By Jack Moorehouse

We all have days when it feels like you never played golf before or had golf lessons. Even the pros have them. Look at what’s happened to Tiger Woods since he’s returned from his hiatus. He hasn’t played well since coming back. In fact, he had his worse day ever as a pro just a few weeks ago. He also didn’t play up to his capabilities in the PGA Championship. Playing poorly happens to everyone.

What separates golfers with low golf handicaps from those with high golf handicaps is how they handle bad days. On bad days you must recognize what you can and can’t do and use that knowledge. If you start planning and executing shots—no matter what type they are—your confidence will come back and you’ll start playing better. This skill isn’t easy to teach in golf lessons or group golf instruction sessions. But we can give you four helpful golf tips.

Find A Swing That Works
Hitting drives out of bounds costs strokes. When you’re driving poorly, make up your mind to find a swing that works. On days you’re not hitting the fairway with your driver, choke down on your driver. It creates a shorter swing that’s easier to control. Or, use your 3-wood or 2-iron. If you’re missing to one side, plan for it. For example, if you’re missing right all day, aim for the left edge of the fairway and let it come back. If you hit a draw and you’re missing right, use a baseball swing. It gives you the smooth, powerful feeling you want in a swing.

Manage Your Misses
Greens in regulation (GIR) are a key. Every GIR saves a stroke. But it’s crazy to aim for a close pin on bad days—especially if it’s protected. The trick when not swinging your irons well is managing misses. Miss your shots on the correct side of the hole, so you land on the green, not in the rough. If there’s a flat side to the green, aim for that, so you don’t waste a stroke. Also, set up with your feet a little closer together, choke down, and move the ball back a little. These changes improve ball-first contact. You hit lower shots this way, but they work.

Get The Ball Rolling
Hitting a chip to tap-in range saves a one stroke—maybe more. The key to chipping is getting the ball rolling quickly. On bad days, focus on doing that. Check your lie. If it’s deep use a club with more loft. If it’s shallow use a club with less loft. Also, don’t try spinning your chips. You get better roll with less spin. And think draw when chipping. Make practice swings and focus on pointing the toe of your wedge to the sky in your backswing and your follow-through. Notice how you release your left hand through impact, just as you do with your full swing.

Trust Your Instincts
Often, we miss putts because we overanalyze or overthink. After missing a few, we lose confidence. When this happens, trust your instincts. Line up in a comfortable position and swing away. Your instincts are often good barometers. Also, try making practice swings with one hand to regain your putting stroke. The left hand—right hand, if you’re left-handed—is a good hand to do this with. It helps you stand square to the target line and set-up correctly. If you’re having trouble trusting your feel, a good drill is putting with your eyes closed and guessing where the putts go. The drill restores feel.

Everyone has bad days—even the pros. But golfers with low golf handicaps tend to fare better than golfers with high golf handicaps because they don’t let bad days throw them. Low handicappers find what’s working for them that day and what safe shots will get them through the round. Remember our golf tips on bad days and you’ll survive them. Today, you need to figure out how to get it done. Tomorrow you can go to the range or attend golf instructions sessions.

By Jack Moorehouse

Golf is a thinking man’s game. Ask veteran players with low golf handicaps what they think about golf and they’ll probably agree with the preceding statement. Like many thinking men’s games, such as chess, staying two or three strokes ahead often saves you from disaster. Course management is one of those skills you pick up by playing, not by attending golf lessons or group golf instruction sessions. Those who master course management shed strokes from their golf handicaps without even using up a club.

But even the most skilled course managers can’t always control where the ball ends up once it hits the ground. Even if you’ve learned to stop the ball dead in golf lessons, you can’t always count on controlling the ball after it hits. Sometimes, you get a good lie. Other times, you get a bad lie. A lot depends on the course and the kind of day you’re having. But golfers with low golf handicaps don’t panic when the get bad lies. Instead, they let the lie dictate their shot.

Below are some poorer lies you’ll face on a course and golf tips on how to play from them. If you’re serious about lowering your golf handicap, ingrain these golf tips. They’ll save you strokes.

