It's time for a new episode of “Faith N Fairways” with the founder, Brad Thorberg, who after more than 16,000 lessons taught to over 2,000 golfers has discovered the most forgotten and overlooked part of your golf game that is keeping you from playing your most consistent and confident golf ever.
Now, here is your host, Brad Thorberg.
Brad Thorberg: What is up, Birdie Crew? Back at it again this week.
This week's topic: “Why the Average Golfer Might Still Be Struggling.” Why are you still struggling to break 90 after we've laid out the code to breaking 90? This is the secret code that's helped so many of my clients break 90. Why might you still be struggling? That's what we're diving into this week.
You know the code from the last several episodes. You've been applying it and been working on the drills. Now, some of you, I’ve been getting emails, getting great success so far. Others, you're still struggling. So, why are we still struggling? Well, we're going to lay it out. We're going to have four major factors why you might still be struggling and we're going to talk about it this week, help give you some guidance there to get you hopefully moving closer to breaking 90 even faster. We're going to try to speed up this process a little bit for you by laying out some of the key pieces that might be keeping you from there.
So, why the average golfer might still be struggling, even though you know the code now. Why is that? Why are you there yet?
Number one: your swinging might have two bigger flaws, so we're going to get into that. Why you're not breaking 90 consistent might be your swing might just have two bigger flaws so far.
Two: you might believe that you still can't. You just believe that you can't, because you haven't done it. You don't have enough self-belief that you can do it.
Three: you just don't have a good routine leading up to the round of golf. You just haven't got yourself prepared well enough for the round to even come close to breaking 90. Even though you have all this useful information, you don't know how to apply it yet.
Number four is just understanding the journey of this that this isn't a quick fix.
So, your swing might still have some big flaws. Why is that?
Now, if you still have a double miss and you don't trust your swing, meaning you slice the ball and you're still cycling through swing thoughts, and you haven't really taken to heart what I covered in the first episode, then you're still missing big in both directions. It's going to be very hard to break 90 because you're going to just have too many dang penalty strokes.
So, you've got to get to where your miss is one direction, meaning you're playing for either a straight or a slice. You're playing for a straight or a hook. And you can start angling yourself away from trouble. So, you've got to get your swing dialed into a point where you're hitting a solid, but you only have a one-way miss, meaning you're either slicing a straight or you're hooking a straight.
If you ever miss both directions, typically what that means is, a) you're still thinking too much about how to swing the club versus where you want it to go, because if you're super relaxed even with faults in your swing, if you're relaxed and you trust that you're either going to hit it straight or slice it, you're going to do it 9 out of 10 times. But if you're kind of playing military golf left-right, left-right, and you just can't wait to meet the penalty strokes and be too far off the map, because you should still be hitting [03:00] three or four fairways.
Someone trying to shoot 88 to 90 will still hit three or four fairways from the tee box, and if you're not doing that, a) club selection; b) you still have your swing where you need it or you're just swinging away too hard. You know, back to trying to just swing 80 percent. Eighty percent. Swing easy. It's about just getting it out there and play and getting the next one within our safe zone, your safe spot, 30 yards from the edge of the putting surface, finding that safe place.
So, stop swinging so dang hard. And if you're still struggling after those, you need to go find your PGA Professional who uses video to teach. You can actually see what you're doing. Because for a lot of you, if you haven't done that, you think you know what you're doing, but you don't have a clue.
Not to burst your bubble, but I've worked with a lot of clients, over 2,000, taught over 16,000 lessons. Number one thing when they see themselves on video is, Man, I didn't realize I was doing that. I didn't think I was doing that anymore. I had no idea I was doing that. Video don't lie.
So, you need to find a professional who uses video and can show you what you're actually doing, so you can stop trying to fix what you have no clue what needs to be fixed and they can lay out a game plan to fix that, so you can start to get things dialed in, so you only have a one-way miss. And, again, to get to that one-way miss, it's about being relaxed, swinging 80 percent and trusting that it's either going to go straight or this way and playing it. Right?
So, you've got to get your swing dialed in. You've got to stop swinging so dang hard. And, if you're still struggling, seek out a professional who teaches. That's what they do for a living. In 30 minutes, they're going to give you more useful information than you’ve spent the last three hours on YouTube researching golf swings.
