Winter Golf, Real Gains

Want real gains before spring? We map a no-nonsense path from “ball beater” to better golfer by turning winter practice into a measurable plan. I break down why block practice stalls progress, how to read your ball flight with honesty, and the simple delivery metrics that drive change: neutralizing club path, aligning attack angle, and building skills that hold up when the lie, wind, and pressure shift outdoors.

We get specific about structure. You’ll hear how to benchmark with a launch monitor, validate motion with force plates, and use short, targeted drills that work without a club before they ever touch a ball. I explain the draw–fade on-command test for confirming neutral path, give practical ranges for a mid-iron attack angle, and show how small exaggerations speed learning without creating new problems. We also tackle timelines—why change requires discomfort, how to stage adjustments so delivery matches your new motion, and what to do when a trend line refuses to move.

Stats become your compass. Using Clippd, we focus on comparing you to you, turning three honest rounds into a practice roadmap that prioritizes short game, green reading, and putting speed where needed. I share session templates that mix clubs, decisions, and targets for better transfer, plus maintenance ideas so a new strength doesn’t steal from another part of your game. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start measuring, this is your blueprint to convert winter reps into lower scores when the snow melts.

Subscribe for more practical coaching, share this with a golf friend who needs a plan, and drop a review with the one metric you’ll tackle first. Want help building your roadmap? Reach out at info@measuredgolf.com or michael@measuredgolf.com and let’s get to work.

Website : measuredgolf.com

Instagram : @measuredgolf | @theforceplateguy

Contact Us : info@measuredgolf.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Winter Mindset And The Simulator Trap
• 4:50 Why Hitting Balls Rarely Changes Scores
• 8:20 Block Practice vs Transfer To The Course
• 12:40 Reading Ball Flight And Club Path Truths
• 18:10 Neutral Path, Attack Angle, And Interplay
• 24:30 Data Sources And Building A Real Plan
• 30:10 Apps, Coaching, And The Role Of Time
• 36:20 Force Plates, Drills, And Motor Learning
• 43:00 Timelines, Constraints, And Holistic Practice
• 50:30 Short Game, Putting, And Green Reading
• 58:20 Using Clippd Stats To Drive Practice

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Measured Golf Podcast, where you, the listeners, sit down and join me, Michael, as we discuss all things golf. And it is a beautiful time of year for golf if you're watching on TV, because it looks like those guys are having amazing weather out in San Diego. But for a lot of us across the country, we are dealing with a very cold and snowy winter. So if you're like me here in Michigan, it is definitely cold, it is definitely snowy. And a lot of people are unfortunately not really thinking a lot about golf because it looks like we're going to be in this for the long run when it comes to the winter. But luckily here at Measured Golf in Ann Arbor, we have a beautiful indoor facility and things are booming. And we've got everybody that's got the itch. They're tired of being locked in the house, and they are thinking about the season that will be the 2026 golf season for them. So super exciting stuff. I know a lot of people got the itch on the heels of the PGA show, seeing a lot of the clubs that are going to be released this year, starting to hear the hype marketing machine ratchet up, telling us about how much better the equipment's going to be this year, how much better the balls are going to be. And, you know, maybe some of that's true. Maybe there is a driver out there for you this year that's going to help you find more fair ways, hit the ball a little farther. But I think a lot of us have kind of come to grips with the fact that year to year, the equipment isn't really moving the needle that much when it comes to performance. And a lot of us are trying to figure out this time of year what skills do we need to work at to shoot lower scores. And it's kind of interesting to me because, you know, on one hand, I'm a golf coach. And on the other hand, I own a facility where people come and hit balls on our track man simulators that don't work with me. And, you know, there are a lot of people that come to this facility here at Measured Golf and practice a lot. You know, there's guys that even come multiple times a day to hit balls. And that's kind of what they do. They they hit balls. And a lot of them play golf on the track man simulators, you know, play the virtual courses. A lot of them just kind of hit balls on the range. And I think and I fear that a lot of golfers think that somehow that is going to make them better at golf. And if you've had the clubs put away because of the winter time and you've been on a little bit of a hiatus, you know, coming and just hitting some balls and kind of getting the body moving again and kind of waking the muscles back up, maybe not such a bad idea. But at some point, if we're not happy with the outcomes that we're getting, we're going to have to put some kind of plan into place to actually make a change. And that's where I think a lot of golfers really struggle the most is that they go to the driving range, they hit a balls, they kind of hit the ball at the target. And as long as the ball is kind of flying towards the target, they're more or less satisfied. But they're not really digging in and understanding what causes the left miss, what causes the right miss, how could they potentially increase their speed? How could they potentially just be more effective with hitting that full swing shot? Just like there's a lot of people who will come in here and hit a lot of balls. We have this amazing 3,000 square foot short game area, and they never hit a putt, they never hit a chip, they never hit a pitch, they never use our indoor bunker, uh, they never use our well-put table, they don't do any of that, they just hit balls. And I think a lot of people, when it comes to golf, are treating it kind of like a game and they want to have fun and they want to hit the ball. They don't want to work on their putting, that's kind of boring. They don't want to work on their chipping and pitching and bunker play, that's kind of boring. They just want to hit the ball. And the thing that's so kind of, I think, frustrating is that generally speaking, when people put time into things, they expect to get better. And I think that's what golfers kind of think by and large, as well, you know, I put a lot of time in this offseason, I hit a lot of balls, I went to measured golf frequently, and they expect to go out there in the spring and play better, but generally they're going to be confronted with more than likely the same issues that they had last year, unless they have made a change. And a lot of golfers, when they come and hit balls, are basically just trying to get the ball to land on target. So I think you know, a lot of golfers really struggle with the idea of making change. And the reason they struggle with that so much is because they really don't realize that trying to make a change on your own without any kind of objective data or information to work with is going to be pretty hard to do. Because generally speaking, when we hit a golf ball and we care about what the outcome is, we are going to more or less default back to doing what we already know how to do. And that's where I think a lot of golfers don't really understand the process of making a change. And that change generally comes from uncomfortability. And most people don't want to make themselves uncomfortable, especially when they're trying to enjoy a game or they're trying to distract themselves from their work life or their personal life or whatever they're doing when they're hitting golf balls. But the one thing that I have seen operating a facility for the past five years is I see almost no drills being done when the people who are in here that don't work with me are kind of quote unquote working on their golf game. I see very few drills, if any. I don't see really any kind of rhyme or reason behind what they're doing other than big chunks of block practice. And if you're unfamiliar with the term block practice, block