Normal Bunker Lies
Not all bunker lies are the same. But you can use your feet to tell what kind of lie you have and how hard the sand is beneath the ball. Get a feel for the sand as you dig your feet in for stability. If the sand is wet and firm, you’ll need a shallow angle of attack, since you want to take less sand with this shot. So open your clubface and stance slightly and aim for a spot about an inch behind the ball. If the sand is deep and fluffy, you’ll need a full explosion shot. Your clubface and stance should be wide open. Take a full steep swing to allow the club to remove plenty of sand.

Shallow Bunkers
Shallow bunkers can fool you. While the loose sand looks fluffy, there’s often a hard surface beneath it. Your clubface will bounce off this surface, resulting in a long bladed shot. Play this lie like a normal pitch shot. Square your clubface and open your stance slightly. Make a three-quarter swing and half an inch behind the ball. Stay firm through impact and into your follow-through. The ball flies out like a pitch shot that you hit slightly fat.

Muddy Lies
The tendency with muddy lies is to try to pick the ball up. This usually results in either a skulled shot or a fat shot one. Instead, cock your wrists in the back swing and hold the position for as long as you can on the downswing. Your hands will be ahead of the ball, which ensures a descending blow. Releasing your hands will cause the ball to fly low and left, if you’re right-handed. Keeping the clubface open, on the other hand, results in a straight and true shot.

Pine Straw
Not every course has pine straw. But many do. Hitting from here is similar to hitting from a fairway bunker. Don’t sole your club, which prevents you from disturbing the straw and moving the ball. Instead, hover your club an inch off the ground and stand a bit taller at address to compensate for the change. To prevent slipping, pretend you’re standing in cement. Keep your feet planted and your weight centered as you swing. This helps you steady yourself and make solid contact. Also, make thin, ball-first contact and sweep the ball off the ground, as you would in a fairway bunker, instead of swinging down on it.

This list of bad lies is not exhaustive. There are plenty more out there, like sidehill lies or hardpan lies. If you’re serious about chopping stokes off your golf handicap, keep track of the bad lies you face regularly and learn to hit from them. If you’re having trouble doing so, set up a golf instruction session with a local pro. Your game will improve greatly by learning to handle bad lies.

By Jack Moorehouse

Here’s a golf tip that’s proven effective more times than not: If you want to cut strokes from your golf handicap, learn to hit shots that hit the green and stick. That’s right. Learn to hit shots that stick. They can save you anywhere from one to two strokes per hole. More depending on how far away the ball bounces from the pin. If the ball really takes off after it hits, look out.

The key to hitting shots that stick is backspin. Golfers need to apply backspin to balls more than ever before. Faster greens, tighter pin positions, more forced carries, and lower-lofted wedges and short irons demand it—the USGA’s new ruling on wedge grooves not withstanding. This ruling affects both professional and weekend golfers alike. What’s more, learning to control backspin helps slash your golf handicap.

The Backspin Equation
You probably already make swings capable of producing shots with good backspin—even if you don’t do it on purpose. But just your swing alone isn’t enough. To complete the backspin equation, you must add the right type of ball and the right face grooves on your wedge. Nail these factors and your spin potential increases dramatically.

To generate backspin: (1) position the ball back of center one to two ball widths, (2) place your hands ahead of the clubhead, and (3) accelerate through impact. The more you accelerate through impact, the more spin generate and the more likely your shots will stick. Combining the right swing with the right ball and the right type of groves is how many instructors teach this skill in golf lessons.

Ball Construction Is Key
Ball construction is also a key to generating backspin. To hit backspin sufficient enough to have a ball stick, play a ball with a cover soft enough to be engaged by the grooves in the clubface. Generally speaking, urethane covers are softer than Surlyn covers. Urethane and Surlyn are the principal materials from which most covers are made.

While balls with Surlyn covers are longer off the tee, balls with urethane covers help control backspin better. They’re also more expensive balls. If some one takes golf lessons from us and they’re not using a ball with a urethane cover, we figure they just don’t know about the benefits of doing so.

