Play within your own limitations.

One appreciates that a lot of the fun in the game for the club player lies in having a go, but surely the score counts too? If it does, a little more reality about one’s own ability, and a little more assessment of the percentages, can work wonders. This does not presuppose a defensive attitude. By all means attack and have a go when there’s a reasonable chance of success. But, when the thing is obviously impossible, accept your mistake and play to minimize its effect.

Playing the percentages is not something you do only on recovery strokes. Innumerable times club golfers are faced with situations where some strategical thought, allied to common-sense assessment of their own capabilities, must result in an iron from the tee, or a sand-wedge instead of a four-iron from a fairway bunker, or a four-wood instead of a two-wood from the fairway. It might hurt your pride to accept the fact you have limitations, but it will rarely hurt your score.

Try your utmost on every shot.

Easy to say, difficult to do. Yet this is one of the greatest factors in success or failure at golf. How many times have good players lost to poorer players simply because they didn’t give maximum effort?

It is, of course, very easy to try on every shot on the first hole, and probably on the second and third holes, too. But what about the fifteenth and sixteenth holes, especially if things haven’t been going well? There, often, is the acid test.

So, to get the maximum pleasure from your golf, try your hardest on every shot. This doesn’t mean adopting the characteristics of a man contending for the Open, and taking 10 minutes to crawl around inspecting every blade of grass between you and the hole. It means above all concentrating on golf when you’re playing golf, and conditioning yourself to the shot every time as you approach the ball. From there on, it is a question of thinking properly: forgetting the last shot, however it resulted, disregarding those to come, and focusing your attention exclusively on the shot at hand.

Unfortunately, there is no doubt that if you are going to try to play the best golf of which you are capable, it is necessary to devote reasonable time and thought to each stroke, just as it is necessary to complete each hole.

What I am really suggesting is a maximum effort, and in this respect I would advise at least half-a-dozen warm-up shots and some putts before playing. The middle-handicapper is always in a hurry. He rushes to the club, into the locker-room, and out onto the course not having touched a club since the previous weekend. He then rushes into an appalling start, which sets the standard and the tempo for the rest of the round. No wonder his handicap stays high!

Click on Your Golf Attitude Part 1 or Your Golf Attitude Part 2 if you would like to read the rest of this great golf article

The golfer with an effective short game, the man or woman who can consistently lay those little pitch and chip shots close enough to the hole for a single putt, really does have a tremendous advantage. Confidence in one’s short game gives a tremendous edge at all levels of competition.

The sad thing is that so few people command a sound short game when, whatever their standard with the long shots, it is well within their reach. Here is the area of the game where the fellow who booms the ball 300 yards off the tee is pulled back to equal terms with the chap who can never manage more than 170 yards. This is the department of golf that calls for nothing more than good mental imagery and “touch”.

The techniques for pitching and chipping are simple, but first let’s see the imagery factor. You should never play a short shot until you have a clear mental picture of how you want the ball to behave. This really is the secret of a strong short game. Until you decide how far and high the ball should fly, where it should land and how much it should roll, you cannot select the right club for the job. And what prevents so many people from developing a good short game is their illogical use of the same favorite club for every shot. There is no way that one club will get the ball close to the hole in every situation when you miss a green.

By using the wrong club for the particular shot at hand, you introduce a needless variable. If you choose a club with too much loft for a little chip from the fringe, in some way you will have to de-loft it during the stroke. Conversely, if you choose a too-straight-faced club, there will be a tendency to scoop at the ball to get it into the air. Selection of the correct club will allow you to play the same, simple stroke under all circumstances, with the club’s loft automatically governing flight and roll.

Watch the extreme care with which the pros think out and plan these little shots in tournaments and you will get an idea of how important it is to “picture” the shot, then select the club that will match the picture.

For a man like Ben Hogan, knowing what he is doing when he swings a golf club may well involve consciousness of the workings of a dozen different parts of the body, all welded together in a composite “feel”. For Sam Snead it might be largely an instinctive, natural “feel”. For the majority of golfers, the right way is somewhere between these two extremes. And the easiest manner in which they can focus their knowledge and swing ability is by the use of key thoughts, or gimmicks.

Before any important round you must always hit a few balls in order to loosen your muscles, and to decide upon your “swing thought” for the day. Every good player follows this policy. (Joe Carr, the great Irish amateur, even used to write things like “Turn, you fool!” on his golf glove, where he could see it at address.) No matter how much in practice you may be or how “grooved” your action, the “feel”, timing and “shape” of your swing will alter fractionally from day to day — even from round to round. It is vital, therefore, having discovered with a few preliminary shots or swings how your action is working, to decide upon a thought, a gimmick, that will keep it ticking over nicely.

The gimmick itself can take many different forms, depending on your ability and how you are playing at the time. It might be simply to ensure that your set-up — aim and stance — is right; a basic thought, as is the way the hands are gripping the club. It might be keeping your head still. It might be a push away of the club with the left side, or a slight drag back with the hands. You might think of not starting down to the ball until your left shoulder has gone under your chin — a “complete-the-backswing” thought. You might concentrate on starting the downswing by unwinding your hips. The possibilities are endless.

Every player of accomplishment has a personal set of swing thoughts or gimmicks, which he will have discovered and proven effective in practice. If he is a thoughtful golfer, he will have indexed them in his mind in terms of cause and effect — “If I do this, that happens, and if I do that, this happens.” In most cases the modifications will be very small — fine tuning. But such thoughts are vital to keeping a golf game in balance. The great thing is to find gimmicks that enable you to think quite clearly of what you are trying to do.

To derive maximum benefit from such gimmicks a clear understanding is necessary of what kinds of actions produce what kinds of shots, which is why the ambitious player must thoroughly understand the “ballistics” of the game — the flight characteristics of the ball when struck in a particular way.

A very useful thought for the good player is to remember how he finishes the swing when he’s playing well, and to determine to finish that way on every full shot. Often this stops the common tendency — especially under pressure — to hit at the golf ball, rather than swinging the club through the ball.

There are scores of gimmicks of this kind. They all help you to “know what you are trying to do.”

• Never to hit the ball until you had decided exactly what you were trying to do.

• Never to attempt more than you could reasonably expect to achieve.

• Try your utmost on every shot.

This golf advice is applicable to every golfer, whether he scores in the sixties or the hundreds: three thoughts to serve as a basic text in any keen golfer’s approach to the game — something almost to write on the back of your glove or carry around the course on a prominent placard in your mind’s eye. Let’s look at the tenets individually.

Never hit the ball until you know what you are trying to do.

This really has two meanings. One obviously relates to summing up the shot in terms of distance, trajectory, ground and wind conditions, the lie of the ball, potential trouble areas, and so on. Thousands of golfers give insufficient attention to such matters. They simply grab a club and whale away almost blindly and wonder why, even when hitting the ball well, they never make a decent score.

Every golf hole and every golf shot requires thought. The better you can picture a given shot in your mind’s eye, and the clearer your mind is about the shot you intend to play, the greater your chance of accomplishing it. Even that simple lesson alone would substantially lower many handicaps.

But there is more than assessing the shot in knowing what you are trying to do at golf. You want to know not only what the ball should do, but what you yourself are trying to do to get the ball to behave in that way. You need to know, consciously, what you are trying to do with your swing.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a good swing, or an agricultural heave; if you have a single focal thought, you will have a better chance of making it work, not once in a while but repetitively. Repetition is the golden key to golf, and it usually starts with a repetitive thought pattern.

Check out our Secret golf instructions that will have you lowering your handicap in just a few days