practice is going to get in a bucket of range balls and you know hitting 67 irons at a time. That's not really what we do on the golf course, right? Like we've got to hit the driver, then we got to hit an iron or whatever we have to hit to get to the green, then either we have to putt or we have to chip and then putt. So we're generally not hitting the same club multiple times in a row. Yet when a lot of people come here to the facility, that's exactly what they do. So the the chances of them transferring what they're practicing to actually how they play is very, very low because they're not practicing what they do on the golf course. So even the people that I see that come in and play golf, once again, they're playing golf, right? Now, granted, in my opinion, that is way better when it comes to transferring what you're doing over the winter into the springtime when we get on the golf course, because that's more, hey, I'm hitting a different club every time and I'm doing these things. But what is the golf ball doing? What does the ball flight look like? And for a lot of people, you know, we've kind of been taught, if you will, that we want to take one side of the golf course out of the equation, we want to kind of have a stock shot. And I don't necessarily disagree with that, but when your stock shots a hook or a slice, that's where we got to kind of dig in and like figure out why that is. So if you're somebody who is constantly going to the driving range and you know, overdrawing the golf ball, which leads to a hook, right? If we're overdrawing the golf ball the time, we need to somehow figure out that our club path is likely too far to the right. Okay. So if we've got this end-to-out club path, this positive club path that's kind of too much, then really we're kind of handicapped with what we can and can't do on the golf course. Just the same way, if we have a club path that's quote unquote over the top or left, or kind of that negative number that we see on track, man, if we get that club path too far left, now all of a sudden we're really handicapped with what we can do once again, just the opposite end of the spectrum. So I think the big thing that we've got to kind of help our golfers understand is that, you know, doing the digging in and the understanding is key. And I know a lot of golfers, a lot of golfers who play at a fairly high level, single-digit handicaps that have a club path at six, you know, generally they don't have a six to the right, but I know some guys that are six to eight left and play at a pretty high level. Now, when I say they play at a pretty high level, that's a general statement. And they do, they they play at a generally a fairly high level. If they're playing a golf course they're familiar with, they're going to shoot you somewhere probably in the mid-70s. Now, the thing is, is that when they're off and they're playing a course that they're not so familiar with, they're likely to shoot you something in the 80s. But once again, they're very handicapped with what they can do, and it's kind of a one-trick pony. And we need to be like a Swiss Army knife out there. So when I see those people and when I talk and coach with those people, I'm always trying to talk to them about hey, yes, you've gotten good at doing this. And I'm not saying that you can't play golf with a club path that's six degrees to the left. You certainly can. However, if we were able to get your club path more neutral, that's going to make the game a lot easier for you. Because one, we're not going to have as much curve on the golf ball. And two, we're not going to be really handicapped when we have that dog leg right to left, and all you can do is hit big fades. So we've got to really kind of dig in and understand hey, what is my ball flight? More importantly, what is my ball flight? And what is the potential miss when I don't get my desired ball flight? And that's where I think golfers have a very hard time kind of being honest with themselves and admitting that we all have a miss. Not one of us is out there hitting every shot exactly as we intend. So I think we want to understand what our miss is, we want to understand what our desired ball flight is, and then we want to see like how often can I kind of get the desired ball flight versus the miss. And a lot of golfers that I see come in that don't work with me and are just kind of using the facility, you know, they get all excited when they do one really well, but they don't count how many shots it took to do really well. And it's like if it took you six tries to get one you like, we're probably not gonna have a great chance on the golf course when we only get one chance. So the reason that a lot of people struggle is because they don't really understand what's creating their desired ball flight, let alone the miss. So one of the key things that I think is really important for people is if you're gonna work on your golf game, if you want to get better by this coming spring, which is very doable, we first have to kind of understand where our baseline is. Are you somebody who tends to get the club moving a little more left? Are you somebody who tends to get the club moving a little bit more right? And then, like just based off of that alone, okay, well, maybe we can get that a little more neutral. And I really want to be clear here a zero club path is not the answer. That's not what I'm I'm trying to champion here. Rather, I would like to see a club path for a golfer kind of stay between negative two and positive two. And more importantly, as your skill level goes up, you should kind of start being able to call that before you do it. And I would like to see a golfer be able to go fade, draw, fade, draw, fade, draw on command, because that's telling me that they're in a neutral club path, meaning between negative two and positive two. And not only are they in this kind of neutral uh kind of club path situation, but they're also able to kind of deliver the club well with this neutral path. So they can get one to fall a little right by shifting the path a little more leftward, just like they can get one to fall a little more to the right by shifting. I'm sorry, I think I said that backwards. They can get one to fall more to the left, okay, the draw shot by if they're right-handed, by shifting the path the path a little more to the right, or they can get the ball to fall a little more left, okay, a fade shot, right, for a right-handed player, by shifting the path a little bit more to the left. So I think these are kind of important things because once again, right now it's snowy, it's cold, nobody's playing golf outside. We're inside, the turf is flat, nice lie, no problems. But when we go outside and all of a sudden we get these ball below our feet, ball above our feet situations, now all of a sudden it gets very difficult for people who have that six degree club path or eight degree club path left or right, because if I have an out-to-end club path, okay, so meaning like over the top, a lot of people would say, uh, kind of a cross club path, but it's definitely to the left. If I get the ball above my feet and I have an uh out-to-end club path, that shot is going to be very difficult. Just like if I have the ball below my feet and I have a very end-to-out club path, that shot is going to be very difficult. And we know that these situations are going to happen on the golf course. So I think it's important to kind of understand like, hey, this is who I am as a golfer. This is what my ball flight kind of looks like when I pull it off. This is what the miss kind of looks like. Dig a little deeper. Hey, this is where the club path is. Oh, well, that's why my my desired shot looks like it does. That's why my miss kind of looks like it does. Okay, cool. Now let's kind of sort that out a little bit and get this a little bit more neutral. And now, once we've got that neutral, now we can dig into some other metrics, right? And that's kind of like where we kind of want to go with this planning, right? So let's say we get the club path between negative two and positive two, but we see the attack angle isn't where we need it to be. Well, where do we need the attack angle to be? Well, it's kind of a tough question because it really depends on your delivery style. But generally speaking, with like a seven-iron, I want to see that thing somewhere between, let's