Why always trying to correct your last miss can ruin your round

One of the biggest problems I see in the average golfer is a hyperfocus on ball flight and the instinct to immediately “fix” what went wrong on the next swing. When you do that, you can quickly ruin your round.

Every time you make an adjustment to compensate for a previous miss, you are walking a dangerous path, because one shot (or even one hole) is not a trend. It takes time to identify and understand your miss pattern for the day, and once you do, the goal is to work of it instead of fighting it.

Normally this is the way it goes from the first tee. A player blocks one in the right trees, and on the next shot (no less than a punch) he tries to negate that block by closing the clubface or releasing the club more aggressively through impact. The result? The next shot goes too far to the left, and then the cycle repeats. Right, left, right, left. Army wave. Never fun.

I tell my students to collect data during their warm-up, pay attention to the consistency and patterns of their misses, and then see how that manifests over the first few holes on the course. If your shots work X on the range and continue doing X During the course you probably established your pattern for the day. Embrace it at that moment and play with it for the rest of the round. If you fight your trend, controlling the ball flight becomes almost impossible.

The problem is that most amateurs either don’t warm up or don’t notice a trend because they don’t practice with a target. So if they see a ball flight on the first hole that doesn’t match the shot, they do it want to to hit, they panic and immediately adjust to the next swing. But how do you know that shot wasn’t just a one-off or an outlier? You don’t do that.

If you adjust with every swing, things will only get worse. One shot, two shots or even one hole is not a trend; it could be as simple as timing, nerves or a tricky lie on the opening hole.

Give yourself time to understand your mistakes. Once a trend becomes apparent, you can aim accordingly for the rest of the round.

If you want to go deeper into understanding shot patterns and miss tendencies, spend some time with Scott Fawcett’s DECADE Golf System. It’s built around knowing your tendencies, avoiding problems, and dealing with misses.

Control your misses and you determine your score.

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