How to Make Your Pre-Round Warmup Work for You

Is your pre-round warm up inconsistent or non-existent. In this episode, Kathy gets real about pre-round warmups. Spoiler alert: it’s not about finding the magic swing or hoping your confidence shows up. Kathy shares how to keep your warmup neutral—like stretching before a workout, but with less "I’m totally going to crush it today" vibes. She breaks down how to avoid the trap of searching for evidence that you're ready to play (because that’s just a setup for disappointment) and how to focus on simple swing thoughts and tempo instead of worrying about perfect mechanics and perfect shots. Tune in for some lighthearted advice on getting your head—and body—ready for the course by making it a simple and workable routine for you!

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Transcript

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. So today I have a clip from one of my calls on the Think Above Par Club, which is a membership that we meet once a week and we talk about different mental topics and folks get coaching and bring topics to the calls to get some help with and assistance on. It's an awesome forum, but I love the topic that we talked about which was a pre round warmup and how to make the most out of that.

I wanted to share it with you here. So without further ado, here's a clip from that call. I know Kendall, you had mentioned about how to make the most out of pre round warmup sessions. This is ideally what you want to do in a pre round warmup, but with that being said, you get to make it your own. Like you want to be really aware of what's working for you and not working for you.

So let me first go into from a negative standpoint on what doesn't work in a pre round session. So if you're doing this, this is a red flag. If you are looking for evidence that your swing is there that day or that you're going to hit it, well, you're doing it wrong. If you're going in to look and search for evidence of having confidence for the day, you're doing it wrong.

If you're looking to see if your swing, the lesson that you had on your swing is integrated into your swing and you own it, you're doing it wrong. Okay? Because your moment to work on all that stuff was before, way before the half hour to an hour before your round of golf. What happens if you don't find the evidence of it? And then what you do is you practice from a place of being needy and graspy with your practice session.

So there's like an urgency to it. I want you to make your pre round warmup as neutral as you can. So let me give you what I would do before I played in a tournament. And this is fairly standard. But again, just like your pre shot routine, this is kind of a pre round routine. And and the more that you fine Tune this. The more certainty that you will have before, around, and the more that you can make the warm up session neutral.

Okay. So when you warm up before around, it's like stretching before you go to workout. You don't go and stretch and go, today's gonna be a good day. I'm gonna build some muscle today. I can feel it because I really was able to touch my toes or something. Right. You know, we don't go in with that expectation about how our warmup is going. So that's the way that I want you to think about it.

It's almost like setting up for a party, getting the ingredients out and you're ready and you're prepared. Right. It's not going to say anything about how the party's gonna go. And that was a weird analogy. I just made it on spot and I'm gonna have to rethink that if that worked. But it's not bad. Okay. So this is what I would do when I played professional golf. And now it's such a habit that it's hard for me not to do it.

That's why it's a routine. And I'll tell you the things that would throw me off. So I typically would go to the range first. Some people putt first, but I always like to putt last. That's me. It doesn't matter. I witnessed all of it. So I would like to go to the range first. I start, start with a wedge, usually my sand wedge. And I hit little half swings.

I'm trying to warm up my swing, right. Warm up my body and get some temp. So really what I'm looking for is tempo when I start, and then I make my swing a little bit bigger. And then once I feel like I can make a decent full swing, I work my way up my bag. I typically do my pitching wedge. It depends on the golf course. This is where you get to be fluid.

So I just played in a member guest. I. I'm not going to hit a five iron all day. I'm hitting wedges and nine irons and eight irons because I'm playing the forward teeth. I'm not going to really even hit any three woods per se, maybe one, but that's not where I want to spend my time. If I'm playing a golf course that's long, I might go and hit all my longer clubs because I know I'm going to hit those.

So to be fluid about your round, a lot of you are just playing the same course all the time. If you're playing the same course all the time, how we can get zoned out about course management. With the golf course, we can do that with our practice sessions, kind of going through the routines, especially if it's social. So you're showing up and you're like, hey, Betty, how's it going?

Did you get the coffee? Did you see what's in the locker room? There's, like, amazing donuts going on, right? And you're. And next thing you know, you're like, oh, I don't have any time to warm up that's going to affect your round. So I hit a couple wedges. I'll go, maybe every other club. I might hit a couple eight irons, might hit a couple six irons. I'll hit a hybrid, maybe a fairway, would hit a couple drivers.

And then I end with some partial wedges, some soft little pit shots to make sure my tempo is in there. That if at any point in there I feel like I'm bleeding, right? That I'm like, I call it bleeding on the operating table, and I need to sew myself up. If something's horrible in there, then I might tap into some of the swing thoughts or whatever I'm working on that might be useful for me.

I usually in the background, am searching for just a swing thought that I want to take for the day. And it's usually one of three for me because it's on the mechanics that I work on in my swing. I know my idiosyncrasies since I was 12. I do the same freaking things, right? And so I know what the result is and what's going on. And so. But my backup is always tempo.