say, three and six degrees down off of a flat lie. So let's say somebody comes in and that attack angle is barely down. Let's say it's like negative 0.5. Okay, that's pretty shallow. It's not really gonna help us create a ton of spin. The dynamic loft is gonna be a little wonky. We're gonna have some issues with that, right? We're gonna kind of hit a lot of high floaters. So we've got to learn how to increase that attack angle. And generally speaking, we've got to move low point forward to do that. Now, we can do that through the arms and the rotation of the body, or we can do that with the pressure. There's a couple different ways to attack that, and that's where once again, digging in is super helpful because if we understand that these kind of metrics are where we're falling short with what we're trying to do, then we actually have something meaningful to work on that's going to lead to improvement in the spring. So, once again, a lot of different ways we can go, right? We can look at attack angle, we can look at club path, we can look at dynamic lie. I think that's a number that doesn't get looked at by very many people. But generally speaking, we want to kind of dig in and look at these metrics and see where they fall within these ranges. And does it make sense? Like when I say does it make sense, if we have a very end-to-out club path, generally speaking, we are going to see a shallower angle of attack. So if you're somebody who's working on your golf game and wants to get better, and maybe you hit those really spinny drives but kind of draw it a little bit, but it's still spin away too much, maybe the attack angle is too down. That's a good possibility, right? Now that doesn't make a lot of sense either, because like I said, we're kind of drawing it but overspinning it. Well, if our club path is to the right, which is how we create a draw, and we're still hitting down on it, we got something going on there that doesn't quite make sense at delivery and need to investigate further. Just like if I have somebody who is swinging the club more out to in or to the left, and they have a super positive, or let's just say a neutral to slightly positive club path, that doesn't really make sense too much either because we should be seeing that the more left we swing it, the more downward our angle of attack is. Just like the more rightward we swing it, the more shallow our attack angle is. But these numbers are interrelated. And by kind of understanding where these metrics fall and do they make sense relative to one another, that's going to kind of help you understand, like, oh, this metric kind of falls within the range of what I'm trying to do. So let's leave that alone. And then we kind of go and look at the next one and see where we're doing or how we're doing with that metric, and if we need to kind of inject kind of a change there or not. So the big thing here is that there's a lot of data, right? And there's different types of data. We could go hit golf balls at a facility that has a launch monitor, and you can get some club delivery and ball flight numbers off the launch monitor, which is super helpful. You could go to a facility that maybe has 3D motion capture and get a ton of data from that. You could go to a facility like ours that has the force bites and we get a ton of data from that. And what really has to happen is we have to come up with a plan. But first, like I said, we need to know these benchmarks. We need to know where we're at, where we're doing well, where we're deficient, and then we have to put together a plan of change. And that's where I see so many people really struggling is that they come in, they hit golf balls, they're not working with anybody, and they're just kind of going off fields and just trying to get the ball to land on target. And, you know, maybe it's not even land on target, maybe they're just trying to increase speed. Whatever the case may be, they're kind of trying to achieve this task that they've set out for themselves. Now, once again, if they're trying to achieve a task that they've set out for themselves, they're more or less going to continue to do what they already know how to do. And that's where I think golfers that are going at it on their own are really struggling the most because they're constantly just, you know, maybe changing things a little bit here and there, but it's maybe not the change that needs to happen for them to have that big breakthrough. And that's where, once again, I'm a golf coach, so I'm going to sound like this is an infomercial for golf coaches, but that's where I think you do need a skilled golf coach to help with the planning part of this because, like I said, there's all this data available. And let's say that, you know, you're a 15-20 handicap, you know, a lot of these metrics that we look at maybe don't fall within a normative range, or maybe you don't know what a normative range is to begin with, or better yet, maybe you don't know how these metrics all kind of interject with one another or interlace with one another to kind of make the golf swing. So if you're somebody like I was a few years ago who didn't really understand how these things go together, well, now you don't even know what to do with this information. All you know is that it's not right, and that's incredibly frustrating for a golfer. There's nothing worse than thinking that these metrics are correct and you're seeing the ball flight do something other than what you wanted to do. So, once again, having a coach that has experience with this, that is using objective information is always going to be the best path forward for you. And I cannot recommend enough getting somebody to help you with this. Now, the someone to help you could be completely different these days. And there's a lot of apps now. And I'm going to say something that probably isn't the most popular amongst other coaches, but it's true. There are apps out there now, not all of them are equally as good as the others, not all are as bad as some of the others, but there are apps out there now to where you can feed it your golf swing and it kind of grades it for you. And it says, hey, you're you're doing this really well, but this needs work, or you know, hey, this is what the numbers, whatever, right? But I would tell people that before you just go and hit balls and kind of like try to feel it out and figure it out, I would use one of these apps if I was going to use nothing else. I would. Once again, like I think the more out of our own heads, the more out of our own feels we can get. And once again, the more objective that we can get, the better off things are gonna go for us in terms of working on our golf swing. Now, I think where a lot of people go wrong with the apps is that it's not as good as having a coach there with you. And here's why. Let's say you use one of these apps and you plug your swing in and it says that your transition is too steep. Okay, I think a lot of people probably fall into that camp. Okay, well, how do I fix that? Well, maybe it gives you some recommended drills, okay. That's great. And let's say you try some of these drills and then you go to hit the golf ball and it doesn't work. You're like, oh, no, no, no, what's what's the next thing I need to work on? That's not it. Well, this is the big thing, and this is why a plan is so important. Because a plan, a good plan for development, should kind of have these incremental kind of things that we need to accomplish prior to moving down the plan. And one of the biggest things that I've seen is that let's say people come in, and every now and then you see this, but there'll be like a hot training aid that comes out. And I I literally just saw this. I'm not gonna name the training aid because I actually kind of like this one, but I had a client, I think, saw me using this training aid in a lesson. They went online, bought one for themselves. They don't work with me, and they came in and literally I saw them make I'll say three or four swings with the training aid on them, and pretty quickly were like, Nope, this doesn't work, it's messing everything up, and I haven't seen them use it since. As a matter of fact, uh I offered to buy it from them and they were happy to sell it to me. So, long story short, Tyne. Is really, really important. And making change is always going to require time. And I know as human beings, we hate