Practicing Hard but Not Getting Better? Here's Why

Not getting the results you want from your practice sessions? In this episode of Think Above Par, Kathy dives deep into the mindset needed for effective practice sessions. Discover how to avoid common pitfalls and frustrations at the range, and learn techniques for managing your mental approach to practice. Kathy shares personal anecdotes and practical advice on creating a healthier relationship with practice, ensuring that your time at the range translates into better performance on the course. Tune in to reshape how you think about practice and accelerate your progress in golf!

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Mastering Your Golf Brain - A Guide to Self-Coaching

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you feel like you're not getting enough out of your practice sessions? Or do you go to the range and practice and you end up leaving very frustrated, not seeing the results that you want? You're putting in a lot of time, but not getting enough out relative to your score or how you're performing on the golf course? Well, in this episode, I'm going to share with you some of the mindset that you want to have around your practice so that you can get better results faster. You ready? Let's go. Welcome to Above Par. I'm your host, Kathy Hartwood. I show you how to take more of your talent to the golf course without practicing harder, taking more lessons, or buying new equipment. I show you how to end the frustration of underperforming so you can start playing to your potential. This is where you are going to learn how to think above par so you can play below par. Let's get to it. Hello my girlfriend. Welcome back to Think Above Par. Super happy you're here and listening. I appreciate it. Okay, so today I wanted to talk about practice and your mindset for practice and why it's so important. Because if you don't get your head straight, so to speak, about your practice sessions, you're gonna slow your progress down. You could even go backwards, right? You could start practicing the wrong things or putting in a lot of time and effort on the driving range and not make any progress at all. And like I said, go backwards, get worse, perhaps. That's a thing that can happen. And mental golf or the mental game, or what I teach is really just thought management anywhere that you want to do it, uh, you know, you have one brain, so it applies everywhere. And practicing is part of golf. So you don't only manage your mind on the golf course, you want to manage your mind about your practice sessions and get really self-aware of what you're thinking and what you're doing out there, and wondering if it's serving you or not serving you, right? We have a tendency to think that it's not as stressful because there's no tournament. And I use the range as an example all the time, is when we're typically in a place of being calm, certain, and confident when we're hitting golf balls, or at least we can access that more easily than we're on the golf course when we're playing in a tournament and we freak ourselves out. But what you do going into a practice session, how you set yourself up is either going to speed up your results or it's gonna slow you down. And for me, when I was playing for a living, college golf, junior golf, college golf, right through when I was playing for a living, um, and I can have a tendency to do this right now when I get, you know, working on my game, is I become very addicted to practice. I had a really poor attitude about practice. I used to think that the person who practiced the most was going to do the best. And if someone outpracticed me, then they were likely going to outperform me. I have no idea why I got that thought. I borrowed it from somebody, but it was not true. And it it I saw evidence, evidence of it all the time. I would see girls who didn't practice very much and they kicked my butt. And I was like, wait a minute, I'm practicing more than they are. Why are they getting better results than me? And then I became addicted to practice. And you know you're addicted to something when you can't take a day off. And that was me. I couldn't take a day off from practicing. I would feel like I was going backwards. I feel like I'd mess up my swing. I feel like the next time I went and practiced, my timing would be off. I would be out of sequence. I would make up all these stories on what would happen if I missed a day of practicing where I didn't touch a club or do something. In fact, this was so bad that my my sister recognized it. We were living in Miami Beach at the time, and she was trying to coerce me to go to the beach with her. And she packed a cooler of beer and she grabbed a book and she's like, Come on, Kathy, just come sit in a chair on the beach and relax for a day. And I said, I can't. I haven't practiced. I need to do something. And she's she was just insistent. She's like, Come on, put your suit on and let's go. So I put my suit on, but I grabbed my sand wedge and I grabbed a little bag of balls, and I went behind the condos away from the water, and I hit bunker shots. Well, I guess they'd be sand shots. They weren't really in the bunker. So I drop a couple balls and I hit a couple of sand shots and I go pick them up until I realized that was a pain in the butt trying to find my balls in that sand. So I hit about 10 or 12 of them, and but I got to think after I did that that okay, I practiced, so I'm okay. I could calm down, and so I could go sit and crack open a beer and sit with my sister on the beach. This was not a good mindset for me. I didn't have a healthy relationship with my practicing, and I wasn't getting the results. There wasn't a direct correlation between that and my results. In fact, that was the problem. You see, high achievers or perfectionists, people who have done a lot of amazing things by putting in a lot of work and effort, even if it wasn't another sport, think that there's a direct correlation between the amount of time we put into our practice sessions and our results. So the more I put in, the more I should get out. And that's not the case with golf. It might have worked in other areas of your life. And