It's the Son of the Bridge podcast. I am your host, Clon Harmon. This week's guest, Ryan Kreisler, works with me here at the Floridian. I think he's one of the best destructors in the game. We talk a lot about golf chaos and managing the chaos of playing golf, and that's what this week's pot's about. How to manage the
chaos of playing golf. And I think it's something that we talk about a lot with our players, and it's something that I think is not focused on enough the actual playing of the game, because when you're on the golf course, it's going to be chaotic, right. Things are going to happen, and it's how you deal with those situations that I think are really really important. But before we get to that, let's hear from our friends at Cobra Golf. The king Tech x irons define how a
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the best players in the world are using. But from a game improvement standpoint, I think one of the cool things is Cobra has irons that look like they are tour quality, but they have all of the characteristics and all of the things that are going to help you
hit the golf ball further. If you're hitting the golf ball off the heel, if you're hitting golf ball off the toe, if you've got a player's iron, and let's be honest, if you've got a player's iron and you don't hit it solid all the time, sometimes you're not getting the most out of the irons you play. And that's why I think the King Tech X is an iron. If you are looking for something that has the look of a player iron but performs and has a little
bit forgiveness, you definitely want to check it out. I guess today is Ryan Chrysler. I've worked with Ryan for about twenty years now. I think he's one of the best instructors in the game. Ryan I mean, one of the things that we're always talking about with our players
is that kind of battle between technique and execution. And it's something I've talked about a lot on the podcast where I think most golfers are just going to predeposed to think of everything that happens on the golf course to them is technical and they've got to go straight to the driving range. And what we started to notice with a lot of the aspiring to our players with juniors is what's happening on the golf course isn't necessarily
a representation of what's happening on the range. And one of the questions I mean I've been asked for twenty years from players is how do we simulate what happens on the golf course on the driving range? And I mean, I just don't think people are practicing playing the game of golf enough and everything is just golf swing and technique.
Yeah. Actually, the first problem we have is the driving range is not a golf course. It is a box with targets that don't move on perfectly flat lies with perfect balls, with.
A ton of balls. You hit a bad shot, there's no consequence. You just roll one back over and you've got an entire bucket of balls. You've got an entire den caddy of balls, a purvan of balls. So you're right, there's not necessarily that importance on every single ball counting because you're working on your technique. You've got a bunch of ball You're gonna try a bunch of stuff. But there's a big difference between. Again, what I keep talking about as much as I can on the podcast, the
difference between technique and execution. And I think if you are looking to try and lower your scores, the answer, yeah, everybody's golf swing. And I say this all the time. Everybody's golf swing can get better. Obviously having a better technical golf swing can help you on the golf course. But I say this to players all the time. Every single player in the game, he's trying to improve their
golf swing. I mean, we just heard Ry Macero saying he spent three weeks in a simulator, not looking at ballflight, not looking at the golf ball is going, just working on the technical. Okay, that is the ultimate example of technique, right, put yourself in a room you're flying blind, so you're only working on the positions of the golf swing, which obviously have a huge impact on your scores, But there is an art to play the game of golf, which I think we're trying to have players focus more on.
That, right And like Roy is the perfect example. I mean, no other sport you do that during the season, where Tom Brady or a bow Knicks sit on their throwing technique fundamentals for three straight weeks.
While the season is going right, while the season is going you know, whatever team sport they're playing, whatever individual sport they're playing, maybe tennis a little bit, but all the team sports, there's no way they're going to try and tear something apart in the middle of a season. And I think the average golfer doesn't realize that. Every time they go out and play it is like they are a football team, a basketball team, a baseball team. You know, let's say you play fifty times a year.
Let's say you pay twenty five times a year. That's your season. Those are your games. Those are your opportunities to play the game. They're not opportunities to go out and practice your technique. You do that on the driving range. So I also think that one of the things that we've I can think tried to get players to kind of zone in on the playing of the game should be sacred, right, that should be the most important thing.
But I think the majority of people listening to this podcast and are trying to work on their golf games, they're only trying to do that on the driving range, and they hope that, Okay, all the work that I do on the driving range is going to somehow translate to me actually playing the game better.
When you're doing that practice, it's nothing like how you play. It's nothing like the penalties you'll see. It's the only sport where practice is not on the same field. It's literally the only sport where practice is not on the same field.
Tennis players, when they are practicing, they are practicing on a tennis court, right, So even if they're just warming up, you know, with a hitting partner, there's a net the court is to find if they're missing the court, if they're hitting the balls out of the court, if they're not hitting them in between the lines, if they're hitting him into the net. That's a big problem for tennis players.