this. I hate when I order something on the internet that I can't have it the next day. That sucks. Like I want it now. And that's how golfers are. We want to see instantaneous change. We want that instant gratification. Unfortunately, that's just not how things work with making change. Now, with that being said, it doesn't have to take months or years to change something, but it is probably going to take more than one or two golf balls to actually develop a change, reinforce that change, and get that change to start taking place more often than not. So I think any plan really needs change. I think where these apps really kind of haven't taken off yet is due to the fact that once again, it makes a recommendation, hey, you're getting too steep in the transition. And we we kind of give you the drills, we kind of show you what you can do to work on that, but people aren't really willing to put the time in to get uncomfortable and kind of let that change start happening. The other thing I think people often don't think about is that if you make a change to the motion of your golf swing, if you make a change to the positions of your golf swing during the backswing and transition, delivery is going to have to change for you to sort things out. Because generally, when we deliver the club, we're compensating for all the movements we've already made. So if we've kind of really kind of had this golf swing and this motion pattern going on for a while, we've kind of learned how to manipulate the club to get it into a position to get the ball to land on target. Now, all of a sudden, if we've cleaned up the motion or we've got the golf swing put together, or I'm sorry, the backswing put together a little better. Now all of a sudden we don't need all those manipulations. And now those manipulations are causing the problem. And it's going to take a little bit of time for the nervous system to catch up and let us kind of go ahead and figure out like how to trust that and how to kind of reconfigure that delivery for the new swing or the new motion. But once again, time. And that's the biggest thing that I see golfers struggle with the most is giving time to something to change and to work. But when we don't have a plan and kind of everything's up in the air and at our disposal, it's very hard to get people to kind of stick with something for a while. So one of the big key things that I like to do is like to tell people like, hey, this is what we're doing today. This is the goal. We're going to get you on the force plates. We're going to kind of look at the motion. Like I'm talking about somebody who is an aspiring better golfer and is maybe right now at like a 10 to 20 kind of range, right? Like they're they're not a super good player yet, but they aspire to be. But hey, you know, let's say there's a motion problem, right? Like we identify on the force plates early on in the golf lesson. Okay, cool, gotcha. So we've got this motion problem. So what I'm going to do is instead of putting a golf club in your hands, I'm going to give you some drills to do with no golf club, and we're going to see if we can't get this motion to work a little better. Now, I'm very fortunate because I have force plates here, but I can have them do the drills on the force plates. And then we can see if that drill even cleans up that motion for them. So let's say it does. Let's say I get lucky, I guess the right drill, we get the torque cleaned up or we get the AP force cleaned up, whatever the case may be. And it's like, okay, cool. Well, we now have validation that the person can do that. And if we do that enough, it's going to lead to the thing that we want and need to happen in the golf swing. So now we can reinforce, right? And do that drill a few times, hopefully a bunch of times, but let's say a few times for this example. And now we stick the golf club back in their hands and go, hey, we want to get that same feeling, but we want to do it with the golf club in your hands. And now we retest that, we get them on the force plates, they hit a few shots, we see if we can start making that happen. But I think that's an easier sell to people because they have seen that if they do this thing and they reinforce this thing, it makes the golf swing work better for them. And it makes it easier for them to deliver the club in a way to where A, they can be efficient and make speed, and B, have some control over the club phase. So I really like trying to help people understand like, hey, this is where we're at, this is what we want to do, and here's how we're going to get there. And then hopefully during the course of that lesson, we can kind of work on that. And it's great, and it's like a very much a rent-to-owned kind of situation, right? It's great if they can kind of make that happen in the lesson. But just because we made it happen right here, right now, under the guidance of the coach, just because we can do it here now doesn't mean that it's always going to happen that way moving forward. It's not like you know, learning the pen code to your debit card and you don't forget that. This is a motor pattern, right? So you really have to tell people like, hey, those drills that we did here, I need you to do those this week, you know, maybe five, 10 minutes before you practice. I want you to do these drills again, then practice and reinforce and see if we're kind of getting the same things to happen. But super important to explain to people, like, hey, this is kind of what we're trying to do, this is how we're trying to do it, and hopefully, this is kind of maybe what the timeline looks like. And I always like kind of have a sense for this as somebody who's done this for a while. But like, if to use the same example, if we give them drills to do and we retest and it's not working, and then we give them a different drill and that's not working, and then we give them a different drill, and that's not that's generally like a sign, like, okay, there's potentially like a physical limitation here. Maybe they don't have the mobility or they don't have the strength to do this thing that I'm asking them to do. Now, I'm very fortunate we have Aram at Smash Factor Performance here at the facility, and I can send a player down there, have Aram do his eval on them, and then he can give me feedback and go, hey, this is where the player is currently at. We're gonna kind of work on them and try to get that mobility where it needs to be for him to do this. But generally, if I find out that there's like a physical limitation, then I'm gonna have to come up with a workaround for that, which is totally fine and happens sometimes, not all the time. But generally speaking, a lot of it is they don't really have the ability yet, right? They don't have the connection between the brain and that muscle yet to really do that thing. It generally doesn't come up like they're injured or there's a previous injury or there's like a lack of mobility. Generally, it comes into, well, they haven't ever done it this way, or they've never even done that before, and they need to kind of create that connection between the brain and the muscle. And then once we have that, then they can kind of unlock that and do that a lot better. But it is important to kind of understand, like when you're asking somebody to do something, right? We got to A, make sure they can do it, and then B, we got to make sure that they have the time available to make that change. You know, for a lot of people that I work with, we're kind of on a longer timeline. We're we're not looking at this as, hey, we got to fix everything in this one session. We're generally looking at, okay, you want to go from here to here. Okay, here are the skills that you currently possess, here are the discrepancies between the skill you possessed and where it needs to be for you to play to this level. Great. Now, here's how long that potentially is going to take for you to develop some of these skills. And whether that be technique or whether that be reinforcement or whatever the case is, it's going to take time to help those golfers get where they need to be. But that all has to be kind of put into a plan. And that's where I see golfers really struggling the most, is there is no plan. And when there's no plan and there's no focus, now all of a sudden everything's up for grabs. And that's where you see a golfer. I'm going to try