It's time for a new episode of faith and fairways with the founder Brad Thorberg, who after more than 16,000 lessons taught to over 2000 golfers, has discovered the most forgotten and overlooked parts of your golf game that is keeping you from playing your most consistent and confident golf ever. Now here's your host, Brad Thorberg.
00:23 What is up my fellow golfers, members of the birdie crew, Brad here, stoked to be talking about why your better swing is blowing up your score. So many of you have been working on your game, working on your swing, you've taken [inaudible] lessons, and we're going to dive into why, even though your swing is better, you're still not scoring well or maybe even scoring worse, which I've seen with [inaudible] clients over the last 16 years. Now we're going to dive into that today. We're going to talk about the three main reasons I've seen over the last 16 years.
00:56 Why a better swing can often lead to poor scoring. Oh, then we're going to get into how you can kind of start improving this. So that's what we're diving into and unpacking today. So buckle up. We're going to get into it. So basically you have fixed your swing, but what has happened is you haven't fixed the six inches between your ears. That's, that's like the, yeah, that is the title of the book right there as to why your, your score has gotten worse, even though your swing has gotten better. [inaudible] You fixed the swing, but he didn't fix the six inches between your ears typically. Yeah, there, there, there's three big things here. Number one, you've been working on your swing and basically you've been striving, you know, and then I always ask this question, are you striving? Four, where are you at? Okay. [inaudible] Perfection. See, if you're striving for perfection, you'll never get there.
01:46 But you have a work ethic that will constantly have you working after it, which is wonderful. If you're affecting perfection, then for a lot of you, you're frustrated and you're constantly grinding in your tents and your, you're trying to come up with the next magical swing thought, that's gonna make the swing. Just look [inaudible] perfect. It has nothing to do with having a perfect swing. So you've got to shift your mindset to be striving for perfection, knowing it's not attainable, but you then have the work ethic and the passion to get after it. If you're [inaudible] affecting perfection, you're going to be disappointed. You're going to be frustrated, you're going to be forcing things to happen. And then when we do that you’re tense, so now you're out on the golf course trying to force this perfect swing, which there's no such thing. You know, golf is not a game of perfect.
02:34 You know, dr Bob Rotella wrote an entire book on that. So, so golf is not a game of perfect, so you can't expect it. Perfection in this game, I've been doing a lot of lessons. I think I'm now over 17,000 lessons since starting this podcast. And you know, I taught over 1700 just in this last year in golf. The golf swings, the game arranges and I tried to get my clients into certain ranges they can be most efficient with what their body will allow them to do to help them move towards a different kind of miss than what they currently have that they're frustrated about. So there's no such thing as the perfect site. But if you have the mentality that you're striving for perfection, then you will constantly be working to improve yourself. And we've talked about in past episodes that confidence is having both a belief within a plan and a belief within your skillset that's better today than it was yesterday.
03:29 Knowing it'll be better tomorrow. And that is a person that is a golfer who is striving for perfection, knowing that they can't obtain it. But if you expect to obtain perfection, you are in the wrong sport. You are going to be angry, frustrated, sad, depressed, all those [inaudible] probably within the same hole. Some of you have felt all of those feelings. So you gotta get away from expecting perfection. Start striving for it, knowing you can obtain it. That's the number one reason. Number two, it is you're trained your brain. So again, we're trying to fix the six inches between our ears cause you've already fixed the swing. You've trained your brain that there is a magical thought that fixes everything. Ooh, this bye made my contact and my swing better. So you, you've hardwired your brain and you've created these, these routines of hitting a bad shot and then instantly going to this Rolodex of memories of, Oh, this thought, this thought, it's gonna fix it made my swing look [inaudible] better and which is going to make it hit miraculous shots and I'm instantly going to score better.
04:31 And that is completely and utterly false. It's ridiculous to think that there's a magical thought. Well, I've done this so many times on camera with my clients. Y'all have him swing. And then they'll go, Oh, I've got two different things. Let me try this. Right? They think of something different and it looks like identical on camera, identical. The only thing that thought did was it changed your timing through impact that maybe you hit a better shot, maybe not. It's too hard to tell from one swing to the next cause there's no pattern. So there's no consistency. So you've hardwired your brain to think about how to swing the golf club instead of where you want the ball to go. You've hardwired your brain that when you hit a bad shot, you think there's a quick fix thought that's going to magically improve it. Yeah. Versus realizing golf's a game of bad shots.