I have such a strong belief that tempo trumps mechanics, that if I'm screwing up, I'm not having a good day. I just focus on my tempo, and I line everything. Lines back up, even if I'm not having a great mechanical day because the tempo's there. If your tempo sucks and your mechanic sucks, you're kind of screwed. So if you don't know how to tap into mechanics or, I mean, sorry, tap into tempo.

That is something that I encourage you to practice this season is look up tempo drills. I've had some people say, I don't know how to work on tempo. I would just say, if you can skip, there's a tempo to that. If you can toss a ball underhand, you have a tempo to that. If you were going to do a water balloon toss, like, think about you're getting a tempo to that.

Hopefully you're not jerky, right? And some people just don't have like very good tempo because they've never worked on it. And then what happens is there's so much more pressure on their, on their mechanics to be on point, but besides that. So I would do that. Then I would go to the short game area. I might hit a couple chips. If I'm not close to the short game area, I will hit chips on the range.

I'll pretend there's a little target there. I know where I want to land it, right? This is where my little system gets sideways. Because if the short game area, let's say, is a cart right away, or if they don't have a short game area, I have to plan my time accordingly. So I'd hit a couple chips, maybe a bunker shot if I wanted to. Just to give my brain a little bit of certainty, like, I hit it.

I don't want to go on the golf course and go, crap. I haven't had a bunker shot since 1986. You know, you don't want that thought popping up in your head. And then the putting green, it is useful to hit putts, long putts, to get your feel and your distance. Again without a cup. Just go cross the green. Go like you're making a T across the green. Just hit some one way and hit some the other.

Some downhill or hit some uphill, right? Get some, get a feel for the speed and then move in closer to the cup. You might hit a couple 10 or 12 footers and then you go in and hit a few three footers. Now if you want, you get to do what works for your game. This is what I would do, both full swing and in short game. In putting, sorry, you would want to take a moment, I would say, before you finish your driver.

Let's say you hit a couple drivers and your last driver or two go through your pre shot routine as if you're on the first tee. Okay, so this is a Tiger woods tactic that I read about that his last couple practice shots, to hit a shot on the range, going through his whole pre shot routine. So he puts the tee in the ground, he walks back, he looks at his target, goes through the routine, holds his finish, maybe tips his hat.

Then by the time he hits the first tee in his head, that's not the first shot. My tee shot of the day, I already did it. Same thing with putting. Mentally was wrapped up in my putting for all those years. I did things differently with my full swing in my putting. I didn't know it no one like I didn't know it. I just, that's where my head was.

And so one of the things when I was playing golf with my brother that I noticed, I was like, what are you doing? He's like, well, I'm going through my routine, my putting routine before I go out of play. He goes, I like to do that every time. It just gives me some more certainty, right? So he would mark his ball. He'd put it down like four or five feet, mark his ball, stand back, do the line.

If he does the line, pick the ball, marker up. He'd do that like two or three times. That's an awesome thing. Thing to add into your pre round, warm up. Okay, now for me then I would go to the bathroom. The first thing you always want to do is suss out where the bathrooms are on the golf course. It's like, I know this before I tee off. There's a bathroom on four, there's bathroom on 12.

I make the turn. Like the turn doesn't come back. There's a little panic that sets in if it doesn't come back to the clubhouse. I like to have an empty bladder before I go play so I don't run into that. You. So you want to know where the bathrooms are. And I usually empty the bladder out before I go play. Typically I like an hour to do all of that.

Okay, now can I do a warm up session shorter than an hour for sure. But it became such a routine in tournaments. Like I can run to the range and whack some, right? And get some in, but I can mess up my tempo when I do that if I'm hurrying. So I just mentally, I just take that session or whatever I do and I just cut it in half.

And I just make sure I'm going through it at the same pace. And then this is the thing. How you hit it is a moot point. You are trying to get a feel for tempo. You're trying to get a feel for maybe a swing thought for the day. You want to witness your brain panicking. If it's not going well, you're like, oh my gosh. Like, that wasn't good, right?

Oh my gosh, I just shanked it. I haven't shanked it in 10 years. I just shake. This is gonna be a problem. You get to make all of that stuff neutral, right? So the more that you are looking for evidence that your warm up session is going to give you confidence or certainty about you're going to hit it for the day, the more that if you do hit a shank, you're going to freak out.

Because I can promise you, If I interviewed 400 tour players, they would all say that how they warm up has nothing to do with how they're going to perform. Zero. I've had an amazing ball striking session on the range. I'm like, today's going to be a great day. And then I start with an eight, right? It's like, what happened? Or I can't get my ball in the air.

I feel like my arm is going to fall off in the middle of my swing. I could fall down. You know, you feel just so discombobulated. And then you go out and have a great day. So there is no correlation between how you warm up and how you hit it. Would we love to have a warmup session that goes great and we're gonna. Great for sure. But the more you make it neutral, then it becomes an advantage.

If it's not going great, you have to say, my swing is going nowhere. Not a problem. Let's go. I got my tufo. All right, my friends, so there you have it. Pay attention to how you warm up before your rounds. Make it as consistent as you possibly can and make them neutral. And if I can help you or if you would like to be part of the think Above Par club, you can go to above par club and the link will be below.

Have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.