you might be wondering, like, why the heck is it not working with golf? Golf just doesn't work that way. And this can be very frustrating. And what can happen is we have a tendency then to put in more work. You'll think, like, well, maybe I'm not working enough on my practice. So, what I want to do is I'm gonna go through a series of questions that I want you to ask yourself. You can grab a piece of paper and a pen if you want to and write them down because you're really gonna get really aware of your relationship with your practice and whether it's serving you or not, and whether you could potentially make more out of those sessions so that you could create better results for yourself and have a better experience while you're practicing. Maybe enjoy practice a little bit more. And then after that, I'm gonna give you a little plan, a quick, easy plan for you to get into the mindset of actually how to practice and put yourself in a place where you can swing more freely, think more clearly, you're gonna have a plan so that you're gonna get better results, faster results. And you most likely won't go backwards, because that's the last thing we want to do is go backwards with our golf game, which means that we've created more bad habits, we've lost confidence, we've become less certain, right? Because that's challenging then to transfer out onto the golf course. Okay, so here we go. So the first question that I want you to ask yourself is how much should you practice? So, in my example, every day, don't take a day off. If it rained, oh my gosh, we didn't really have indoor facilities when I was growing up much at all, right? But oh my gosh, if it rained, I didn't know what I was gonna do. I'd put in doors on a carpet for a little bit and go like, okay, that was good. So, how much should you practice? How many days a week should you practice? How many hours, quote unquote, should you put in in your mind? What is enough to you? All right, so that's the first question I want you to answer. I want you to ask yourself, what do you make it mean if you don't practice? So let's say you have a tournament maybe coming up next week and it rains all week and you didn't get a chance to practice. What story are you going to tell yourself in your head? This is an important story. The sentence is it I'm not ready, I haven't practiced, I'm not gonna play well because I didn't practice? Just get really curious. What's what are you making it mean? When you go out and practice, what are your tendencies? This is where you get to get really curious. Do you have a tendency to get pissed off pretty quickly if you're not hitting it well? Do you judge yourself if you're not hitting the kind of shots that you think you should be hitting? Do you have a tendency just to practice your favorite clubs, your favorite shots? I hit my sandwich, I hit my seven iron, I love my seven iron, I hit maybe my favorite hybrid, and then I hit a couple drivers. But I hit my five iron, so I'm not practicing that. Or maybe you don't like bunker shots, so you never go to the bunker. Or do you have a tendency to chase squirrels, I call it, right? So you miss one shot and then you try and fix it, and then you hit some, another ball maybe goes to the right, and then you try and strengthen your grip, and then maybe you duck hook it or you hit it left, and then you try something different. Call that chasing squirrels. Which we change up what we're doing on the range based on the result that we have. And if you do that, if you make that a habit, you are going to do that on the golf course. So, do you have a tendency to do that? Do you end up have a tendency to try like every single one of the possible tips and tricks and drills that less uh that instructors have given you over the years, and you just pull them out based on whatever you're seeing with the ball going up in the air or on the ground, right? Right? I call it chasing squirrels because really you're not gonna do anything consistently. You're you do something different on every single swing, you're not gonna be consistent, you're not ingraining anything. So, watch for those ways that we end up chasing squirrels. Okay, the other question I want you to ask is what do you make your results mean? So, what this means is what do you make the look of your shots mean? Are you are you looking for yourself to hit good golf shots? Do you hit a wonky shot and then you create a story about it? What are you making that mean? What's the story that you're telling yourself about the results of the shots that you're hitting on the range? Is it I'm not ready, my swing's not there, I can't hit a straight shot, I'm not hitting it very solid, something's wrong, things are broken. Like, what are you telling yourself? And then the next one is what's your objective? Is it just to see good golf shots? Are you going out there to just see and observe what your ball is doing? Are you going out there to just relax and have fun and just not make your results mean anything? Are you going out there trying to work on drills and some things that you got in the last lesson? Do you have an objective? Or are you going out there with just the purpose of checking a box because you said you were gonna practice and hit balls for an hour? And the next question is if you have a swing change that you're trying to make, how long in your head do you think it should take? Like you have a story, you have an you have kind of an idea. I'm gonna work on changing my swing plane, and it should take me X amount of time. Because if you don't reach that, then you're gonna start practicing from a place of urgency or impatience. One of the ways that we also know that urgency shows up in our practice sessions is if you have a tournament coming up or an event coming up, you can start making your results mean a lot. I'm not ready, I'm not gonna play well, things are going in the wrong direction, right? And then you're practicing from urgency. So you're out there trying to hit good golf shots. Right? Because if you hit a good golf shot, you get to feel what? Relieved, confident, certain, assured? If you have a tendency to only practice your favorite clubs, what are you avoiding?

