your golf game will improve no-end.

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What it takes to be a tour pro!

May 3, 2019

Want to become a Tour Pro?

In this new video series, The Rookie Year, I’ve teamed up with European Tour professional and TaylorMade Tour staff player Kim Koivu to document his progress throughout the 2019 season. In these videos we’ll explore what it takes to be a tour pro.

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Is Your Golf Course Management Up to Par?

April 30, 2019

Golf course management is essential to your success as a golfer. Do you know what separates the great players from the good players? It is course management! While you may not be able to hit the ball like a pro or putt like a pro, you can learn to think your way around the golf course like a pro. Here I am going to give you 3 tips on how you can manage your game better.

1. First and foremost you need to realize the number one mistake that many golfers make is that we all tend to not take enough club. By this I mean that most golfers, especially men try to hit the ball hard and think they can hit their clubs further than they really can. I know for the longest time I tried to hit my 9 iron 150 yards on every shot, and then I realized that I have much more control from that distance with an 8 iron. The point is that in most circumstances it is better to hit too much club than not enough.

2. Another thing that many golfers do is try to get too close to the greens on a par 5. This may sound weird but what you need to do is lay up to a yardage that is comfortable to you. If this means laying up to 60 yards or 80 yards then that is what you should try to do. Most professional golfers tend to lay up at around the 100 yard marker because this gives them a full sand wedge to the green. This is a great way to improve your golf course management.

3. Last but not least you must remember that every golfer has weaknesses, but you must play to your strengths. Every successful golfer at every level does this. If you have trouble with your driver, then hit 3 wood off of the tee, if you have trouble with hitting your wedge then try to hit bump and run 8 iron shots around the greens.

Golf course management is crucial to your success, so to maximize your potential make sure you do not neglect this vital part of your game.

Source by Matthew Lord

Working on Your Golf Swing vs. How You Play the Game!

April 30, 2019

Don’t just play golf. Understand it.

Your Golf Swing vs. How You Play the Game

 

I recently played in the Southwest PGA Senior Open. I was hitting the ball great, but it didn’t translate on my scorecard. This reminded me of a few lessons I’ve shared over the years.

1. Remember that your score is not necessarily a reflection of who you are as a player. Use your experiences on the course to learn and improve.

2. Playing the game and working on your golf swing are two entirely different things.

Here’s a great conversation I had with Brendon DeVore @bebettergolf, talking about this very subject. It’s part of a 6-Part Golf Talk Series you can watch at malaskagolf.com.

 

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