this. I saw this on Instagram. This looked really good. Oh, no, no, no. I got to do, I got to do the other now. Like they're just not giving themselves enough time to really allow any of these changes to happen. And I get it. Like, we live in a very fast-paced society. Uh, if you go on social media or YouTube, everybody's trying to tell you if you do this one thing, everything's fixed. You know, there's a lot of selling going on in the industry. But generally speaking, I have found coaching for a fairly long time now that golfers have to really kind of study the ship, understand where they're at, and then understand like, hey, I need to spend some time working on these skills in a very diligent and meaningful way. And whether that be through the aid of drills or through using some training aids or, you know, working with a coach, working with an app, whatever it is, no matter which way you slice it, it's going to require time. Now, you know, I think best case scenario is you get on the internet, you do some research, you find a great coach in your area. And if you if you can, if you can find a coach that has force plates, has 3D motion capture, has a launch monitor, you know, has worked with some better players, um, you know, book a lesson and see what they say and and go, hey, you know, I need to get better, I need a plan, you know, what's that look like? How much time? You know, and and be honest, you know, that's the big thing for me is if if you come to me for a coaching session and you're like, hey, I'm only doing this once, like this is what I can afford, or this is what I have time for, or whatever the case may be, and I'm only coming once, no matter how good it is, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna approach that a lot differently than if somebody's gonna be coming in, you know, once a week for six months. Those are two completely different things. But for the person who's gonna come in once, you know, it's like, hey, I'm not gonna sit here and and really just work on this one thing and be very, very adamant about getting this one thing in place. Rather, I'm gonna try to be a little bit more holistic and I'm gonna try to go, hey, you know, I appreciate you coming in first and foremost. And here's kind of where you could get better. Here's kind of the big discrepancy. This is the thing we want to work on, and kind of lay it out for them to go, hey, there's a couple of different ways we could go with this. So we're gonna try this way. If that way doesn't work for you, you can try it this way. But we're gonna give them some different ways to kind of help fix some of their problems that are happening. Because once again, if I kind of fix that motion discrepancy or that swing discrepancy that they're having that's holding them back from where they want to be, you kind of have to tell them it's it's at least two steps, right? So if we fix this part of your swing or we fix this part of your motion, this is going to affect your club derivory like this. And if that if that starts to happen, it's gonna produce a ball flight that looks like this. So if you start seeing that, here's how we're gonna adjust the club delivery to match up to the new motion or the new swing. And now all of a sudden they at least have some pieces and parts to kind of go home and work on and play with and kind of start developing this new skill. But if I have that person who's only coming in once, no matter what, and I just work on the motion discrepancy or the the swing discrepancy that they're having, or deficiency, I should say. If if we just work on that, and I'm like, okay, cool, go do that, I'll see you never ever again. Like they go work on that. Well, now they got a new problem. So they traded one problem that they knew for a problem they didn't know they were gonna have, and now they're like, well, screw this, this whole thing doesn't work. So I think you've got to kind of help people understand like, what does this look like moving forward? If if we do this better, this should happen. Now, this that should happen may not be perfect because we haven't adjusted the club delivery or we haven't added this secondary piece that we need to happen in the swing as well. But once again, you got to tell people these things. So that's where having a plan is super, super helpful. And I do, I lay that out, and it's like, hey, I want you to do this one thing until every ball starts well right. Like if they're super steep, I'm trying to get them to hit some blocks. And the reason I'm trying to help them get hit some blocks is because now they're shallowing the club too much versus still delivering it steep, right? It's kind of the old adage that a lot of the old PGA pros had, which was, hey, get them to do the opposite of what they're doing, and now you got a chance of like getting them in the middle. And like I I very much believe that. So, you know, from a very basic kind of 30,000-foot view perspective, if I've got somebody who's too steep in delivery, the first thing I want to do is get them to where they're hitting it, you know, way too far to the right and go, okay, cool. Now we're, you know, getting the club to shallow a bit. That's allowing us to get that face to open a bit more. Now let's talk about how we got to rotate through the shot to square that face up. And that's going to be super helpful for that person because A, we're going to get the club to stop being steep, which is being a problem for them because it's probably getting the ball going left from time to time and kind of trapped. But two, if I can get the club to kind of shallow and I can get the ball to start right, now all of a sudden it's like I can teach them how to rotate and use the ground a little bit. So now we hit the ball straighter and we gain a little speed. Now everybody's super happy. So it's it's really kind of helping people understand where we're going. But once again, it's all got to be like planned out. And, you know, we need good communication. We need to understand, like, hey, I'm coming in once, hey, I'm coming in every day, uh, or not every day, but I'm coming in, you know, once a week for for six months straight. We kind of need to know what the timeline is. We need to understand, like, is the objective possible, right? Like, if somebody's like, hey, you know, I'm a 20 handicapper, I want to shave 10 strokes off my game, and I only want to come in once. I'm probably not going to want to take that on because I can't, I can't necessarily do that for that person. You know, if if you're a 20 trying to go to a 10, you know, it's probably not just the full swing that needs work. We probably need to work on the putting, we probably need to work on the chipping, we probably need to work on the pitching, we need to work on some different things. So it's we need to like have this communication. We need to understand like what the resources look like, like how much time do you actually have to work on this? How much time do you have to practice in between lessons? You know, and then a willingness, right? Like, hey, if I show you a drill and this drill like creates the thing we want, are you willing to do this drill when you're not here? Or hey, there's this training aid that's really beneficial for you doing this. Would you be interested in doing this when when you're not in a golf lesson, if it helped you? And I found that if you show people how the training aid andor the drill kind of lead directly to the thing we're pursuing, there's buy-in there and they'll do it. But once again, it's getting them to do it over a period of time and be consistent doing it over that period of time. And, you know, that's once again, if you work that into a plan, if it's like, hey, you know, you're gonna, you know, and I'm I'm I can plan and over plan, if you will, but it's like for a lot of my juniors, you know, the the coaches love to talk about how juniors don't know how to practice, and we love to blame them for that. Okay, well, tell them how to practice. So I have no problems going, hey, you know, if you're gonna come for an hour, here's how we're gonna spend that hour. And we're gonna spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of that hour doing the drills, doing the training aid stuff, creating those motions, getting our feels that we need, and then we're gonna test our feels against the objective data that we get in the launch