unknown 10:14

Right?

SPEAKER_00 10:14

What are you avoiding? Are you avoiding being uncomfortable hitting five orns because you don't like them? Because you don't want to see the ball go a certain way. That's likely because you're making your results mean something in your practice sessions. Because one of the things I would tell you that if your objective is to go out there and just take good golf shots, like you just want to see the ball fly nice and pretty while you're out there, then I would ask you, how do you hit a good golf shot?

unknown 10:36

Right?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

If you're just whacking balls and waiting for that one shot, you're like, see, that's the one I want. This happens when I was teaching so often, people would say, I just want to be consistent. I'm like, okay, well, let me see what you're doing. And they top one, they top one, they top one, they top one, they top one, they hit a solid one, and they're like, that's the one. That's the one that I want. Now they've hit 10 balls, they've topped nine, they hit one good one. I said, You are consistent. You're consistent at topping it because you've gone out there and you've rehearsed topping nine times, waiting to see that one, and then you judged yourself on why you can't do that more often, and that you're not consistent. When the truth is you are consistent because you've rehearsed that top so many times. And so, one of the things I tell people if you start screwing up, if you're topping it, don't repeat something more than three times without stopping and changing course, figuring out what's going on, because you're going to ingrain that. So that's one of the red flags to look for. If you're looking for yourself to hit a good golf shot, but in your pursuit of doing that, in the number of balls it took you to get that one shot that you get to feel good about, you've created and rehearsed basically a lot of wonky swings with the potential to create a lot of beliefs about yourself and your golf game in there that aren't going to serve you on the golf course. Okay, so I want you to notice your dominant emotion when you're practicing. Are you practicing in a place where you're pretty calm? Or are you practicing from urgency, impatience, annoyance, judgment, irritation, disappointment? Because remember, if those emotions are in you while you're practicing, if you're experiencing them in your body, they're vibrations, and if you're experiencing them in your body, you are not going to be able to think clearly and swing freely. So if that's the purpose, or if that's what you're the objective, what you want to do, and you're trying to change your swing, it's so much easier to change your swing when you're swinging freely and thinking clearly. It is very challenging to change your swing when you're in a negative place, when there's tension in your body. Maybe when you're swinging faster. If you get pissed off, right, you're gonna be swinging faster. Impatient, you're gonna swing faster. You might not go through your pre-shot routine. You might rapid fire those balls over one right after the other. So really pay attention to what your dominant emotion is when you're out there practicing. And I tell people that if you get to a place where you're in a negative place, in a negative state, you need to do a walkabout. You need to just step away, take a little walk, get yourself back down into a calmer place before you go back and hit balls. You're not moving forward, you're moving backwards at that moment. So many people go out and practice, they're just like I call it treading water. You put in so much effort, but you go nowhere. Right? Treading water is exhausting. You just try to keep your head above water, basically. So you do all this action, you're staying in one spot. And that's what we do when we go and practice. We put in all this effort, sometimes, not all the time, right? We put in all this effort and we're not getting anywhere. I would just prefer you not spend that time, go do something else. Because there's such a greater tendency for you to actually start moving in the wrong direction, start making and creating swing faults and habits that aren't useful that then you have to go in and put in time to correct. And that's what we don't want to do. Once you get to a certain level with golf, for the most part, practicing becomes a game of whack-a-mole. So you go and practice and you're just trying to whack-a-mole away any bad habits from creeping up. Because if you don't go out there and send an intention to practice, then bad habits creep in. And usually, those bad habits for a player who gets to a certain level, they know what their tendencies are. Like for me, I love, love, love, love. Love to twist my club face going back. It's so yummy to me. If I just didn't think about it, I would fan that face open. I've done it since I was 12 years old playing golf. I don't know why. I love it. Okay, so if I don't practice and be intentional about that, then next thing I know, I