January is almost over which means that for us northerners, golf season is rapidly approaching. After some time off this winter, it’s time to start turning attention to spring golf. Depending on your access to indoor facilities or your bravery in battling the cold, most of us have had little to no golf for the past few months. There are a few ways to start honing our skills at home so that we don’t start the season in catch-up mode.
I hope to post some Instagrams over the coming weeks of different things we can do to prepare, but I will give a few thoughts as to what we might look at to come out of the gates running this spring.
1.Swing a club inside/outside
Warning: make sure you’re 100% confident your ceilings are high enough for this. I don’t want to be responsible for any damage, and I am making it very clear so don’t blame me when your 3 wood puts a hole in the ceiling.
Golf is a very awkward rotational movement. It is likely you haven’t had anything even remotely close to this type of motion for a couple of months. Just swinging a club will get your body acclimated to that kind of movement, and you’ll slowly remember what it felt like last fall.
It might also be a good idea to make some swings outside. Put on a few layers of clothes, a compression shirt, your golf shirt, a vest, and a heavier jacket, for example. You’ll likely get the bad day in the spring where temperatures will be cold, or some rain showers pop up. With the extra layers, your swing will want to get a little shorter, but practicing what that will feel like can remove some uncertainty, and you’ll have a feel for swinging in those extra layers and a leg up on those who neglected this.
2. Putting
This is by far the easiest skill to practice inside. As I have said before, a majority of our practice with putting is straight putts inside of 5-10 feet. That is very easily replicated on your living room carpet. Just set up a coaster (or whatever else you have), and get to work.
Use some clubs or alignment tools to make sure your setup is consistent so you don’t have to find what’s comfortable during your first round. Make sure your feet are square, your ball position is consistent, and general set up is the same every session. Over time, you will get more consistent with practice and eliminate that variable.
Use a club or alignment tool to make sure you’re aimed at the center of the hole. Aim is a large majority of the issues I see with amateur golfers in putting. The first goal is to be confident that we’re aiming where we think we are, and then can determine if it was a stroke or face problem.
After using the alignment tool, take it away. Go through your routine and set up to the ball, then throw the alignment tool perpendicular to your putter face to see if you were correct. (This can be more easily demonstrated in a video, so I hope to have that up on Instagram soon). This drill will help you aim the putter face on your own. We got comfortable with what straight feels like while using our alignment tool, so now we need to test if we can do it on our own.
Side note: if you use the line on your ball, you should practice aiming it as well. Getting the line on your ball to be aimed square to your target is a skill in itself, in my opinion.
3. Chipping
Getting your chipping motion to feel solid might be the most important skill to work on as we lead up to the start of the season. It is inevitable that you won’t hit the ball as well as you would when in mid-season form. Therefore, we know we are bound to miss a few more greens than normal. If we can have our chipping feel ready to go by day one, however, we can save some of those pars and bogeys and not lose too many strokes in these early year rounds.
We don’t have to do too much to start honing our chipping motion, and you don’t even necessarily need a ball. You can get whiffle balls or foam balls if you’d like or even chip some real balls into a couch cushion on the floor like my dad and I did growing up. A ball isn’t necessary though, there are plenty of other ways to practice.
If you have a carpet, it is as easy as making some small little swings and making sure the bottom of your arc is hitting the ground at roughly the same spot every time (also can be better shown through a video that I hope to get up). You can also place a tee on the ground and try to hit that and make sure the bottom of your arc is at or in front of the tee.
We can look back at a video I posted for a good drill set up
We can get into the technique of it, and we want our body rotating through the ball, but if we can make sure we are consistently hitting the ground at roughly the same spot, we shouldn’t need to worry too much about that. If you’re struggling with the ground interaction, then you should focus on that body pivot as described in the video.
These few little thoughts won’t get you into mid-season form on day one, but they will definitely get you started off on the right foot. A couple minutes every day on these things will be huge in getting a head start on the season!
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