05:18 You just got to focus on where you want it to go. Play with what you have [inaudible] trust that you're better. Improves swing is going to produce a better pattern of shots and miss it and your old swing. But by working on your swing and working with thoughts and feelings and sensations, you're out there and thinking, Oh, I gotta do this and you're so focused. I'm trying to feel this movement, enforce it, that you're tense, you're not relaxed, you're no longer, you're no longer swinging like an athlete. You're, you're swinging like a chest, a player who's thinking four things ahead. And you know, chess is not an athletic game and you're playing in athletics game whether you think so or not. And what makes it so mentally challenging is because you have so much time to think and over analyze and psych yourself out. Well, you've kind of wired your brain that way from all the work you've done.
06:06 And I'm not saying you shouldn't be working on your swing. You absolutely should. 99 out of a hundred people I see out there needs work on their swing. It's just you've worked so hard on it that sometimes you start to create a crutch of swing thoughts thinking that's going to produce magical shots when it's not. So you gotta get rid of that mentality, you know, go back and listen to, you know, the episode on how to practice and that's going to be a huge one for you of how know your practice is ruining your golf game because so many of you are doing it wrong because you're putting too much time into how to swing the club that you've neglected, how to hit golf shots. So you've created this habit of hitting a bad shot. It instantly thinking it was your swing. Then thinking that there's a magical thought that you're going to force to have happen.
06:55 And you know, like I've talked about that it's like thinking of what your wrist, your thumb and your breathing [inaudible] is doing while you're trying to hammer a nail in. And that's a great way to break phones, got to get rid of that. And number three is you have spent so much time working on the full swing and improving your swing. It looks better when you do execute it well from a relaxed state where you're not thinking you've had some of those beautiful shots, but you've put so much time into it that you've neglected your short game. And we've talked about this. I mean the short game is 65% of your score and you've been so focused on improving your full swing that you've neglected the short game. So now you are hitting beautiful shots, but now you're not getting up and down your your three putting more than you were a year ago when you weren't working on your game. And simply because you've neglected the focus of [inaudible]
07:44 The short game. Even though Brad has cracked the code to consistently breaking 90 there are still three major mistakes he's found from working with over 2000 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 polls and provides you with some easy action steps to start playing more consistent golf today
08:09 So you can't lose perspective of your golf game as a whole. You have to think of, even though you're trying to improve your mechanics and how that swing was, that's great, but because you're so focused on that, you lost focus of of your game from a big 10,000 foot view and realize, crap, I've done no short game work over the last three months. I have this beautiful swing. I hit it 10 yards further when I don't think about it, but now I have no short game and that's where some of you fall into that category where you are hitting beautiful shots. They're going further. You're missing a few more greens because now you're hitting it further than you think you can and you're not used to that. But now you're not getting up and down. You're not making as many putts because you've put no practice in into that area.
08:52 And that's where you're losing those shots and your and your score in the same or even worse. So those are kind of the three main reasons I have seen over the last several years of teaching that a lot of clients will fall into, cause they've spent months, months, some years. I mean I have clients who've been coming for [inaudible] over 10 years to me and they get so stuck in a mechanical rut of how to swing the club. I'm striving for this, you know, you're now striving but expecting that at some point they're just gonna wake up and be like, I did it. I have the perfect swing. And when they don't see that day in and day out, they get frustrated and they start going right back into that. Yeah. Spiral effect of swing thought and forcing things, intention and frustration, attaching too much more emotion to it to where when you get on the course, that's the first thing you fall back into is hitting a bad shot.
09:44 You're frustrated and you go right back into swing thoughts and that's why you always have to find the good in every shot and kind of retrain your brain. So how do we fix this? Number one practice, we gotta kind of focus on how you're practicing. You do have a beautiful swing, you still want to work on it. Well like I've talked about in the episode of how practices are in your golf game. You to go back a few weeks and definitely listened to that episode will help you tremendously. You got shift your practice to hitting golf shots and trusting [inaudible] your swing is better. Stop focusing on how when you hit a bad shot, let go in. Realize that's just a bad shot. You're not, you don't do this for a living. You're going to hit bad shots. So let it go. You got to focus on how the practice, you got to focus and realize your bad shots will happen.
10:30 Let it go. I mean if you're out there and you're shooting 85 you're still going to have something like 14 to 16 miss it. So bad shots happen. You got to let that thing go. Give yourself grace, move on and understand how the next shot is probably going to be good. No, you're not gonna usually hit that many bad shots in a row unless you start trying to force a perfect swing and you started thinking you have to try this in your swing. It's going to fix everything and everything magical is going to line up and you're going to, you know, knock it in the hole from 135 yards, it's not going to happen. Number three, you need to trust your game plan from warming up properly. You know, so now some of you maybe be warming up poorly this whole time and we're getting to the end of the season.
