Developing a Long-Term Training Strategy in Golf
Setting priorities, understanding reality, and mental shortcuts
Setting Priorities
You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else. — Naval Ravikant
Golfers have a neverending list of things that they could improve.
Progress in one area of your game means sacrificing potential improvements in other areas.
Investing your time and energy evenly across all parts of your game will not generate the same results as investing a disproportionate amount of time in one (or two) specific areas.1
Deciding how to allocate your time and energy has a major impact on your long-term development.
The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking
— Naval Ravikant
Understanding the current reality
Before picking a direction (the area to focus your time and energy) you must have a clear understanding of your current reality.
We need to understand our current reality so well that the problems and their solutions fall in our laps — James A. King
For golfers, this requires tracking stats about their performance in different areas.
Below is an example of a data analysis I conducted for a player using Circles. I ranked each area of their game from “weakest” to “least weak”.
This information allows the golfer to identify the proper direction to move towards.
Once the direction has been decided, the next step is to establish a long-term development plan.
Unfortunately, many golfers follow a “day-by-day approach” to skill development. They change their area of focus based on how they feel on a given day.
A long-term development plan provides golfers the necessary structure to stay committed to the process (see last week’s article on long-term planning).
Once the plan has been established golfers have three potential leverage points. In other words, three ways to maximize the effectiveness of their plan:
Time — Spending more time on the identified areas of focus
Environment — Training in a suitable environment with the necessary tools
Content — Using appropriate training methods/drills to improve the necessary skills
Using these three leverage points is powerful, but can be detrimental if used to move in the wrong direction.
An objective analysis of your performance (such as the one illustrated in the image above) helps ensure you don’t use the levers to move in the wrong direction.
Heuristics
Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem — Naval Ravikant
A heuristic is a mental shortcut.
Nine times out of ten when golfers play poorly, they (and their swing coach) identify a swing issue that (apparently) caused the poor performance.
This is an example of a heuristic.
You’ve saved yourself the mental energy of thoroughly analyzing your performance and defaulted to the most convenient solution based on limited supporting evidence.
Heuristics lead golfers to get stuck repeatedly working on the same problem using the same approaches.
As I’ve said in a previous article, we default to addressing the issues we want to work on, rather than those we should work on.
For elite golfers, the “problem” is unlikely solely a technique issue.
And even if it was, what have you been doing the last few years if you haven’t resolved that issue?!
The reality is that defaulting to addressing a swing issue whenever performance isn’t as desired is less mentally exhausting than considering a complete overhaul of how you approach golf performance.
Questions to consider
Golfers should ask themselves the following questions:
What are the best and worst parts of my game, and what evidence do I have to support that?
What are the two areas of my game that can lead to disproportional improvement in my performance, and what evidence do I have to support this?
How would I like to structure my training over the next 12 months to address these two areas of my game?
I first came across this idea while consuming content from Cal Newport