Beginner to 8.8 Handicap in less than 3 Years - How I Did It (6 simple tips)

I started playing golf for the first time in June 2021 with no prior experience fast forward to today May 2024 and I have just got my handicap down to an 8.8 this is the lowest it's ever been and in this video I'm going to break down the key things that enabled me to achieve this so the first thing I want to talk to you about is understanding your limitations as high handicap mid- handicap low handicap golfers we're all good at certain parts of the game and maybe not so good at other parts of the game and it's important that you understand which bits you're good at and which bits you're not because if you try to play to your weaknesses you're going to score badly now we've got an approach shot here maybe 50 yards over a bunker this is a tough shot probably a shot that most mid handicappers would not like to play all they'd be seeing in the mind's eye is this bunker so trying to play the perfect sand wedge over this bunker when you might not be too confident with your sand wedge probably isn't the greatest idea but if you are going to play this shot you need to do one thing you need to accept the risk that you've taken if you play this and thin it into the bunker or thin it off the back of the green you can't get mad you made the decision but if you want to take the challenge on then go for it I took the shot on it got over the bunker it didn't make it to the green not great shot but I can't be mad because I chose to play the shot however if I'd chosen to just understand my limitations and not go for the Hollywood shot maybe I could have taken a 9on and played a really simple long bump and run shot here and got on the green and give my s a t that's back of the green 8 to 10 ft away from the pin not a difficult shot yes I'm probably not going to get it that close that often playing that shot but I am going to be on the green more times than I'm not and I'm definitely going to to put that more times than I'm not playing like that making decisions like that sensible decisions that you know fit with your technical capabilities will keep your scores as low as they can be now I'm not saying don't try to get better and don't try to learn to play more technical shots do that if that's what your motivations are but don't try to do it on the course when you know you haven't got it in your locker yet understand your limitations right the next point is to work on your ball striking I think a lot of people that shoot in the hundreds or the 90s this is where they lose a lot of shots because they hit too many shots this can be fat thin tops anything Shanks the dreaded Des word and that that shot doesn't actually progress the ball up the hole so that can be a massive issue and basically just adds shots onto your score so to fix your ball striking you need to work on two key things the the first thing is hitting the center of the club base and the second one is controlling where this club actually bottoms out so obviously we want to hit the ball out of the center and we want the bottom of our swing to be after the ball so that we get a good nice crispy strike now I've got two really good drills for working on these so I'm going to run through them both for you now so the first drill that we're going to be doing is going to be working on where we actually hit the club phas obviously we want to hit the screws in the center this is going to get us the most speed uh with the least amount of effort and to do that we can use use impact spray this is actually foot spray uh for athletes foot but you can get impact stickers or you can get sprays that are actually specifically uh designed to be used on these but it all works the same basically all we're going to do is put a light covering on the club face and then I don't know if the camera is going to show that but now we've just got sort of a Dusty Dusty coating on the top of that club what this is going to enable us to do is that when we take a shot we're going to be a to see where we hit uh the ball on the club facee so let me take one here for you and again I don't know how well the camera is going to pick that up but we can see that I missed that just uh to side of Center so that wasn't a perfect hit now obviously we'll get away with that clubs and things will help us but at least we've got the feedback see a lot of the time when you're doing drills like this you've got no feedback so I could tell that that didn't feel quite right but I don't know where until I start doing this and I start building my own awareness of where I'm missing on the club base you're not going to get any better so now I know that that feeling was more of a tow Miss let's see if I can get a heel Miss I'm usually pretty good at these so this shouldn't be too hard that was literally just heelside it's hard to see with the camera but it's just heel side of Center and again that one started sort of straight peeled out to the right was a really weak strike didn't get much distance particularly for an eighton but again I've got that feeling now that felt closer to the to the shaft when I hit it so even by using this spray you're just going to build that feel for where you missed the second drill I've got for you is going to help you work on that lower Point control all you need is a towel so all you're going to do you might have seen this one before is set the towel up on the floor and put your ball it's up to you how far away from the towel you want to place the ball but essentially all we're trying to do here is make a swing not catch that towel and then hit the ball so obviously if you start with like a 3-in gap to be to begin with this should be pretty easy to miss that towel and just looking at the spray that was right out the middle but that was dead easy so that's if you are someone who chronically fats the ball start off with a large gap and start to make it smaller as you get more and more comfortable work your way back to sort of I think really the most that you want to do is maybe an inch half an inch because otherwise you are just going to start catching the towel but if I put this really close so it's barely behind barely in front of that towel now so I'm looking for ball first Contact here I mean that one came straight off the heel but you you can see I didn't touch the towel whereas if I fat one you can see that towel is giving you that feedback straight away and this