monitor and see if it's making an impact. So I think that's that kind of makes sense, right? Like we have to have a plan. Like, this is what I'm trying to do today. This is what I'm trying to accomplish today. In this world of, you know, mountains of data, it's very easy to kind of start picking and choosing and bouncing all around, and then we get very distracted. But I think if we have a plan and a timeline, that's where it gets super helpful for players. It's also super helpful to have a timeline for me, the coach, because if we put together this plan and let's say, hey, we're gonna spend the next three months working together, these are the things that we would really like to get accomplished in those three months. If we're a month and a half into this and we're still on bullet point one, it's like, well, whatever I'm telling this person isn't working for them, right? Or they're just not doing the work or whatever the case is. But I've generally found that it's I'm not telling them the thing that's helping them accomplish this part that we need or this task that we need. So I think that's important. I also think the important thing with planning is that we can take a much more holistic kind of approach to this whole thing and go, hey, you know, if we're working on your golf swing, okay, you know, your practice session is probably going to be involving a lot of full swings, and we're working on the golf swing. But what about the short game? What about putting? You know, what about you know, hitting drivers? What about, you know, whatever the the different kind of you know subgenre is that we need to work on? How does that work in? And the thing is, is like I've seen people, and I'm seeing it right now, and I alluded to it earlier, who are coming in here who are working on their golf games, air quotations, working on their golf games, just beating balls, right? Beating a lot of seven irons, beating a lot of nine irons. Uh, you know, well, are they gonna have to chip and pitch and putt when they go out and play golf in the spring? Of course they are. But when is that when is that practice gonna happen? When is that gonna get addressed? And because there's no plan, it probably isn't. So that's where I think it's like, hey, you know, when I put together a plan, I like to do it, you know, hopefully over a few months, like three months minimum, you know, generally speaking. But when we get this plan together, it's like, okay, you know, we've got the golf swing, kind of where we like it right now. Okay, great. We're gonna leave that alone for a little bit and try to kind of reinforce and manage that because we got a lot of good things or good pieces going on there. Okay, well, now we're gonna spend, you know, we're gonna up the time that we spend working on putting. Okay, and then it's like, once again, we we've done the evaluation part of this, right? Is the technique good? Are they, you know, good at starting the ball online with the right speed? If they're not good at doing those things, okay, well, what kind of reinforcement drills do we need to do to help them with start line or to help them with the speed? You know, a lot of people coming out of the gates earlier in the year, you know, it takes them a while to develop the skill of like reading a green. It's one of the biggest reasons I bought the well putt big tilte that we have here at Measured Golf is because it allows me to create slopes. And now all of a sudden we can actually practice and train throughout the winter on kind of figuring out, like, hey, you know, when I'm reading pots, is it a one, two, three, four, five? Hopefully it's never a four or five. That's not good, but is it like a one, two, or three, right? Percent grade. And now that I know that, where do I have to aim that relative to the hole to get that thing to go in? And like we can actually practice the skill of green reading, right? Now, a lot of people don't like aim point, it's because a lot of people don't understand it and it's not generally taught very well and or applied very well by most amateurs who think you just hold fingers up and guess. If you train that, there's a reason so many tour players use aim point, and it's because it works by and large. It's kind of like capitalism, it's the the best thing out of a bunch of things that aren't the best. You know, there's no perfect system for reading greens, but aim point to date is about the best thing we have. So, you know, if you're somebody who struggles reading greens, we can train that skill. We can devote time and the plan to actually working on our green reading. Now, does that need to be, you know, on there every single time we practice? No. But we need to be, you know, hey, once a month we're gonna do a green reading session and really dial that in and make sure we're staying on top of that. Just like we could be doing a lot of maintenance stuff and not letting these things get forgotten. And that's where I see a lot of golfers really kind of get bitten by the thing they do. Well, is, you know, let's say this past year you didn't strike the ball that well, uh, but you putted really well. Okay, well, you spend all winter working on your ball striking, and let's say you go out in the spring, and man, you like hit 14 greens in regulation, you are just ball striking like a maniac. Now, I know what a lot of people are gonna say is well, the proximity, and I know, but for this example, let's say we hit it to the same average proximity as we did last year. Now, all of a sudden the putter's gone cold. Well, wait a minute. I was a great putter last year. I was rolling in everything, I couldn't hit the ball worth a darn, and I said if I could make some putts, I'd be dangerous. But now all of a sudden I'm actually hitting the greens and I can't. We kind of forgot about it, right? We we put our attention, we put our focus into this one area, and we kind of let the other thing get rusty, and now we need to revisit that. But once again, if that had been on a plan, if we had kind of measured all this out and put it onto a plan, we could have made sure that we were kind of keeping up with the putting, the chipping, there's all these other things, these other skills we have to have. And I get it, this sounds like work, right? It it sounds like we're having to really commit to this, but that's how we make change. And that's the thing that is. Like frustrating for me as a golf coach is the fact that people want change, but then you explain to them how to do it. They're like, I don't want to do that. Okay, fine, then play the game, but don't be upset anymore. Like, that's the big thing for me is like a lot of people don't come to us for help with their golf games because this is how we approach it. We go, hey, this is where we're at. These are the benchmarks. You want to be here. Okay, well, here's what benchmarks look like for that. Here's what your benchmarks look like. And how do we close that gap? So here's the plan, here's how much time it's going to take. And they're like, Well, I don't want to do that. Like, I just want to like maybe you know change the position at the top. That's not going to help. It might for a little bit, but a lot of that stuff, in my opinion, is like a placebo effect. It doesn't lead to sustained change, it doesn't lead to us getting better. So generally speaking, I think you know, uh getting kind of a bow on this thing a little bit is if you if you want to get better, if you want to start to get better, okay, and I've said this before, and right, and I sound like a huge salesman for him. I'm really not, but uh I think the easiest one to use that I've seen is an app called Clipped, C-L-I-P-P-D, Clipped, and it allows you to track meaningful stats from your round of golf. I hate to say those words because those words trigger people, they hate stats, they hate tracking, right? But it allows you to record your score in a meaningful way, and now you understand how you got to that total number, right? And now you get three rounds of golf in this thing, and it starts kind of breaking down like, hey, you know, driving is actually the best thing you do, and putting is the worst. And people are like, Oh, I didn't even know that. Well, okay, well, this is objective. These are like you entered this information into clipped, it's telling you exactly and look, this isn't strokes gained. Okay, I don't think