Number two is you've got to start believing you can do it. A lot of you are struggling because you still don't believe you can do it because you've never done it. If that's the case, then nothing great would ever happen.
What is it, the five-minute mile or breaking five, or whatever it was? Or four minutes? Breaking four-minute mile, I think it was. But, anyway, it was that—I’ve drawn a blank here. But I know the story well enough to prove my point, meaning—nobody had ever broken that barrier in the mile. Then one guy does it and the next thing you know, 70 people in the next year do it because they now had belief because they’ve seen it done. But, until then, no one thought it was possible.
You're in that same place with your golf game. You don't believe it's possible to break 90 because you've never done it. If you go in with that attitude, the moment you hit a bad shot or have a blow-up hole, you give up because you think there's no way. So, you've got to start building belief within yourself.
How do you do this? You've got to start actually visualizing yourself breaking 90. All the great athletes, before they compete, visualize success. They visualize winning. They visualize hitting solid shots with the golf club or hitting solid balls in baseball. They visualize themselves draining three pointers. They visualize tackling if they play defense in football or catching the ball if they're a receiver in the NFL. I mean, they literally [06:00] will spend hours visualizing the game before it happens.
Now, you'll hear that with tour players—“I already visualize myself winning. Then, I just had to go out and do it”—because they've already played their rounds of golf in their head and they've seen the success and the great shots they've hit. And then, they can recall upon those even after they’ve hit a few bad shots. But you haven't done that. You're relying solely on negativity and past experience with no belief in the future. So, to do that, you have to start believing and visualizing yourself having that success.
How do we do that? At minimum, start spending five minutes or more a day visualizing success in the weakest parts of your golf game. Start picturing yourself hitting more solid shots with the driver or cleaner shots with irons off the deck. Start picturing yourself draining more of the short putts or rolling putts with no effort inside that five-foot window. Whatever that weakness is, you've got to start picturing and visualizing yourself succeeding in those weak areas. You have to close your eyes. You have to take it in. You have to smell the trees or the ocean breeze if you're by the ocean. You have to feel the sun on your cheeks.
Even though Brad has cracked the code to consistently breaking 90, there are still three major mistakes he's found from working with over 2,000 clients that will sabotage your round before you get to the first tee. Head to www.MyGolfCode.com now to receive your free guide where he outlines all three faults and provides you with some easy action steps to start playing more consistent golf today.
You have to picture yourself on that course and playing that hole, and just hitting a solid drive that is a little pull-cut 30 yards left to right, back into the middle of fairway, and then your safe place is short right of the greens. So, you grab an 8-iron and you make a smooth swing, and you just swing 80 percent. You're knocking 8-iron up to the front-right of the green and it almost gets on, and then you putt from five feet off the green, and you lag it up there to 15 feet. You lip-out the par putter. Maybe you drain it. Maybe you visualize yourself draining it. What about that? And then you move on to hole-2—but you have to go through that. You have to picture yourself doing these things to start creating self-belief and a sense of that you can do it. Because, otherwise, you just have too much negativity built into it to ever believe you can do it.
Number three is you have to have a routine that sets you up for success, a routine that gets you walking to the first tee with swagger versus a routine that is setting you up for a mind bomb of thoughts and anger and uncertainty. And that's what most of you do because you just don't have a good routine.
You don't have a visualization process that day before you play. You're not fueling your body correctly through the day to have energy, stamina and focus through the entire round. You haven't been working out in a way that's been improving [09:00] your balance, your stamina, your mobility, your flexibility and your strength to allow you to be improving with your golf swing and just over the course of 18 holes in the grind there.
Then, you're not warming up before the round correctly. You're warming up in a way to try and hit a golf ball straighter, hit it solid, versus warming up in a way that tells you your tendencies and creating that cheat sheet. “My cheat sheet,” that is such a huge thing for my clients that I take them through.
We actually have a scorecard cheat sheet that we go through and it’s “we hit four shots with this club and that club,” and we track it. We go, Hey, today with short clubs and you're averaging a five-yard push, and so we're going to play straight to seven yards right when we aim and plot out way away from danger, or your mid-irons or 10–20 yards right, so we're going to play that. Your tendency is to be a little chunky, so we're going to tee the ball up a little bit higher on par-3s. So, we're creating a pre-round warmup that gives us knowledge and facts to take to the golf course and play with what we have that day versus what we want to have that day.