have this habit of twisting my face open going back. And I know what that shot looks like, basically. It's like a weak shot to the right. And I'm like, oh, I didn't play whack-a-mole with that. I didn't set that as an intention of something for me to check on when I'm practicing. That wasn't an objective of mine. So if you have those swing tendencies, things that creep in, like you know that because if you take a lesson and the instructor says to you you're doing that thing again, right? And you get irritated, that's because you haven't played whack-a-mole, right? You thought it's gone, right? It's like a water stain on the ceiling. It kind of they have a tendency to creep back in. Once you get to a certain level, if you're a beginning golfer or higher handicap, you know, you're still learning some of your skill set, so to speak. So you might have a variety of things that you're working on. But once you get to a certain level of golfer, you'll have three or four things that you just really have a tendency to do. But one of the things that we want to avoid with practicing is going and creating bad habits because it takes time to fix a swing. So we don't want to get off course too much. And that's an intention and a purpose of practicing. So this is the plan that I want you to have when you go into practicing. I want you to be really aware of what your mindset is about your practice session, how you're feeling about it. Find your emotional state that you're going to go into this practice session. Check in with yourself. Are you feeling urgent, impatient, desperate, scared, irritated, right? Just check in. Make sure that you're getting yourself into calm, certain, or confident before you go to the driving range. And listen, some days we might set an intention of going out there and practicing for an hour, but mentally all we got is 10 minutes, and then we're toast. You've you got to meet yourself where you are. You might have had a big day, an exhausting day, and we could run out of those mental poker chips that I call them, and you're like, I got nothing. You do yourself a favor if you walk away. 10 minutes is the best you have. Put in good 10 good minutes. It has nothing to do with an hour. There's no time on it. It's the quality that you put in. So if it you're practicing at the end of the day and you're mental toast, you have a lot of things going on in your life and you're just not very present. You know, make a deal with yourself that I'm gonna practice as long as I can stay present and focused because I don't want to go backwards. I'm not serving myself. All right, so be really self-aware before you go into a practice session on how you're feeling. What's your attitude about it? What are you thinking? The second thing that I want you to do is set an intention or have a plan. If you do not have a plan to practice, you're treading water. What are you working on? What are you whack-a-molling? Do you have some drills that you want to work on? Do you have some low-hanging fruit on things that you want to practice? Maybe chipping or bunker you noticed the last time you played wasn't so great. So you're gonna set an intention to go and practice that. How are you gonna practice that? If you're going out and practicing it and looking for a result that you're gonna hit good chip shots, how did you do it? How are you gonna repeat it? If you have no idea, you can't help yourself on the golf course. No, you have to have some basic understanding of what you're trying to do or have a plan, have an instructor tell you some, give you some drills to do when you're out there practicing. I encourage people to go and create a plan that is going to move you closer to creating the swings or the moves in your swing that you want, or the shots that you want. So let's say if you're trying to correct your curve on your ball, your ball is slicing. You want to go in with the objective of doing some of those things in your swing that are gonna help that, that are gonna move you closer to doing it. It might be you're gonna set an intention with that every for the 10 shots, all you're gonna do is you're gonna focus on your grip. Because when you don't focus on your grip, and promise, I promise you this part's true. If you don't focus on your grip and set that intention, if you're trying to tweak it, you're gonna go back to your old grip. I've watched it a million times. I've spent lessons going, fix your grip. Every shot, fix your grip, fix your grip, fix your grip, fix your grip. And then I just start saying it until they could hear it in their head, fix your grip, because they go in and they're thinking about something else, and they went back to a grip that was comfortable. Comfortable wasn't correct. So they had to be intentional about getting uncomfortable and making sure their grip was in the right location because that's gonna affect their curve, right? And you might need to do that. Like your only intention is I'm gonna stand over this ball and make sure my grip's on where it's supposed