So I've never thought about that. You're right, golf is the only real sport that's practiced on a completely different field, basketball football, American football. They're all played and practiced on the same surface.
And one hundred years ago, one hundred and fifty years ago, these clubs put in maybe a little bit of a practice seede just for warming up. It wasn't for practice, it wasn't designed for practice. And now some of the new modern clubs you're building these really extravagant practice tees.
Which are great, right, they have a massive role in helping golfers get better, right, But it's still not quite the same.
And so how do you practice real scenarios? And I think we've got a good way to do here, So.
Why don't you dive in and tell like kind of what we're trying to do with players to get them into that play mode. I mean, you and I have talked and I've talked about it on the pod in the past. Tournament golfer can competitive players, but for the average fifteen twenty five handicap, a round of golf is it's their tournament, right, So how do you think that players can get into that mindset of saying, Okay, I've
taken my practice, my technique practice. What tools are we trying to give them and what tools do you think are important in practice? That isn't technique, right, it's basically the ability to handle duress.
Right. So the military you train under duress, right. In football you're training under a coach helling, you under duress, two minute offense, you know things like that, right. So you have to create a system or a practice system that creates duress. And the easy first step is to maybe create a group environment or a team environment and make sure your responsibility to complete this task. Let's say it's seven drives out of ten inside boundaries is done
in a group environment with a penalty. And the games we're gonna use tomorrow is you're gonna have to run basically a half mile if you don't complete seven out of ten drives down our window, right, And so you have that external pressure, you have that intrinsic motivation not to have to run. But even if you get six out of ten, you're gonna throw in a mile of cardio, come back, and you're gonna do it again. And what that does is really simulate your physiological response on the
golf course to your practice. And that's one of the key things that doctor Doris talks about is we don't practice under duress, right, So we can create these conditions, these tasks that are seen maybe relatively easy. But when you start adding heart rate, start adding accountability to the group around you, now it starts to get interesting. And now it starts to create this sense of practice being super valuable and super close to what it is on the actual course.
One of the things I think players struggle with is they work a lot on their technique, right. They work mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, the drills, drills, drills. The club's getting too deep inside if you're coming over the top of it, you're doing drills to try and shallow it out, whatever that is. And I think the disconnect with a lot of players is they work NonStop on their technique and then the test is when they go play golf, right.
And the test needs to be before golf.
So I always look at, you know, what we're working on from a technique standpoint, Like if you work in a Michelin Star restaurant, right, if they're going to come up with a new dish, right, they practice it for months and months and months, and they refine it and they refine it, and they refine it. They just don't come out with a brand new dish for the menu Friday night, three hundred people in the restaurant, busiest night, and say, Okay, hey, I've got this new dish we're
gonna putut. We're gonna put it on the menu. We've never really tried it. I've tried it once, and we're going to see if it works. The probability of that tasting good being good is slim. So what they do is they practice it, They practice it, they refine it, then they practice making it to see if they can make it in the right time, and then after months of work and months of refinement, they say, okay, we
know it works in a controlled environment, right. We know that because we've tested it, We've tested how fast we can make it, we've tested the time element all that. Then only then do we put it out on the menu for people to taste in a restaurant environment. And I think what I'm always trying to ask players to
do is listen, work your technique, work your drills. That's great, But then in a practice type situation where you're not working on your technique, where you're working on another task, working on having to complete something then we're going to see quite quickly if anything that you're working on technique wise actually really does work.
This is not uncommon in other fields, like military units don't go in a battle without a plan, all right. Football teams don't go into the games without a game plan, similar to other sports, right. And so what we're trying to do basically is you gotta have like a battle tested technique system way of playing before you get to the golf course, right, And it has to be done under duress because when you're playing, even with your buddies, even with your friends out there, there's still a little
bit of edge, there's a NASA going on. There's something right, and it's a little more extreme obviously when you get the tournaments and junior tournaments, money craw Firescu's cool.
