Tour Championship
East Lake Golf Club
1
Tommy Fleetwood
4
-18
T2
Russell Henley
4
-15
T2
Patrick Cantlay
4
-15
T4
Corey Conners
4
-14
T4
Scottie Scheffler
4
-14
10 boring things tour pros do to get better at golf 📈
Al Chang/ISI Photos
Being really good at golf is really fun. You travel around the world to the finest courses, making tons of money and achieving glory along the way.
But getting really good at golf is a monotonous task. It requires hours on the range, alone. Early wake-up calls and countless reps practicing really boring, simple things to try to get a tiny bit better.
A few weeks ago I asked a group of tour players and coaches what those boring, simple things were so the rest of us can learn from them. Maybe even practice them ourselves.
Here's what they said …
1. Sam Burns: Putting down a chalk line
This was the first one that came to Burns' mind when I asked him. He didn't hesitate, and it's easy to see why. Lots of pros practice variations of putting down a line on the ground to make sure they're starting their ball on their intended line, and the ball is rolling end-over-end as a result.
"Putting down a chalk line is pretty boring, but definitely helpful," Burns says. "It's a 'just do it every day' kind of thing and your putting will probably get a lot better."
Burns does, which makes sense—he's first in SG/putting on tour this season.
2. J.T. Poston: Dialing in your alignment
Here's a boring one that often goes overlooked by amateur golfers: Aiming.
If you're not aiming where you think you are, you may be making bad swings to compensate. Or worse: You may be making good swings that send the ball into places you don't want to be.
Often you'll see players work on this by placing a series of alignment sticks down on the ground. One along their feet, for instance, and another down the target line themselves. It's a simple way to get your eyes synced up to where you want them to be.
"Doing the same things on the range every day, like working on your alignment … the consistency of it is boring. But that's what makes guys really good, because it's important," Poston says. "Scottie is the perfect example."
3. Scottie Scheffler: Stress about your grip
You know one thing Scottie works on a lot? His grip. He has a tendency—like most golfers—to move his grip around, which can affect his takeaway and other positions on his backswing. That's why he carries an extra 7-iron with a practice grip on it to dial it in, and checks the position of his hands painstakingly before every range ball he hits.
"For me it's just checkpoints. I'm not trying to find something when I arrive at a tournament. I'm trying to do the same things I've always been doing," Scheffler says. "Getting my grip right has always been one of those key fundamentals for me."
Kevin C. Cox
4. Brian Harman: Find space for yourself
This one caught me slightly by surprise, frankly, but it's a good one.
Working, for tour players and the rest of us alike, is stressful. It's easy to disregard the self-care and recovery portion, but it's an essential part of getting better, says Harman.
"Somewhere peaceful to lay your head is pretty important," he says. "We get pulled around a lot out here and having a place where you can go and get left alone to gather my thoughts is really important."
Jonathan Bachman
5. Coach Sean Foley: Activate your body
At least when you're practicing golf you're literally doing the thing you want to do. But golf isn't chess. It's a sport, which whether you want to or not, means you need to spend time in the gym.
"Doing activation techniques in the gym to make sure your body is ready, that's boring. Stretching, that's boring. Doing it every single day, 50 weeks a year, that's really boring," says Foley, Golf Digest No. 3-ranked teacher.
"Everyone's obviously good at golf because they were passionate about the game, but I think the ones who become great are the ones who are really good at the parts that they don't like about it."
6. Corey Connors: Improve your tempo
Connors has one of the smoothest swings in the game—but his butter draws didn't get that way by accident.
The Canadian said he used to spend hours on the range with his dad, practicing a pause between his backswing and downswing.
"He always felt that if you have good rhythm in your golf swing, you don't need perfect swing mechanics," Connors says. "Working on tempo and rhythm is something that is pretty boring. There's nothing too fancy or flashy about it, but I think it's really important. It always helped me strike the ball more solidly and it can help the everyday golfer."
7. Coach Justin Parsons: Perfect your posture
When was the last time you checked your golf swing posture? Pros do it all the time, multiple times per day. Try it yourself using a mirror and you'll soon appreciate how incredibly tedious it can be. But pros don't do it because it's interesting. They do it because it's important.
"When your body is unbalanced at setup, the first thing it's going to try to do when you start moving is try to find balance," says Parsons, a Golf Digest top coach to multiple tour players. "Getting your posture right is a detail these guys focus on every day."
8. Luke Donald: Practice your wedges
Pros work hard to hit their ball longer off the tee to put themselves in scoring range with their wedges—but that only works if you're actually good with your wedges. Which, of course, requires practicing.
The way most pros do this is by simply hitting lots of wedges to different distances. Dustin Johnson improved his wedge game by hitting wedge shots inside 100 yards at random intervals. J.T. Poston does it by moving up in five-yard increments. Luke Donald, one of the best wedge players of all time, did it in three-yard increments.
"Rather than just hitting to the same spot over and over again, which is not very similar to golf, I try to create games that are a bit more golf-like," Donald says. "Create variability and then attach a score, then you can figure out where you stack up and what I need to work on and what I don't need to work on."
9. Coach Adam Schriber: Hit lots of short putts
Along those lines, practicing your short putts is something pros do relentlessly every day. Why? Because a paltry 5 percent difference between making 92 percent of your putts inside five feet and making 87 percent of your putts is the difference between being inside the top 10 on tour to being outside the top 100.
"You just have to do them over and over again," says Schriber, a Golf Digest Top 50 teacher who coaches J.J. Spaun. "Hitting all those three-footers gets really boring, but it's the only way to get better at them."
10. Matt Fitzpatrick: Track your stats
Half the battle of getting better at golf is knowing what to get better at. And to do that, you need to track your stats.
Fitzpatrick famously has tracked every shot he hits on the course by hand, then inputs them into a spreadsheet to review. Most players have a team of coaches that crunch the numbers before their rounds, and it's the players' job to sit down weekly to review it all.
"It's something I've always done because I think it gives me a bit of an edge," Fitzpatrick says.
Sean Foley agrees:
"Going over data with these guys week after week, that's boring, but it pays their bills."