A lot of you aren’t doing that. A lot of you get out there. You don't even warm up at all and you're expecting greatness, your best round ever without warming up—good luck with that—or you're warming up and you hit a couple bad shots, and you spend the next 15 minutes before you race to the first tee trying to fix the slice you have—good luck with that. That takes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reps and lessons, but you're trying to fix it in 15 minutes onto the first tee—and you skip over any short game work, which is 65 percent of your score.
You warm up before your round is shot. You're creating anxiety, stress and uncertainty. You're just lacking confidence as you go to the first tee box with a million thoughts. But the person who goes through the cheat sheet goes to that first tee with a game plan, and they spend a good chunk of their warmup on their short game, which is crucial. That's what they need to be focusing on in anyway.
So, you've got to be focusing on a proper warmup. You've got to be visualizing this success before it happens. You've got to be fueling your body correctly. You've got to be improving your body from a fitness standpoint. All those things will be helping you.
And then, finally, number four is, this is a journey, not a quick fix. There's no quick fix in golf. That's what makes it so fun and so admiring for those who are good because you know it just didn't happen. It took work. It took effort. It took practice. So, you've got to embrace the journey, guys.
For some of you, you might be seeing some immediate results because you were so far along where you needed to be that you just needed the code to unlock it. For some of you, it's going to take more work and just the daily discipline of implementing these things and some more practice, because your mind is still wandering. You're still thinking about too much of how versus where. You're thinking too much about “don't do this” and negativity versus positivity and leaning on the [12:00] successes you've had.
Muscle memory isn't just for your body. It’s for your mind. Your brain is a muscle that takes repetition to create a new habit and you need to start creating habits with these routines and these warmups and these thoughts. To be able to say it starts here and ends there, relax, 80 percent, deep breath, to do that before every shot is going to take practice, because I’ve done this.
I've been out there so many times in playing lessons with clients, and I'm there. Their coach is there telling them what to exactly be telling themselves in their brain and be thinking, and they'll still a handful of times tune me out and think of something they should not be thinking of, because that's just how the brain works—it's such a powerful, powerful muscle, but it will wander, because you've been ingraining it for years to think negatively, to think that when you hit a bad shot you did something wrong and you needed to somehow fix it. You've been in graining these habits for years and years.
So, it's not going to happen just like this, right? Right away, just, I've listened to the code to breaking 90 and instantly my brain is going to be wired to do this every single shot. It's not. It's going to take practice. You're going to have to do this over and over. You're going to have to grade yourself and keep track of, Alright, did I truly think of where I wanted this to start and end, played the shot I had and relaxed, and only swung 80 percent, or did I try to kill it or did I try to hit it straight or did I try to do something I've never done before? Right? But was I thinking hit it on my tiny spot on that four-foot putt or was I thinking don't leave it short?
You have to reflect upon each hole and kind of just give yourself a grade of how well you actually did, because it's going to take time. It's going to take time and practice to build the muscle memory in the brain to just start to happen, along with all these other components, so you're not getting fatigued, so your body is there and your mind is staying fueled.
So, that is why you're still probably struggling a little bit. But guess what, guys—there's a light at the end of the tunnel. There's hope. I've helped hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients to do this. It's easy if you stick to the plan. You implement it. You stay focused and you stick to the grind. For many of you, your game is there and your swing is there. You just need to unlock the code, trust it, have faith and apply it. You need to start being more positive and thinking correctly. That is such a crucial piece. You're there. You're on the cusp of greatness. We’ve just got to get you over the hump.
So, start thinking of these four things—maybe it's my swing. Maybe I'm swinging too hard. Maybe it’s because I still don't believe in myself. Maybe I just need a better warmup and routine for the day. I need to work on my visualization and my positive thinking—and just embrace the journey, guys. You do those things and you're going to be there in no time, no time.
That kind of sums up the series of how to break 90 consistently, “The Code to Breaking 90.” That's going to help so, so many of you. Next week, you're going to want to tune in. We're going to talk about the secret better golfers know that you don’t. There is a [15:00] secret that the better players know that you don't. I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to give away the secret. I'm going to show you how you can start implementing it next week to create immediate results in your golf game. So, you're going to want to tune in for that.
Until then, get out, play. Have fun. My Birdie Crew, you're doing awesome. We'll talk to you soon.
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