to be, and then I'm gonna swing. It could be that you're having an intention, like maybe you're doing Kathy's move and you're fanning the face open and you have a move on your takeaway, and you're like, I'm gonna make sure that for 10 balls, I usually use seven to ten is the number. For seven to ten balls, all I'm gonna think about is making sure my club face isn't getting fanned. It's square going back. And sometimes I have to feel like I'm shut and feel like Dustin Johnson on the top of my swing, right? Just to get square because I've let that go and it has to, it's uncomfortable. So have a series of things, three to four to five, that you rotate through. So you're gonna do 10 balls. This would be a nice intention and plan. Ten balls doing one thing, 10 balls doing another thing, 10 balls doing something else, and then maybe 10 where you try and put it all together and don't think about much of anything. I would add into your practicing that you do a few balls going through your pre-shot routine, right? Because we want to practice and rehearse that. I would probably add that into every practice session that you do, including your pre-shot routine for putting and short game and full swing if you practice those. So you have a plan on what you're working on. You're not just gonna go out there and whack balls. So when you go out with this plan, then you have to decide, and this is the key next step, how are you going to grade yourself? This is where people make a big mistake. Is that okay, I have a plan, but you're grading yourself on the shot if it worked, if it was efficient, if it hit a pretty shot, if it went straight. And you're using the result of when you're doing a drill to judge whether you're moving in the right direction, you affect your confidence at that moment. The objective is not to hit a good golf shot if you're doing a drill. Not always, I would say rarely, because there's always a downside to a drill, but really the objective of the drill, whatever you're doing, or the intention of that swing is to make sure that you kept your face in this example, and that my other example, that you kept your face square going back. Did I do it or didn't I do it? That's how I grade myself. I kept my face square, great. A. I gave myself an A. I don't care where the ball went. I'm gonna start integrating that into my swing. I'm gonna do that 10 times. I want to get as many A's as I possibly can. Now, this is the challenging thing too, is that you can't see yourself. It's not a problem, like if you're doing something like that, to like use your eyes, take lots of little practice back swings, but also video yourself. That's where lessons are valuable, right? You got eyes to look at you. Because I promise you, what you think you're doing, you're probably not doing because you're doing it based on feel. Going back to my example of fanning my face open, I can't tell you how many times I'm like, I was so Dustin Johnson in that swing. Dustin Johnson has a really bowed wrist on the top of his swing. That's what I would feel like. I'd video myself and my wrist is still cuppy. But the feeling I had was I was worse than Dustin Johnson. Not that his is bad, but I'm just more than Dustin Johnson. All right, nope, not even close. So you can't use your comfort as a barometer of whether you're having success. If you're making a change, you should anticipate being uncomfortable. Because if you're not, if you're comfortable, you're not changing anything.

unknown 21:43

Right?

SPEAKER_00 21:44

So decide how you're gonna grade yourself. You could decide, you could go into a press session, you could decide that I have three drills I'm gonna do. I'm gonna rotate through those with three different clubs, hit 10 balls, and I'm gonna call it a day. And I know that I'm moving the needle forward because I did things that are actually going to get integrated into my swing, versus going and hitting 60 balls or so and walking away feeling crappy because all you're doing is judging the result and you didn't have a plan. One is gonna move you closer to creating your results much faster, and the other one is basically gonna leave you frustrated and maybe going backwards. All right, my friends, so get really aware of the way that you show up in your practice sessions. Pay attention to your thoughts and emotions. They really do dictate how quickly you're going to get your results on the golf course and the results that you're trying to make in your swing and the results that you're trying to create with learning different shots. All right, I hope that helped. I want you to make the most of your time. If you're putting in the time, let's be really efficient at the way that we practice. All right, my friends, I hope you have a beautiful week. And if I can help you, make sure you go to kathyheartwood.com and connect with me or send me an email at Kathy at KathyHartwood. I'd love to hear what you have going on. All right, have a beautiful week, and I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.