Trying to win your club championship, trying to win your flight in you know, the monthly medal, trying to win you know, the ladies club champion. It doesn't matter what that tournament is. The Masters is important and incredibly famous for putting players under pressure. That's the tournament everybody wants to win. But sometimes if you're trying to break one
hundreds for the first time. If you're trying to break ninety eighty, trying to break power for the first time, that is the equivalent of your major championship, right, that is your masters You were going to feel things all the time. When we've really started to do we call it round defense. We get all of our competitive players, a lot of our juniors, a lot of the people that are trying to play, you know, on various tours to get their tour cards. We every week have what
we call round defense. We get everybody in a team environment, We get them in a boardroom and we put their scorecard up on screen. We sometimes get another screen where it has the GPS of the course, and then we basically go through and have the players talk us through their rounds, talk us through, Okay, the birdies you made,
but more importantly the mistakes you made. So anytime we see kind of big numbers on the scorecard, right, doubles, triple bogis, and then the other thing that we're constantly looking at, which I think is a great way for everyone else to look at their score cards. Look at what you're doing on the par fives, and look at what you're doing on the par threes. The par fives or the legitimate scoring opportunities that we all have. Right, Almost all the tour players that you see on tour,
they're killing the par fives, right, They're not losing. So over the course of the year, the majority, if not all, of the players on the PGA too, are under par on the par five. So we're starting to look at their scores and actually challenging them when they do make a big number, when they do make a double, when they do make a triple, say okay, talk us through the mistake that you made.
We had round offense with Dubai a couple of weeks ago, and.
We had three kids. They're all brothers, two twins. They're really good players. They're kind of in that thirteen to seventeen range. They're super super competitive. They played in a tournament, a big junior tournament the Tummy Fleet would put on out in Dubai. It got Wagger rankings, It was contioned with the AJGA, and one of the brothers won it. But the first brother shoots sixty five the first day, right, and that's the lowest round of golf he's ever played
in competition. Right, followed up the second day with I think what seventy five made a couple of big numbers. But talking to this player about what he was thinking in the first round versus what he was thinking in the second round was really I found interesting. And I think you zoned in on it. You were on a zoom call. I you're you know, connecting through zoom, but
you said sixty five. You were leading, I think he was leading by four or five, and you said to him, have you ever shot a score that low in a tournament? And he said no. So that is the equivalent of being a mountain climber and you're trying to climb Mount Everest and you've just never been that high on the mountain before, right, So you don't know what you're going to do in that situation. And I think the following day is a great example of what we see a lot.
You're going to have a good score the first day and then the second day based off of I think expectations.
Just hanging on trying to get down the hill, right. And one of the things we really preach is the journey or the process. So it's like sixty five and now what right? Seventy five? Now what right? So those those peaks and valleys are gonna be there in golf. But what do you do now? What do you do next? And that's one of the big things we talk about during these sessions is like, this is the first time you've actually played a second round of a tournament with
a three or four shot lead. It's new, it's a new tapic golf, right, you've never done this before.
You see this a lot Ryan on players that have that really good front nine, right, They'll be maybe one two under on the front So then the back nine a lot of times just goes into Okay, I'm just going to try and go into prevent defense. Now. I'm just going to try for the next nine holes to not make any bad swings, to not hit any bad shots, to not mess up. And what ends up happening?
And it's up because nobody plays golf like that, right, So it takes experience, takes practice, and we try to assimilate those situations in our practice.
I think of the things Nico Darris, who's been on the podcast before, Nico's big on heart rate, and one of the things I think that we're finding is the simulation in practice. Again on a driving range, there's no consequences right, you're just hitting balls. You hit a bad one, you scoop another one up. So there's there's no consequence. Your heart rate doesn't get up, you're not, you know, kind of in a heightened state, both physically and mentally.
And I think Nico's tapped into you know, we've started putting heart rate monitors, you know, on players to where we can say, okay, before you actually have to complete this drill, this task, this kind of simulation of shots, you have to get your heart rate up and then you we also, I think are finding that in a practice environment, getting the heart rates up, but then having a task that you have to complete with outcomes, consequences for outcomes, but in a time specific spot three minutes
five and it's whatever it is, that's what you're going to be feeling on the golf course.
Golf which are real good at like finishing the bucket right, taking a handful of balls, hitting the chips and we're done, right. And so one of our concepts is you cannot move on to the next task without completing the task prior, right, and so we've got to get you hyped up. We got to hit you seven out of ten draws seven out of ten fades, whatever the situation is, and if you don't do it, there's a penalty for it. And there's also a penalty for it in the group setting.
You got some peer pressure now working against you, and if you've got to run to the stops, hunt and back, that's just what the task calls for. Right, that's the journey, that's the process, And you got it used to playing under those situations and under that duress as you move through this career that you're trying to play golf in.
Yeah, And I think getting into those heightened states, both physically and mentally is the chaos that is golf at the competitive level. I mean Brooks Kepto's five time Major champion John stub I think those two are very very good on the golf course at managing the chaos. They're very good at kind of staying in the present. They're very good at kind of controlling their emotions. I think Brooks is one of the best at when the pressure
gets the highest. Everyone says they love pressure, right, but as you know, we've heard from many famous athletes, pressure is a privilege. And the more that you can be under pressure in your practice, the better you are.