Grooves Are Also Key
Your wedge’s face grooves are also key to adding spin. A high-producing wedge must have aggressive enough face grooves to engage the ball. New grooves spin more than old grooves and clean grooves spin more than dirty ones. Also, the sharper the groove edges, the better they grab the ball’s cover and produce spin. More importantly, box grooves are better than U-grooves and V-grooves and worn out grooves of any shape.

The USGA recently made a rule change that can affect your choice of wedges with box grooves. This new ruling downsizes volume and limits edge sharpness for all grooves manufactured after January 1, 2010, so they’re equal to or less than the previously approved V-groove dimensions. If you’re an amateur, you have a choice of which grooves to play until at least 2024. On the other hand, if you buy a wedge manufactured after last January, it must have grooves with spin performance at or below V-groove levels.

If you want to hit shots that stick, learn to add backspin to your ball. The keys to adding backspin are using the right setup and swing, a ball with a urethane cover, and a wedge with the right grooves. These keys affect all shots that hit the green. Getting shots to stick when they hit can chop two to three strokes from your golf handicap.

By Jack Moorehouse

Concentrating on your mechanics while swinging usually leads to disaster. Thinking about how to hold your hands, make a good shoulder turn, or execute one of the other golf tips we pick up from magazines, newsletters, or golf lessons leads to topped shots, shanks, pushes, and other bad shots. More importantly, thinking about your mechanics causes you to ignore critical swing elements like rhythm and tempo, which contribute greatly to accuracy and consistency.

A great way to stop thinking about your mechanics while swinging is to build a swing you can trust—one that lets you focus on rhythm, tempo, and timing. How do you do this? You do it by ingraining key moves at critical swing points—like your set-up, downswing, and follow-through. Ingraining these moves enables you to forget about your mechanics and focus entirely on the task at hand. Improved focus leads to better shots. Better shots lead to better scores and better golf handicaps.

Let’s look at five key points where can ingrain moves that build trust in your swing:

Set-up
Setting up incorrectly generates swing faults that lead to bad shots. So you always want to set up correctly. For example, if you set up so that you’re reaching for the ball with your arms disconnected from your body, you’ll tend to take the club back to the outside. To build trust in your address position, set up your arm hang so that the club swings back automatically on plane. You can do this by bending from the waist so that when your arms hang down your triceps rest against your chest.

Takeaway

What you need to do with your takeaway, as I’ve said in hundreds of golf instruction sessions and golf tips, is start everything back in one piece. To help execute a one-piece takeaway correctly, try lightly brushing the grass behind that ball. When you keep the clubhead low to the ground like this, it makes it easy to stay on plane and create proper width in your swing. You may not actually hear the clubhead brush the grass during your takeaway, but keeping low helps builds trust in your takeaway and your swing.

Backswing
Your backswing is the source of many swing errors. If you could eliminate your backswing, you fee yourself of many swing errors. Obviously, you can’t eliminate your backswing. But you can build trust in it. To do that, you need to let the club swing freely to the top. You can do this by turning your back hip pocket behind you so that it feels like your clubhead and torso are moving back together. They should arrive at the top simultaneously.

At The Top
The top position is another key point where you want to build trust. But there’s some dispute as to where the toe of your club should be pointing when you reach the top. Some say it should be square or closed. Others say it should be pointing downward to provide the freedom to let the club go at the bottom. Most great golfers—the one’s that have lasted for years—pointed the club down and cupped their left wrist at the top. To build trust in your top position, do the same. It jump-starts a powerful release through the ball.

Impact
When you make good impact, you should feel like your back shoulder is on top of the ball. Too many weekend golfers ignore their back shoulders when swinging. To them the only thing that counts is their front shoulder. But ignoring your back shoulder produces pushes and hooks. To build trust at impact, swing the club so that it feels like the clubhead is passing through your hands at impact, not your hands trying to hold the face square at impact.

Building trust at these five key points in your swing builds trust in your entire swing. As a result, you won’t be thinking about the newest golf tips you’ve read or learned about in golf lessons during your swing. Instead, you’ll be focusing on more important things like rhythm, tempo, and timing—things that contribute greatly to better shots. Better shots lead to better scores and better scores lead to better golf handicaps. Trust me.