I've watched thousands of golfers in my schools and know one thing for certain: practice makes permanent. Also, poor practice makes permanently poor golfers. The habits you form when you work on your game are the ones you'll repeat on the course, especially under pressure, because there's not enough time to think your way through swings.
Let's say you have one hour per week to practice your wedge game. If during that hour you make every swing from a perfect setup position, you'll insert between 100 and 200 "perfect" setups into your memory. The importance of this is that even when you make bad swings and hit poor shots during the session, you'll still be grooving the habit of setting up properly. And proper alignment during your setup is vital to learning good technique (from bad setups you only learn to make compensating swings).
Try this. Get two quarter-inch-diameter plastic dowels (from any hardware store) and aim the first one exactly at your target. Place the second dowel parallel left of the first, about 12 inches inside the target line. Start hitting balls from just outside the target line dowel, and make sure your toes are equidistant from the inside dowel. As you set each new ball on the first 1/2-inch of good turf behind the preceding divot, you'll only take a small amount of turf after each shot, and your divot line will grow to extend back parallel to the target line.
• HOW TO CHECK YOUR BREAKS
The data at left tells us that most golfers don't allow for enough break. I've reported this before, but golfers don't seem to have learned from it yet. A simple test will prove whether this problem applies to you or not.
During your next round mark on your scorecard whether your first putt misses above (A) or below (B) the hole. After your round, see how many A's vs. B's you've totaled. If you have more B's, you're not borrowing enough break. Start adding a little extra break to your reads until you end up a round with an equal number of A and B misses. By then you'll be holing more putts.
• 17 inches
The distance a missed putt should roll past the hole on average. This means the ball rolled at optimum speed as it neared the cup. If you roll your putts faster than optimum speed, you'll see more lip-outs; roll them slower and you'll see more putts die off line as they roll through the "lumpy donut" (footprints in the green made by golfers in front of you) short of the hole.