Going to perform on the golf course. We talk about it's like a saving principle. We talk about the practice being tougher than the actual event. So we want you to get to the tournament. If it's a junior, it's on the weekend. If it's a pro, it's a Monday or it starts Thursday. We want to practice so extreme and so hard that the tournament feels like the fun part.
That's why they call it playing golf. You are playing a game. They give you a scorecard, they tell you what the rules are, they take you to a specific field that has boundaries and obstacles stuff. But everything that is about playing the game of golf is given to you beforehand. So if you think about a scorecard, and this is one of the other things that I always say to specifically the juniors, if you look at a scorecard on a round of golf, look at how small
the boxes are. The boxes are only big enough for you to put a score down. But when you make a big number, when you make a double bogie, when you make a triple bogie, there is this long drawn out narrative, almost novel type story. Every time we question one of the players that's made a big number. There's always this big, long, drawn out, you know, story as
to how they made the double. And one of the things that I always say to them, so they go through this whole thing and they, you know, Okay, so I'm standing on the tee and I hit one, and then I hit it in the water. So then the drop I get goes into a hole, and then I tried to go for the green, but then it clipped the tree, and then it hit a sprinkler head, and
then it kicked out. About there's this big, long narrative, and I, you and I we will sit in these conference room and listen to these people talk about this, and at the end of it, I'll just say, nobody cares. Nobody cares how you made the double. Try to stop making doubles and triples. Look at the decision making process that is called it. Why do you think golfers when they do get out of position, Ryan, why do you
think they become so aggressive with their shot selection. So you've hooked to drive into the trees, and now you know, let's say you're one hundred and you know, sixty five yards out, you've got some treat trouble you're in the rough. The li's not good, it's not a flat lie. Almost all the time players just go, okay, I just push all my chips into the middle of the table, and I just go all in on this shot.
There's a couple of different factors to this. Number One, they watch too much golf on TV, right, so they see the best players hitting the best shots even in recovery situations. Number Two, they are eternally optimistic that they can actually do this despite never having hit a finesse practice three wood from two point fifty, which is one of the Dubai kids talked about. He's like, dropped it hitting three. Now he's gonna try to finesse it. Yeah.
So one of the kids that we were teaching, so the Race for Dubai Tournament, which will be on TV this weekend from Jamier Golf, estates the eighteenth poles a hard five. There's a creek that kind of goes right down the middle. He hid it in the water off the tee. Then he dropped it and he said, you know, the lie was a little bit still in the middle of the you know, in the fairway, but all a little bit below his feet. There's you know, a bunch
of stuff around the greens. So he said, you know, it was kind of in between like three wood and five wood or something like that. So he tries to finesse kind of three finger a high cut soft three wood from two fifty to a front pin with not a lot of landing era. I mean, he's just rinse one in the water. So now he's going to again. Now he's pushing all of his chips into the middle of the table and basically, for lack of a better word,
just as fuck it. I Am just going all in here, and there's no thought process of what happens after that shot if he doesn't.
Pull it off. And we see this sometimes like in football, the quarterback just thrown it up right. But the real problem is that that's just how golfers have been trained and how they've been brought up. They practice until they get it right. When you go to other organizations New England Patriots, the military, the army specifically, those units practice until they can't get it wrong, and so they're out there until it becomes automatic.
I think that's a huge thing for everyone that you just said. There, everyone thinks I'm going to practice until it's perfect, but the best practice until they can't get it wrong. The other thing I think Ryan that we see is we see players go to the golf.
Course and.
They don't expect anything bad to happen, regardless of their handicap range. Right. They think that the lies are always going to be perfect, they think the conditions are always going to be perfect. They think everything is going to be perfect. I mean there are times where players will come off and they'll shoot kind of even one over, you know, tour players, and you'll talk to the caddies and they'll say, listen, every single club today was in between, right.
We didn't have one good number. We were constantly in between seven and eight. We were constantly in between five and four, and that constant battle. We just we just struggle to get some decent numbers. And I think when that happens to normal regular golfers, it's almost like they don't prepare for the worst. They're only preparing for the best.
Every club they choose, whatever yardage it is, most people will choose a club that they say, all right, if I flush this right in the middle of the club, face hit the best seven iron I've ever hit. That seven iron is going.
To carry the distance that I need to carry it for this flag, right, And maybe it happens in practice six out of ten times, but on the course in reality maybe it's three out of ten times. Right. So the data just doesn't support the decision making because they're eternally optimistic.