just helps you build like I say half of these these faults with golf is because we've got no feel for them we hit a ball we see it Go badly but we don't know why from what we felt on the club doing drills like these are going to give you that art feedback like aha right I know what I did there I hit it off the hill or I hit off I hit it off the toe and there's be there's going to be clues in your shot and there's going to be clues in how it feels as to to what it is that you've done exactly if you seen a Big Slice it's probably come off the hill if you seen like too much of uh a move like a draw shape more of a hook shape you've probably caught it on the toe if it feels like it's not really bounced off the club you know for certain that you've missed you've missed the center and to be honest what I do with both of these drills is use them in conjunction so I'll will get the spray give the club a cat and then I'll use it in conjunction with the towel so now I know that if I'm hitting the center and not catching the towel and my strikes getting pretty good I think I actually just caught the towel there but the strike was great so again you can work on edging that low point forward by making sure that you're still hitting the center of the club face and I promise you if your ball striking gets better your scores will come down another thing you can do to work on your low Point control and where you the ball is use a divot board now I've used a host of these over the sort of three years that I've been playing but this one's been sent to me by a company called golf gaffer and to be honest it's the best one I've seen yet so how it works is you've got the layout of where you're trying to hit the ball in the center obviously in the two lines of where you set up with the club and as the club hits the mat it will show you where you're hitting on the footprint that you've got now there's a few things that you can decipher from this obviously where this starts to turn over is where the club is starting to bottom out and then where it is in relation to the center of the club face you can figure out if you're hitting the center the toe the heel whatever so the beauty of this is that you don't even need a ball you can just put this down anywhere you are no ball needed and this will give you feedback on exactly where your Club has hit the mat and you can see just from using this this is how I've been able to really work on my strike going to the ring and actually hitting the balls is a different thing of course it is but first of all you need to get that that feeling of setting up to a ball and then hitting past it cuz that really will improve your strike now these mats have been fantastic like I said I probably used two or three of them over the time I've used the forb one previous to this and it's more of a felt material and to be honest it doesn't hold up anywhere near as well as this one has this one's more of a sequin thing and you can see I have battered this thing I mean it's had daily use and it still works flawlessly uh still got plenty of life in it so I am really impressed with that so the guys at golf gaffer have actually sent me three of these over to give way on the channel so if you want to be in chance of winning one of these all you need to do is like the video subscribe to the channel and then head over to our Instagram page to find the post about the giveaway you have to do all three of those things to be entered into the giveaway and I'll announce the winner with the winners at the end of the month so if you're interested in doing that head over there you can also pick one of these up yourself with a discount code that they've given us for 10% off all the details will be down in the description if you want to give them a check out huge thanks to golf gaffer for sending the mats over the next key thing that you need to understand is that you have to have a good grasp on your distances how far your clubs actually go we're down here at wly path 3 we're going to play a short power four I'm going to tee off with this five iron and that's going to leave me some sort of wedge into the green but when we get up there I will know which wedge that I need to use based on the distance so let's hit the t- shop and see how far I've got left in So Good Start let's see how far we've got left in right decent t- shot let's zap the pin 91 y so I know that my sand wedge goes about 86 yards and my 50° wedge goes about 105 110 depending on balls what balls you're using conditions lies things like that they will all affect your distances but you should have a good rof estimate of how far you're going to hit a shot so because I'm in the rof it's slightly uphill and there's a little bit of wind I'm going to take a 50° wedge and just accept that this might go a little bit long but I do know that I'm going to be able to get this club there I'm not guessing and because I'm not guessing I can commit to the shot and as we thought that's probably a little bit long but I'm on the green and I'm putting so let's go see where it is so good shot I've took it left and missed probably about 5 y long but not a bad shot at all and just through knowing my rough distances I've given myself a really good chance of making a PA here and to be honest nowadays there's no excuse to not knowing your distances you can go down a lot of driving ranges these days they'll have trackman or top Tracer that will give you good carry statistics you can go to it there's more and more simulators about these days and also launch monitors have become a lot more affordable so if you're going to do anything make sure that you go down to one of these places where you can do your distances either jot it down in your phone or take a pen and paper with you and just get some rough distances for how far each Club goes nice easy pair all from stressfree decisions made by knowing how far each Club goes so so the next point that I want to talk to you about is not falling into the YouTube rabbit hole and if you've ever done this before you'll know exactly what I mean but there is a whole host of educational content on YouTube around teaching people to swing this metal Club around them and it can be overwhelming now there is not a video on YouTube that is going to make you instantly better trust me I've tried I do think educating yourself on the golf swing fire mediums like YouTube can be really helpful but actual Improvement