11:14 For a lot of you [inaudible] you know the Northern States, you got to warm up properly. That warm up gives you the cheat sheet before your round of golf. So if you're warming up properly, then you got to stick to that game plan. You can't go out there one bad shot in, instantly throw your game plan in the garbage and go right back into swing thought mode. [inaudible] Yeah, where you're expecting to make [inaudible] perfect swings and you think you have magical thoughts that's gonna allow that. That's great. You know, I tell my clients all the time, you may have, if you're force and you think your way through a perfect golf looking swing, it is to look wonderful on camera, but you're going to hit some of the crappiest shots you've ever hit. For someone who's never worked on a mechanical thought in their swing and just goes and hits, they will flush so many shots.
12:03 It doesn't always hold up under pressure because of some of the faults in their swing, but they'll hit with far more solid shots cause they're not thinking how and when they hit a bad one, they just go right into trying to hit a good one. The next shot instead of trying to fix it is you can't, especially when you're out on the course, it's game time. You can't fit, you know, basketball players have fixed their shooting form in the middle of a basketball game. So you've got to stop that. You've got to trust your game plan. Stick to it for the full nine holes or 18 holes, any evaluate from there on how it went cause that was your test. Learn from it. Practice properly. Go through your cheat sheet, warm up again the next time you play. Trust it. Yeah, and I promise you, you're going to shave shots.
12:46 I mean what I got from my test group going through the cheat sheet warm up this year, it was an average of 3.7 strokes dropped over the course of their next 10 rounds on their handicap. 3.7 strokes over the next in rounds. Bye. Going through their cheat sheet, warm up, trusting it in, using it for the full 18 holes. That was the average. So you got to warm up properly. And we have that website almost up and running. We had a few bugs, but it should be up and running soon@mygolfcode.com slash cheat sheet where we have, you know, I think it's five part video series on how to warm up like a tour player [inaudible] in 30 or less minutes. So you then have a game plan to go attack the golf course versus attacking the golf course with 17 swing thoughts and a migraine during two Advil after your round.
13:41 And then finally you just have to come to grips. You know, there really is no such thing as a perfect golf swing there. There is no such thing. I touched on this earlier, there's no such thing as a perfect golf swing when a client comes in, it's what are you frustrated about? What don't you like seeing and how can I shift that contact or that ball flight into improve contact in a shape that you'd rather have or reducing the severity of the myths that you currently have so you're less frustrated. I mean, it's always swinging within ranges. I mean [inaudible] path we call, I call it the cone of success. I mean there's a range. You can be on the high part of the cones, the low part, there's no perfect spot that code, there's no perfect face angle. It's getting you away from your biggest frustration and misses in improving the consistency of contact.
14:30 That's all we're doing. And then from there it's learning how to apply that on a golf course that really takes the most amount of time. It's not about beating a million balls to death, thinking about how to swing the golf club and trying to create a perfect swing. And that's gonna solve all your problems. Cause like I've talked about, you only make 35 to 45 full aggressive swings over 18 holes. The rest is all short game and feel shots and [inaudible] managing the course and positioning yourself in the right spots where your misses tend to be. Putting yourself below the cups, most of your putts are uphill. Let me think of that. [inaudible] All your putts were eight foot uphill versus six foot down here. You're going to make more of the eight footers up the Hill than the down the Hill. But it's about positioning.
15:12 And its management [inaudible] too often we've hardwired our brain the six inches between our ears on how to swing the golf club thinking there's a perfect way to do it. Grinding and forcing that to happen that we throw everything out the window and we forget about how to be an athlete and we start trying to be a chess player in the middle of a 1.2 second golf swing and it's impossible to do. And by doing that you've neglected your short game. You're not relaxed, you're not fluid and that is why you are blowing up your score because you fixed the swing but you didn't fix your brain and you're just creating, okay time bomb out there when you're playing around a golf. So that is why your better is blowing up your score. Hold for that help. So if that gives you some action items and some understanding as to why all that work you've put in and that swing that looks better isn't translating to scoring, that is why.
16:09 Definitely check out a previous episode on practice and how long, how to warm up those will help you tremendously. Yeah. I think the warm one's called oozing confidence. As you head into the first tee and why practices ruining your golf game, those two episodes, you definitely want to tune in because that's how you're going to solve fixing the six inches between your ears. Next week, we're going to get into Howard, how you can win by hitting bad shots. We're going to talk about how you can improve your score, beat your buddies with your bad shots. It's going to blow your mind, you know, want to miss it. So stay tuned for next week. Until then, remember to swing easy. Always find the good in every shot you hit, and we'll talk to you all soon.
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