I mean, I've said this on the pot before. Richard Bland came in last year and spent some time with some of our players that are trying to compete, and he said, listen, if you get into trouble, and I've said this before, but I'll say it again, it's very, very impactful and very powerful if you get into trouble and you are going to try and hit some sort
of recovery shot to get to the green. Richard Bland said, Listen, I always say to myself, Okay, if I had ten balls from this situation, could I get five of them on the green. If I can't get five on the green from this, I'm probably going to struggle with one. So the decision making process of a player that he gets in trouble off the tee needs to be what getting.
Trouble off the tee needs to be? Basically, what club do I have in my bag today that is actually working, so I can get it into the fairway since penalty shots are the number one reason why score start high.
And it's a domino, right, So we put ourselves on a defensive because we're taking driver, because maybe the people in the group are taking driver and it's either block right, block left, whatever, and we just have to let it go and move on to the next club or the next shot right, and being able to take a moment, take a pause and make that decision is going to save you shots throughout the rest of the round.
In the military, they call that a tactical pause. So explain what that is.
Yeah, quite simply, it's taking a knee when you're undercover, right and trying to reassess the plan of action and our advisors, an army ranger just gave us a simple mission. Example. When we're going on a mission to eliminate or arrest to terrorists and there's a sniper in a building that we didn't account for. Most military units will go after the sniper because you know, the man next to me
got shot, right. The rangers will back up, reposition, take cover, and create a new plan to get to the mission right. And if they take out the sniper on the way over. It's really not even a factor. They're trying to get around that and go back to focusing on the mission, which in golf basically is how can I make power
in this next hole? Right? And when you're trying to either outplay the competition, meaning you're trying to hit driver because they hit driver, or you're trying to hit a shot that's close that's not your shot shape because your buddy just hit the same shot and just flagged it, or hit club that you know on a par three to where you know you can't hit the golf ball
get it on the pin. If the you know, one seventy five and your your your playing partner pulls out you know, eight iron, right, you pull out eight iron, you probably know that you're not going to hit it one hundred and eighty five, but you do it anyway.
Right.
So it's like that that shot that doctor Joe Parent talks about in Zen Golf. You just do it anyway. I'm sorry, Like no other sport organization or even you in a business setting are just going to do something because of I'm just going to do this anyway. Right.
One of the things I find amazing. When we're in round defense is when players will hit bad shots, bad drives, and a lot of times I record it. And I remember one specifically with a young player, you know, kid
that played Division one color golf. He was trying to play, he is trying to play a minor league, mini tour event down here, you know, professional, and he said, okay, so I hit my driver out of bounds, and then I went back and reteat it, and I knew it was the wrong play, but I reteat driver and then hit that one over and and I actually stopped and played the recording. I said, you actually said you knew it was the wrong play, the wrong decision, but you
did it anyway. That makes absolutely no sense.
It's it's freaking crazy. I mean, come on, right, no other sport, business, setting, whatever, would ever do something like that. But here we are in golf, just flying by our ass and here we go, We're just gonna do it.
What are some tools for everyone listening? Listen, we're doing a lot of this stuff in a team environment. You know, we're having them. You know, the consequences are push ups, running stuff in the gym. Right for the average person listening, that's not part of a group that's just doing it by themselves. What are some things that they can do? Give me some drills that and some games that they could play, and some consequences that they could implement for themselves.
Number one, my favorite one is to go play in your Saturday morning group with one ball, and now see how you feel you're going to have to make decisions because number one, if you run out of balls and it's going to be pretty embarrassing you've only got one, you can keep it a secret amongst the group, or you can tell everybody.
But we do that a couple of times a month.
You know.
We will get our players that we work with, we'll get them in a group setting, and the task is they go out and play on the golf course. They have one ball in their back right and the winner and the goal is to see who can play the most amount of holes with one ball, which means you hit it out of bounds, you're done, You hit it in the water, you're done, you lose one, you're done. So the object isn't the score that you're making. The object is to just keep going as long as you
can with one golf ball. The decisions that you have to make if you get into trouble. If there is trouble out of bounds, water and stuff, the one ball that you've got, you will make much different decisions then if you've just got one in your back pocket and you rinse one in the water and then you just throw another one down.