will only come from physical practice and putting in those reps you need to be down the range or down some sort of practice area putting in that time to get better honestly just watching a video you're not going to get better just by consuming the content I wish it was that easy so I think the best way to get better is to get professional help they will point you in the right direction of the areas of your game that you need to improve to get better and then you can use a resource like YouTube to help supplement that around the areas that you're trying to improve now I personally think the best way to get professional help if you're just sort of a casual golfer is to start with swing tweaks swing tweaks is a app on your phone where you can simply record a down the line and front on VI of your swing and that gets instantly sent to a PGA Pro and within a day or two you will have personalized feedback on your swing and drills to do to improve your golf game it's really really simple and it's a fraction of the price of using a PGA Pro after you've had your swing twak back you'll then know where to where to invest your time in order to get better and they'll also send you some links to some drills to do but again if you've got your favorite YouTubers that you like to watch as far as uh educational content you can go to their sources of information and check their videos on the issues that you now know you need to fix it's a much easier way of getting better and I fully recommend it if you want to check out swing tweaks I'll leave all their details in the description they've also given up and down viewers a discount on their first tweak so make sure you head over there and check them out so the next thing I want to talk to you about is putting now putting has been a weak area of my game for a long time until recently and the thing that's changed it and some of you might not be surprised that this has worked but lining up your puts when it comes to putting there's really only two things that matter getting the line right and getting the pace right now a lot of the time what I was doing with a putt is I would stand behind the ball generally eyeball a spot on the floor that I'm trying to hit and then pick my pace and now the issue with this is as soon as you stand up over the ball from being behind it everything is different everything looks different and you start second guessing everything so now instead of being stood over the ball literally concentrating on the pace I'm now thinking about the line as well and second guessing it as well as trying to get this club back on a good angle not a good recipe for a good putting stroke so what I've started doing is first I've bought some balls that have a nice clear stripe on them but obviously you can you can draw that on and what I will do is I will line this ball up exact where I want to hit it and then that is the line taken care of I don't need to think about the line at all anymore so once it's lined up all I've got to think about now is hit that ball in the direction that I pointed the line and just get the pace right and a good tip that I've had for the pace is think about rolling that ball if you were going to roll that ball to the hole you would be constantly looking at the hole you wouldn't be down here doing this with your head down not looking at where you're hitting it you would be looking at that hole and You' be trying to feel how far exactly it is that you need to throw that ball most of us can do that right no practice needed I've held it from 12 ft do the same thing make your process line up line up the putt get a line that you're happy with and that's it Vine's taken care of stand over the ball and imagine that you were going to roll it feel the pace that you need to hit that ball to get it to the [Music] hole what 4 in short left myself a taping and sometimes they'll actually drop and that has made a huge impact to my putting I've honestly started to two put more and more I'm not saying that I'm good at making one puts from any sort of distance I'm not but it has it has got me a lot closer to the hole on those leg puts and if you can get it closer to the hole on the leg putts tapping in the short ones is also a lot easier so definitely one I'd recommend even though it's super simple get yourself a shot for around the greens high and mid- handicappers miss the green quite a lot so you need to get good at getting the ball somewhere near the hole from around the green now I think the Trap that a lot of high mid-handicappers maybe even some low handicappers fall into is trying to get too cute with this too complex I actually think you only need one shot around the greens a sort of one shot fits all sizes kind of thing and that you use in pretty much all circumstances unless it's like a really weird shot and you probably guessed which shot that is it's the bump and run now the reason that I'm picking this is because it's really easy to play and you can change it up relatively easily so here I'm going to play this with a sand wedge with green side I've got a pin with a little bit of green and a little bit of first cut I've got loads of room to to get this close so I know that this Sand Wedge is going to pop up a little higher it's probably going to check a little bit and it's it's not going to roll out quite as much so I need to carry this probably about halfway not the greatest but I've still got about a 6t put there if I needed a little more roll all I need to do keep the exact same technique that I've used there and just use a little bit more Club so for example a pitching wedge I could carry this a little bit further or about the same to be honest because I don't need to carry anything and this one should roll out a little bit more the slow on the Green's taken that one away from me a little bit but you can see that it was a relatively Easy Shot to play and again I've probably got about 4 foot for the put if I had all the Green in the world to work with I could use an eight iron like this is what I mean you if you've got room to roll the ball up the sooner you get the ball rolling the less margin for error there is so I can really carry the ball to around here get this ball rolling up to the pin and I can do that with an atite so if I was I I wouldn't put through this because it's too I don't know how the put is going to come through there but a little putting stroke with an eight iron should work out