Practice Strategies
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Practicing with four clubs adds a significant variety to set up and swing adjustments that you will prevent yourself from falling into the standard block practice hypnosis. When you do only blocked practice, you'll typically over-estimate your skill level. This over estimation leads to higher levels of frustration when you don't perform as well on the course. To help your golf game transfer from the range to the course, I highly recommend some form of random practice as part of your program. The four club practice circuit is a simple way to do just that.
Tags: Practice Strategies, Concept, Intermediate, Beginner
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This is the four-club practice circuit. So this is one of my favorite ways to add
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random practice into a golf program that where golfers tend to struggle with
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hitting more blocks though. So basically if you fall into the pattern of hitting
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10, 7 irons, 15, 7 irons in a row, I'd recommend adopting the four-club
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practice session. So basically it's a really simple game or a really simple
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strategy you work on any mechanics that you want, but the rule is you're going to
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have four clubs from different parts of your bag. For example I've got a driver
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and then I've got a 7-8 iron I've got something in between those, so whether
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it's a four iron, five iron or in this case a hybrid and then I've got a wedge. So I've
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got a pretty broad spectrum and one from each of kind of the four quadrants.
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Now the rule is I can't hit the same one twice and the more advanced I'm playing
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I've got a very some of my backswing lengths, my tempos, the shot shape I'm
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hitting, I've got to create more variety. But simply by having these four different
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clubs you'll avoid falling into the self-hip noises and thinking that you've got
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it or that you've owned your swing just from hitting a handful of good 7 irons in
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a row. So there's a couple of different ways that you can benefit from doing this
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type of training. One would be by using yourself to your swing miss. And what I
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mean that by that is let's say you're a very good driver of the golf ball
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but you struggle with wedges. So you hit let's say you know 10 or a dozen wedges and
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kind of towards the end you get into a pretty good groove where you're having
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more of a cast pivot and less of a real drive of a club, right, less of a real
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body pull. So you're making solid contacts but really because you've just found
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this rhythm. So then what you can do is you can hit the longer end of the club
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and you can go back and forth a few times because I said you can't hit the same
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one twice but that doesn't mean you have to hit hit each one in succession. So
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maybe you'll go driver hybrid, driver hybrid, driver hybrid wedge. And just by
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doing that what you'll find is that if you naturally have more of a driver based
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swing where you get more of that arm pull on or the pull along the grip you
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get more of this access tilt by hitting a handful of these longer clubs in a row
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you're going to buy yourself to make your swing miss with your scoring club
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and it's going to force you to use a good pre shot routine and a clear focus
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to overcome that. The opposite can happen. If you're really good with your wedges
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you can do wedge 7 Iron wedge 7 Iron wedge 7 Iron Driver and it'll prevent you
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from just getting into a good groove. Now if you struggle mightily with just
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making solid contacts or hitting a solid driver I would recommend doing more
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block practice until you have that kind of as part of your repertoire but as
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soon as you get it you want to start testing it by doing these four club
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challenges. This will help you prepare for getting on to the course. Okay so we'll
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go through it one or two times. As you know I'm a big believer that there's some
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differences between the driver and the iron swing so I'm just going to start
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with a 7 Iron and I'm going to try and kind of groove my low point control by
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staying a little bit more on top. I'm going to take it pretty good swing there and
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now I'm going to work my way up one notch at a time so I'm going to do a
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hybrid and see if my iron swing if I can make a little adaption to what's going
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on. So now I've got to get a little bit more behind it maybe a touch wider
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stance make my hybrid adjustments and then see if I can get them to hold up.
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Now I'm going to step up one more notch so we'll go to the driver. Now with the
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driver I'm trying to avoid getting spinny contacts so I'm going to try to get a
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little bit more of that kind of falling back style weight shift maybe a touch more
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shafferitation whatever your driver keys are you'll go through it with your
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pre-shot routine. Got my target. Now all along I've been gearing myself and
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setting myself up for testing the wedges. It's pretty good one there. So by
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starting in the middle and then coming to the wedge last now I'm setting myself
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up because my body wants to get into that driver pattern and I'm going to have
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to do a little bit more of a good cast wedge pattern. So it was a little bit I
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can feel myself hanging back so it launched a little higher than I wanted but
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overall pretty good clear you know 15 feet short I can take that. So then I would jump
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back and forth I can pretend I'm playing on the course but adding this style of
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random practice to whatever mechanics you're working on whether it's
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transition release set up will ultimately help you transfer it from the range to
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the course faster.