that that's the best way to go forward, but this is all about you and comparing you to you. So you need these benchmarks because if you don't have these things, how are you gonna know what to work on to get better? It's really important. Like, I'm look, I I've told myself this, I'm committed to this. Uh, I'm gonna, I I did not keep, I was a bad boy, did not keep my stats last year. I didn't do it. I was lazy, uh, I can make up a lot of excuses, but I'm just gonna call myself lazy. I was lazy and I didn't do it. And honestly, like I said, last year wasn't my best year, and I was kind of disgusted, so I definitely didn't want to put the stats in. But look, this year, yeah, you can hold me accountable if you're listening to this podcast. This year, I'm going to keep my stats in clipped, like a good golfer, and I am going to use that information to help me. Because two years ago, when I had a great season, I was using clipped. And I used clipped, and I mean that, I used it, and what I would do is I would get onto the app right before I'd go practice. And I look, I'm busy like you are. Um, you know, I don't have a ton of time to practice, but I try to get out uh on grass and practice, you know, twice a week. Like that's kind of and not only that, but I I like to get outside. I'm inside all the time here at my facility. So like I like to get out like twice a week on the grass, and generally it's pretty short game heavy because it's on the grass. I can hit balls all day long until the cows come home here at Measured Golf. Uh, but I can't I can chip and pitch here, which is and use the bunker here, which is great, but it's different off the grass, obviously. So I tend to be pretty short game heavy with my practicing uh outside. But how I use clipped is I would pull into the parking lot and I would open up my clipped app and I would go, okay, you know, do I like A, I like I like to hit some balls outside and see the ball flight, kind of figure that out. That's all kind of well and good. Like my stats within clipped with my driving and approach were very consistent. Uh they didn't really change too much. Like, I kind of do what I do, hit a hit a fair amount of fairways, hit a fair amount of greens. As long as I'm kind of staying in that 60% range, uh, that's that's pretty good. Like, that's not like getting it from 60 to 65 percent isn't really gonna change things for me all that much. Now, what is gonna change things for me a lot is my ability to scramble and my ability to make puts. So, what I would do is like I would open up you know the around the green, because I'm gonna practice my chipping, and I would go, okay, you know, where are my weakest spots when it comes to my around the green score? Like, where where is that number kind of and yet it shows you this really cool map? It shows you exactly all the distances for around the green, uh also lies, so it shows you rough versus bunker versus fair way, and then it like kind of shows you like where you're better than where you're not. Anywhere I wasn't like as strong as my strongest point, I'm gonna practice those. I'm always gonna practice the weakest ones, but I'm gonna make sure to hit these like problem areas for me, and I'm gonna spend a little more time there. I do you know a lot of like straightforward chipping and pitching work off a nice lie. We all like to do that. Chipotle close the hole, we all feel good, but then I really like dig in and work on those those areas that are not so great for me score-wise within the app when it comes to around the green. Now that's super helpful, right? Now I'm like really working at the things I'm not great at, creates a little uncomfortability, brain turns on. Okay, is this like I don't understand what the heck I'm doing here, or is this like a technique thing, or am I just kind of getting hosed? So you can kind of really dig in with that. And then when it came to my putting, which was my weakest spot, I couldn't believe it when I did the stats two years ago. Putting was my weakest stat by a lot. And what I started to do was, you know, we all like to see the ball go in the hole, but you know, sitting there and practicing three and four footers where I'm not really missing isn't doing me any good, other than it's the right thing to do, allegedly. But I would find the problem areas in my putting and go, okay, like these are the distances I'm really struggling from. Let's go and work on these. Now, once again, you get outside of 10 feet and your make rate really falls off a mountain. And it wasn't so much about making those putts, but it was creating a lot of putts from those distances, different angles, different brakes, and really working on getting the speed control better. And that's where I kind of got really good two years ago was my speed control with my putting got excellent. And if you get your speed control pretty good and you're managing the entry speed of the ball, now all of a sudden you're like gonna have more balls that just kind of catch an edge and fall in. So that's what really made the difference for me two years ago statistically. Last year I don't know because I was lazy and I didn't keep my stats, and I just kind of complained and bitched and moaned a lot. So um that's why this year we got to keep stats, you know. We got to figure out, you know, is you know, chasing, you know, this swing work that I've been working on here lately, is is that gonna be meaningful? Or am I better off working on my putting and controlling the controllables when it comes to my putting? Or or is there something else? But you know, the thing that stinks is right now I'm kind of practicing blind. I don't have a plan. I'm just kind of doing what I'm complaining about everybody else doing. So, you know, once again, step one, we got to get some benchmarks. So if you're serious about wanting to get better, uh look, there's nothing wrong with going hitting some balls, but hit all your clubs and and just kind of start like tracking, oh, I'm really not so good with this club. Okay, we'll spend some more time with that club, right? But kind of like figure out like baseline, we're getting out, we're hitting balls, like this is going good, this isn't going so good. All my misses are to the right, all my misses are to the left. What's that mean? How do I okay, cool? But then once you get out and start playing some golf, now it's like, okay, let's get these benchmarks into clipped, let's get three rounds in, let's take a look and see where we're at. And now all of a sudden you can start kind of targeting what you're working on. And now we can kind of build that into our plan and we can kind of start working at this thing. And more importantly, the really great thing about using clipped and feeding it accurate information on the regular is that it creates trend lines. And it's like, okay, it's a dent, I'm just making something up. Let's say it identifies my chipping sucks. Okay, well, I go about kind of working on my chipping more because that's part of the plan now, because I'm seeing that that's a deficiency I need to work on. But now all of a sudden, if that trend line doesn't start moving up in a positive way, it's like, well, wait, I've been putting time into this, been working on this, but it's not getting better. So I have to reevaluate how I'm going about trying to get better at this, right? Is this, hey, I'm doing the wrong kind of work? Is this, I have a technique issue? What's going on here, right? And it's one of those things to where you can try a couple of different ways to get that trend line to move in a positive way. But eventually maybe I just got to call my buddy Parker and go, hey, Parker, fix my wedge game because it sucks. But we don't know these things unless we have these actionable benchmarks, which is what I like so much about clipped. And there's other apps too. Uh, it's just most of the apps out there are using strokes-gained math, which I don't like that much uh for the average person, or for any person for that matter. I like comparing to the person, not to an imaginary person that's not there playing golf. So, long story short, we need a plan and we need time. And I think any good plan needs time. And if there's anything you're gonna take away from this podcast today, it is that you know, identify what you want to work on, um, and then be diligent and give it time. And maybe it's more than a session