Week 45 Update
Welcome Players! Read below for the Week 45 Update.
Contents:
Habit Tracker
Training Log
Skill Practice
Golf Performance
Wrap-Up
Habit Tracker
A great week of practice.
The 9-holes on Wednesday I had one focus, and that was to really get comfortable at an 80-85% stock swing speed.
The past few weeks I had the problem of practicing at max intensity, and then trying to swing at max intensity on the course and I lost a lot of control and made a lot of errors. So playing 9-holes alone with the sole intention of swinging with a very smooth tempo and not trying to smash it really helped me see what the potential of my game is at when I limit the mistakes and not try to maximize performance.
Training Log
Resistance Train (Gym): 2
Conditioning (Road Bike): 0
The good news is that I’m back to training at 100% intensity in the gym. My SIJ injury is feeling about 90%, and it’s not limiting me in anything I do.
But.
I do still have some residual uncomfortableness and I’m in no rush to push myself into as set-back, so I’m going to continue to wait before trying to get back on the bike again.
I’ve earmarked December as my earliest return, but I’m really going to continue going by how my body feels and my own understanding of my injury.
Skill Practice
My coach is back in Miami and so we got our first hands-on range session since the beginning of summer.
Even though we’ve been communicating via text/call/video frequently, it’s certainly a whole different experience to be in person hitting golf balls with immediate feedback.
The good news is I’ve shallowed out my swing plane enough where coming over the top is no longer a problem for me. Hooray! Only took 10 months of practice 😅
Now we’re moving on to deeper corrections that are smaller in magnitude but will continue to make big differences in how I practice and perform.
For starters, I was standing a little too close to the ball. I think this is a recent development because of my SI injury, so I’m getting comfortable moving a little further away again and it’s naturally correcting a tendency to get really steep in the downswing that I was dealing with, causing me to pull the ball.
Golf Performance
This one felt good!
Clearly the 9-hole practice round paid off as I was very relaxed on the course. I didn’t hit a lot of fairways but that wasn’t exactly indicative of my driving performance as I was hitting long balls with clear second shots, even if it was out of the fairway.
This is one tough part about golf statistics is the numbers rarely tell the whole story, but let’s take a look at the scorecard.
I didn’t do anything exceptional in this round, but most importantly, I didn’t make many drastic mistakes either. And that’s key for me. Only 2.5 penalty shots, only two 3-putts, and 1 triple and 1 unfortunate quad.
It was a great round to show me that for as much as my skill has improved it’s the mental aspect of the game that leads to the greatest improvement in scoring.
Wrap-Up
Another good week of practice ahead and a round upcoming on Friday. My goal is to stick to my keys and play cool, calm, and composed!