just nicely started that one way too high not a great shot and I've still only got about four or five foot for the put there so three pretty terrible chips from greenside with a bump and run uh technique and you can see pretty much all of them within four five ft dead easy shot and yes there's going to be some times that that shot doesn't fit this but let's say the pin's at the back and I've got a bunker to carry say just in front of us here all I would do is take a more lofted Club hit it a little harder let's say the pin's at the back of the green or let's say the pin is where it is so we're basically short sided with a bunker in front of us I'm going to play a long bump and run shot here that I know is probably going to be 20 30 foot past but I'm still going to have a put I mean annoyingly that's hit that ball but you could see that that was going to be a long way past the pin fine putting I haven't thinned it I haven't duffed it into the bunker it was a super easy shot to play and I'm putting and if you use the putting tip that I've shown you in the video you get that close the first time you tap it in it might be a boogy that you make but it's a low score and you can get your handicap down and the last thing that I want to talk to about is just to enjoy your golf nobody really cares what score you shoot or how far you hit your 7 iron as long as you you have fun what does it matter there's no point getting upset about a bad shot because you're only going to upset the other people that you're playing with and to be honest golf is a game about misses and the more you miss the more practice you get at managing your misses and that's going to make you a better player so at the end of the day just have fun so just to finish off the video I did do some research on YouTube from other similar videos and I thought I'd collect all the questions from the comment sections of those videos to see what the were the most popular questions around this sort of thing so the questions I found were how many lessons have you had had in total I've had seven I had two right at the start of playing golf I've talked about this before in another video and to be honest there weren't much help I was too new to golf I didn't really have the understanding to take in what he was telling me I should have just been practicing really my hand ey coordination down the range since then I've had five other lessons and these have been pretty good but to be honest my wife just had some lessons as well and she said the same thing I think our expectations were too high of them I don't know what I was expecting from the coach but they're not magic makers they're just going to tell you what you're doing wrong and then it's it's you that's got to fix it and they can only tell you in small increments uh and you can spend an hour with these people and they can honestly they can tell you what's wrong within 5 minutes and then the other five 55 minutes you just end up chatting about football or whatever so if you're going to go for lessons temper your expectations it's a long process getting better uh and don't expect any Miracles this is why I'm such an advocate of Swing tweaks because if you want to just get the Nuggets of what you get in a lesson the information that's going to help you get better swing tweaks will give you this for a fraction of the price and you don't have to travel to see them like I said it is a really good service and I'll leave the details in the description below how many times you go to the range per week when I started I'd say probably twice nowadays probably once but I try to get there every week just to keep greasing the groove keep that that feel fresh so that I don't become too rusty what does your practice routine look like to be honest this just depends on what I'm struggling with at the moment uh a couple of weeks ago my short game was starting to go downhill so instead of going to the range I just went to a short game practice area and I just spent a couple of hours there for a couple of weeks and sharpened sharpened up my feel around the green and that that worked really well at the minute I'm just sort of feeling the driver doing the same so I'll probably spend the next couple of weeks on the Range just huning in that driver I think what happens is as you spend more time practicing you raise your ceiling for each area of your game but you also raise the floor and you sort of oscillate between those two levels in each aspect of your game for a long time my driver has been up near the ceiling of where I where I'm at and it's now starting to dip again back down to that raised floor but it is still the floor so I'll get back down the range and hopefully get that driver back on the way up how many rounds do you play a month or year I would say average is about seven or eight but sometimes that can be four in a month or 12 in a month but I would say the average is about 7 to eight times have you had any gear improvements and is it worth it I've talked about this before I started with some really basic Callaway Big birth Ryans they were 2005 I think uh cheap set of irons to start with and then I bought the tailor mid p790s about 6 months into golf would I recommend it I really like the clubs um but I've only really used two sets of clubs so would I buy them again yes do I know if they were really worth 10 times the price of what I paid for the Callaway Big birthers honestly not sure but if I was if you were ask me if I would do it again the answer would be yes so I really hope this video has helped golfers these are definitely the most key tips that I've implemented in order to get down to a single digit handicap if you have any other tips or any other questions let me know down in the comments below I check all the comments so if there's anything in there that I need to reply to I will thanks for watching Remember to like And subscribe and I'll see you next time

Channel: Up & Down Golf

Views: 50,966

Keywords: up & down, Up & Down Golf, Up Down Golf, 12 Handicap, 30 Handicap, 36 Handicap, Single Digit handicap, Golf, Golf Lesson, Golf improvement, Breaking 100, Breaking 90, Breaking 80, single figure handicap golf, new golfer tips, How to get better at golf, hot to improve at golf, how to break 100, how to break 90, how to break 80, How I went from beginner to 8.8 handicap in less than 3 years

Id: gKUI49KbiqQ

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024