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Last spring, I started a lesson with my pro by making his job difficult. It was a few days before a golf trip, and I was spraying my driver, so I asked for a quick fix— something I could work with, but wouldn’t mess me up. In other words, I wanted help getting ready more than I cared about getting better.
The inverse example would be the time I scheduled a lesson an hour before an important round. The swing pattern we implemented could lead to a more consistent ball flight, but it was so awkward to start, I struggled all afternoon. Here my goal of getting better came at the expense of getting ready.
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The distinction between these two approaches—getting ready and getting better — is essential to account for when working on our games, yet most golfers are like me in conflating the two. Our golf journeys often follow two tracks: in the short term, we want to get the ball from A to B as efficiently as possible. In the longer term, we aspire for more precision, power, and consistency. Yes, we always want to get better. But we’re less willing to take certain steps if they come at the expense of right now.
“As a coach, we’re always striking a delicate balance between giving the person what they want, and trying to move them towards what they need,” said Joe Plecker, a Golf Digest Best in State teacher out of The Landings Golf & Athletic Club in Savannah, Ga. “You can’t just come in and cut somebody’s swing apart and say we’re gonna do these five things because the player might be like, ‘Wait a minute. I got to play in an hour.’”
Plecker’s perspective is as a teacher, but the dynamic extends to working alone on our games. Think about the times you’ve been warming up, or even in the middle of a round, when you’ve decided to try a shot you’ve never tried before. Or in the middle of a practice session, you’ve abandoned something because it’s not giving you results.
The get better-get ready distinction is meant to help you determine what you can live with and when. When are you playing next? What are you hoping to achieve before then? You don’t want to be saddled with attempting unfamiliar motions you can’t trust when trying to piece together a score. But if you’re looking for meaningful improvement, some discomfort might be necessary.
“When we’re making improvements to help golfers play better, I let them know that we’re in a training phase. We’re not in a performance phase,” Plecker says. “We’re just using every round of golf that you get to play as an opportunity to test what we’re training.”
The solution, then, is to start with defining what you’re after any time you get a chance to practice, because the session should take on a different look from there. Getting better is when you can pull out your notes from a lesson to understand what you’re doing and why, whereas getting ready is sometimes about knowing what to leave behind.
“I call a round of golf chaos, and all I want you to do is prepare for the chaos,” Plecker says. “You can have a terrible warmup in a great round and you can have a great warmup in a terrible round. And that’s the chaos, that’s what the round brings.”
Luke Kerr-Dineen and I discussed this dynamic in two recent Golf IQ podcasts, which you can listen to below.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