And the other way we do it, basically is this coming up with tax and tasks are basically hitting a certain amount of balls that achieves some sort of objective. So if it's a wedge shot from one hundred yards and you have a definable green on your practice tea, or maybe just boundaries that you can visualize on the practice tee, if you were to get five out of five, that'd be a great wedge practice. Let's say, now let's
raise the stakes, let's take it. You know, maybe there's a tighter boundary, so whether it's trees or clouds or bunkers, and let's say if you don't make the objective five out of five, then you're not allowed to use that club for the round. Right, So the club gets ejected, it's not approoved for play because it doesn't meet the
criteria required to play. Right. You can do that with wedges you can do that with irons, you can that with driver, just creating these imaginary boundaries that they're not defined on the practice team and just making sure that if they don't complete the test, they don't make the game. Right, So you go into the game with six clubs in the bag. Seven clubs in the bag, and now we have to play the course with a limited arsenal to what we have.
I mean, you also have to learn if you don't have your lot weedge ne'ar in a bunker and you only have it at a nine iron, right, You've got to learn how to get out of difficulty. With different golf clubs. I think everybody has their kind of go to golf clubs around the greens. Everybody kind of has their go to golf clubs when they practice, and I think what we try and do is get players out of that comfort zone and say, okay, I know that's you know, I know you would never play the shot.
I did this a couple of weeks ago when I was in Dubai. There were two young juniors and we were going over and we're going to work on their wedges. And one of the players and these were young players, I mean the twelve thirteen, fourteen years old. Well, one of them said, I said, okay, so what do you want to try and work on? He said, well, I want to take spin and speed off of my wedges. And I'm like, okay, if somebody told you to say that,
But they said okay. So I gave them targets and said, okay. We had like a wedge distance that was like sixty yards, and what's the first club they pull out of their back lob wedge right, immediately go to lob wedge, and now they're going to try and take speed and spin off. So they're going to start to swing slower and the
lob wedge is going to go no distance. By the time we finished, we were hitting pitching wedges and nine irons from sixty yards, flighting them down, controlling the length of the backswing, controlling the length of the follow through. And I think they were blown away that how they eventually got to taking some speed off of their wedges was very different than what they thought it was going to be. They thought it was just going to be
trying to master the lob wedge. So then what we ended up doing is we worked on trying to take some spin and some speed off with a pitching wedge from six yards. By the time we give them a sixty, they don't even want to hit the sixty right. They're saying, no, no, I'll just chip flight my fifty four right or my sand wedge is supposed to using my lob wedge. And once we started moving to different targets, it was very interesting that the clubs that they would normally pick they didn't.
Their dibbots got better. They understood, you know what the length of the backswing and the follow through is. By just using a different tool than they're used.
To use, you're basically taking the technique request out of the player and putting them into a place where they have to solve problems. That is basically what happens on the golf course. You got to solve the problem with the first te get to the first fairway, get to the first green. It's basically problem solving.
I mean you can make You can snaphook your drive, hit it behind a tree, right, chip out, and then hold a bunker shot and the score you write down looks very different than if you pipeoin down the middle of the fairy pipeline to fifteen feet and put it in so you know, my dad used to always tell it. There's no points. You don't get any points for style in golf, right, It's it's not a style competition. So when we're trying to have players in these tasks and
in these drills, there's no right answer. The only right answer is can you achieve the task? Can you win the game that you're trying to play? Can you figure out how to solve the problem? That is one thing that I say that I probably said more to the juniors when I was in Dubai a couple of weeks ago. Listen, this is a problem that we have to solve, right, So the game has given you a problem that you've got to solve.
Problem solving is a great learning environment because you're not focused either working as a team or as a pairt.
Force.
In's a alternate shot. Let's say you're also focused on an external solution to the problem, basically versus the internal is my swing care? Am I doing something incorrect? Am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing with my grip? Whatever? All that internal intrinsic technique questions disappear when I'm faced with I actually got to solve this with whatever tools and whatever I have in myself that day.
I think most great athletes, yes, they love the hard work, they love the practice. But I think so many golfers feel so much more comfortable and confident on the driving range than they do on the golf course. It's a little bit like they're sailing. They're great at sailing in the harbor. They're great at sailing, you know, not in the big, big ocean. But then the only thing that matters is, Okay, it's great if you can sail in a control environment, but can you actually really sail when
it matters. I think a lot of you know about playing golf on the golf course like pilots, Right, everything's fine when the autopilot's on thirty five thousand feet and the seat belt signs off and the flights. The skill is a pilot is when something goes wrong.
I was thinking, just Michael Jordan, you know, his practices were like the worst to be around on his team with the Bulls. Nobody really enjoyed his intensity. They appreciated it, and by the time they got to the game they could see why. Right, And so golfers, golfers show up for practice and it's like, man, it's such a great day, I'm gonna hit this bucket of balls. I'm not sure I'm gonna work on. Oh, I'm gonna turn around and hit some pitch shots over here. Nothing like how you play,
nothing with how you play. And it's just a systemic infrastructure problem with golf. I believe.