that you work on that thing, maybe it's a couple sessions. But try to, you know, do your little test, do your little experiments, figure out kind of where your benchmarks are, and then see if you're able to move that needle. And if you are, good on you. And you know, keep doing what you're doing. Obviously that's working. But if you're like a lot of people and you can't move that needle and you need help, then I think you've got to either, you know, go online, download one of these apps, and maybe hope that it comes up with the same conclusions and gives you some you know ways forward. Or I think you got to find a good golf coach and not like a guy that does this part-time and it's like their side hustle. Like, actually find somebody who A has experience, B has some technology, and C, like, cares, right? Like you should feel like they care, they're invested in trying to help you. Find one of those guys uh and get after it and like let them kind of help you, but give them some time to help. Like, nobody's a miracle worker and nobody's gonna be able to fix it all at once. So um, I think that's the big moral of the story is we need more time and golf uh to work on things. And change sometimes can be very, very fast, and change sometimes can be very, very slow. It just kind of depends on what you're working on and where you're at with your life and how much time you're devoting to this and all those other factors that go into this. So if you're somebody though that is is like, hey, I love the way all this sounds, and I don't have those things available to me, or I've tried those things and they haven't worked, uh, I think a lot of people don't necessarily know, but I do virtual coaching. And we can do all these things we talked about through virtual coaching. So if you're somebody who's serious about getting better at the game of golf and would like some help from me, uh, you can send us an email at info at measuredgolf.com uh or you can reach out to me directly at michael at measuredgolf.com uh and let me know that that's something that you're interested in. We've had a ton of success with the online coaching. I've been really happy with it. Um when we can get people to provide us with the clip data as well uh and the benchmarks, and we can kind of keep an eye on that as well. I think that's been super helpful and super good. But uh yeah, if you're if you're serious, you know, there's a lot of ways you can go. There's a lot of layers to this, right? Uh, but I definitely think getting some benchmarks on your own game is key because I I I remember two years ago, I would plug this stuff into clipped and I'd go, man, I feel like this was good today and this wasn't so great. Uh and generally I would find out that there were things that I just totally missed. And it goes a lot to our emotional reactions to golf shots and things like that. But that's where I think having that objective data is really, really helpful uh and can really help you understand what needs to change for your golf game to get better. So, you know, take everything I said with a grain of salt, of course, but I really do believe that, you know, just keeping some notes. Like one of the most important things or pieces of equipment that should be in your golf bag um that nobody has is there should be a little notebook in there. And, you know, even if you don't want to keep stats, even if you don't like technology, you're super old school, you know, just make some notes like, hey, I went to the range today, and man, this this feeling seemed to really work well for me today. And this feeling wasn't really kind of working at all today, and just kind of journaling and putting in some entries, you know, you can do that as well. But I think, you know, we all know, I've kind of beat it to death this podcast, that change is going to take time. Now, the more analog you go and the more independent you go, probably the more time it's going to take. By going more technologically advanced and working with somebody like myself, now all of a sudden that speeds that time up. So I think the big thing for people is, you know, it doesn't have to take forever if you're getting the right information and you're getting good drills and it's all applicable to you. We can kind of shorten that timeline up a bit. But if you're kind of like trying things that you're finding online and none of it's really catered to you, and you don't even really know if that's the thing you need, then yeah, it's it's kind of a long drawn-out thing. It can be quite unpleasant. So I highly recommend getting with somebody who's catering everything that you're trying to change directly to you, uh, versus just kind of, hey, well, if you need help with this, do this thing. It'll help. Like I haven't seen that work out too often. So, anywho, you know, I hope you all get better. I hope the change happens. Uh, it's a great time of year to kind of go about doing some of these things. There's not a lot of pressure on us to go out, play golf on the golf course, uh, especially where I live in Michigan, pretty white and snowy, uh, going to be cold for a while. But, you know, once again, it's I was on the force plates earlier today um myself, and like, hey, and and you know, I wasn't on them for that long, but I was on there kind of looking at, you know, the things I've been working on on my golf swing. Is that changing the motion the way I want it to change? And it actually was. I was quite pleased. It's the first time I've been on force plates in a while and haven't wanted to throw up about my own golf swing. So uh quite happy to see that some of the things I'm doing are leading to some positive change in the golf swing for me. So super pumped about that. Um, looking forward to getting out on the golf courses here uh and hopefully, you know, rekindling the love of the game. But I think honestly, you know, I think having the stats, you know, not only is that good for us helping figure out what we need to work on and what we don't need to work on, it's also reinforcing, right? Like it's also like keeps us from really getting into the lows. And like maybe you have a bad round that you don't feel good about, and you left a lot of shots out there, maybe you hit a couple bad ones, but then you like plug it in, you're like, oh well, this is within two points of where I normally am. This isn't like sound the alarms and quit the game, you know. So I do think that it's helpful in a lot of different ways, uh, whether it be making change or reinforcing, like, hey, this is who I am, let's not get too low, just had an off day, chalk it up to that. We don't need to go and and try to change everything. So, anywho, I appreciate you guys listening. Uh, today was a little bit different. I just I've seen a lot of people coming in here just beating balls, and it's like, what message could I share? What could I say to people to try to help them not just be ball beaters, but like actually go about making things a little bit better for them when it comes to springtime? So thanks for listening as always. If you haven't already, uh please be sure to download and subscribe to this podcast, that way you never miss another new episode. If you are unaware, we do post a video version of this podcast on our uh YouTube, which you can find by going to YouTube.com, searching measured golf. A lot of swing video stuff up there, uh, how to go about making some change. So if you're somebody who's ready to dive in, we got some stuff up there for you. All the podcast episodes are there as well. Uh, and then lastly, if you can't remember any of that or you want to find us on social media, everything is on our uh on our website, measuredgolf.com. You can also find us on Instagram at measuredgolf or find me on Instagram at the forceplate guy. But thanks again for listening. Uh, I really appreciate everybody tuning in every week. It means a lot to me. And uh, you know, I think we're gonna keep it going for a little bit. I am waiting for some people to give me some more topics so that I don't just have to rant into the night. So if you've got some ideas, if you'd like me to talk about maybe some specific things, feel free to shoot them over to me. Uh once again, info at measured golf. You can get all your information to me there. And uh hopefully you'll hear that come up in a future episode. So thanks again, and as always, keep grinding.