I think you want to get more comfortable as a golfer on the field that you're playing on the golf course, then that comfort of going back to drivers. A lot of times DJ or a player that I'm working with, if they don't play good, I'll sometimes say to DJ, you know, has a round where you know, hitting the water on a par five double shoots you know, one or two over. And I'll say, hey, do you want to go hit balls? And he'll say, no, I'm good. I made one bad swing today, I know what I'm
supposed to do. I'm hitting it good. I had a lot of good chances and stuff like that. So he doesn't want to immediately go to the range. So many of the junior golfers that we work with, they want to spend they want to practice for four hours before they go play golf, and then as soon as they get done. Whatever happened on the golf course. There's no analysis of what happened on the golf course. It's just
let me go back to the driving range. Because everything that happened on the golf course today was my technique. I just need to practice, work on my back swing, work on my club base, work on this. And I also think it's important for players to build in play days and practice days. Right days where you don't practice, you do a warm up maybe twenty thirty minutes max. It's not a practice sition. Then you go play golf. When you're done, you don't go to the driving range.
You take stock, you analyze so that when you go back to the driving range, the range should be a place where you look at what you're doing on the golf course and then try and use the practice range and use your practice to try and fix what's happening on the golf course when you're playing, not to just have your golf swing look prettier on video.
Let the practice tee be its own practice tee, and you have to come into that practice tee armed with the plan, armed with a set of tasks or items you have to complete before you move on essentially right, the only to practice, dictate how you're going to practice that.
Day, having a plan when you practice. It doesn't have to be super involved, but say, okay, listen, when I played the other day, you know my wedge game wasn't great, my ability to control my shape wasn't great, my driving wasn't engaged. So then you're not just going to the practice range and getting exercise right, you're actually practicing specifically with the purpose. I think game building and task building
in your in your practice sessions is huge. I mean, most ranges are going to have visual things on the golf course that you can use to try and work on your scoring. So give yourself. Say you know a good one that I like to do on the drivers, Say okay, let's go pick out a fairway on the driving range. Right, you know, two pins, two targets, one left, one right. You've got to hit a drive in that, okay.
Then pick out a green and say, okay, whatever the yardage is, I've just got to hit the ball anywhere on this green. Right. Then go make a five foot pot right, so you're moving right. So there's a test. So there's three points available, four points available. Whatever each round you go through, think about how many points you get a point if you hit the fairway with your driver, you get a point if you've hit it on the green, and then you get a point if you make the five footer exactly.
Those are tasks you can wait the task you move on.
You're not thinking about your technique while you're doing this. You're in your preshot routine. You're in your pre shot you know whatever that is, treating each shot like it would be on the golf course. Then do three, four or five rounds of that. Evaluate what the issue you're having is right, is it quality of contact? Is it you know, too much CURRCT. Then get out of that mode, go into a practice environment and say, okay, let me work my technique, work my drills, work my fields to
try and do this. Now let me get back into test mode to see if anything that I'm working on is actually really working.
Right. I kind of like if we had like sixty minutes, we're gonna have maybe thirty five minutes of task going in and problem solving the quick reevaluation where we're at, and you maybe have ten minutes to solve it before you move on to the next task, Right, so there's a structure, there is a clock if you will, there's pure pressure if you will in a group.
Environment, but also holding yourself accountable, holding yourself accountable for you know, go to the short game area and say, okay, let me chip this, and wherever I chip it, I have to then make the pott to see if I can get up and down. I've got ten balls. How many of those was I able to get up and down? Right? So there's a consequence, right, So you feel like, okay,
I've got ten up and downs. I've got to get up and down around these greens, right, and I've got to chip it, and then I have to go and try and make the putt for par. The more times you're trying to make putts for par under pressure under a game type environment where there is a consequence to missing it, I think is another way that you can simulate what you're doing on the golf course.
You're moving around trying to solve these situations. Instead of just hitting thirty chips in a row at one target, even maybe a couple of targets. You're moving around. You're simulating play. It's not technique, it's solving the shot at hand. And moving on and creating some sort of consequence. I love having the clubs not make it to the game, not make it in the bag, to the course, forcing
you to really adapt on the course. That's where I think is another big macro problem with golfers just don't adapt to what they have that day, to what they have on the first tee. They just don't adapt, and they just are eternally optimistic.
And I also think, like you said, everybody wants to play golf the way Scotti Scheffler plays golf driver off the tee, you know, wedge fifteen feet stuff like that. Sometimes, Okay, maybe driver isn't the right play for you, Maybe you need to hit an iron off the team. Maybe, you know, if you're a higher handicap, start playing the par fours as three shot holes, right, get something and play off the tee. Then hit an iron that gives you a wedshot, then chip it on and then that's an easy way.
I think if you are someone that's making big, big numbers, right, and big numbers are you know, ruining your score and you're struggling to kind of get down from that kind of one hundred, break hundred for the first time, break ninety for the first time. There isn't a specific way to play each hole, right, There really isn't. So like I said, you could hit five iron wedge, make the putt,
and that writes down as a four. Where someone could hit driver, wedge, hit it to five feet, lip it out and the score is the same.
Right, There's an infinant number of ways to make a part and whatever you have that day is what you have that day. Right, So being able to adjust, be honest and focus on just solving the problem without any emotional toll or optimism and bottle the optimism into at the end of the round. Right, if you go out and stay calm, stay smooth, not too many ups and downs. Right.
I talked to Jason Duffer recently about and I was talking to him and I said, you know, he's a major champion, played on Ryder Cops, President's got multiple winner on the PGA Tour, you know, long career. I said to him, what are some of the attributes you have to have to be a great player? And it's like, you know, I think acceptance is a big part of this, right, Accepting that, Okay, this is the situation I'm in, this is the shot I've just hit, accepting now this is
what my options are. Right. Yeah, I can go through the trees and stuff, but that's that's bringing in a lot of danger. Can hit a tree, could go in the water, it could go out of bounce. So accepting that, okay, this is where I am, and accepting that I might have to chip out backwards or chip out sideways, and maybe I won't be able to get to the green. But what I'm not going to do is compound the problem.
I'm going to accept that, Okay, I made a mistake, and I'm going to do my best to try and not compound the mistake that I just mad.
That's our concept of offensive and defensive golf. You hit your driver behind a tree, you're on the defense for the next shot.
But everyone goes on offense.
Right. This is when we hand the ball off and go ahead and hunt on fourth down right, and until we're back in the fairway, then we have an opportunity to get back on the game plan, get back on plan, get back on the green. So a lot of golfers tend to go into the trees or bunkers, and they
think offense is the best strategy. They throughout the hail Mary, they run the thirty yard out when quite simply, all you have to do is hand it off, hitch it out, move on to put yourself at one hundred yards, get the wedge on the green to put. Now it's a bogie instead of triple or worse.
I think that if you can just say to yourself, listen, if I get in trouble off the tee, the worst I'm going to make here is bogy, right. But what I'm going to do is get this somehow on the green. And no matter what length of pott I've got, if I have a putt for par if it's from forty feet, I've got a pot for far, you can make a
forty footer right. It's hard to hold bunker shots. It's hard to have all these incredible, you know, fantastic rescue shots that we see players on TV make and just accept that, Okay, I'm in trouble, I'm going to get out of trouble and I'm now The worst I'm going to make here is bogie right.
Part five, five hundred and fifty yards. Driver in the water. You can dink a five iron from three p fifty out two times that say one hundred and eighty yards each time and still be in decent position to have a chance for a bogie.
Rian, we could talk all all day on this stuff. We're gonna do another one in a couple of weeks where we actually go through some of the games and the tasks that we have, and I think everyone listening, I mean, there are some things that you'll be able to take to your game and to your practice. But you know, our goal is to help players play the game of golf better. Our goal is not to try and help people practice the game better, swing better, right, Listen.
Technique is a huge part of this, right, but just remember Ry McElroy, Scottie Scheffler, John Rahm, Nellie Cordo, Lydia Co, Padrick Harrington, Ernie, all of the best players in the world world across all of the various tours, they're all trying to improve their technique. But where you can become a better golfer is to get better at playing the game of golf and learning how to play on the golf course.
Als perfectly said, right, I'm being able to adapt and play on the golf course.
So some great stuff that can help you with your game from Ryan Cressler there and golf it's game. There will be things that happen, and there will be things that are kind of chaotic, and how you handle those and how you handle the situations that happen when you're out on the golf course, not with what's going on in your practice on the driving range, but what is happening when you are out on the golf course, I think is the most important thing that you can focus on.
Everybody's trying to improve their technique, but the way you play the game and how you play the game and the decisions you make on the golf course and have a massive effect on your scores and your handicap. Son of a Butcher comes to you most every week. Rate review, subscribe wherever you get your podcast