One of the tour pros I’ve started coaching, a real future star, recently gave away 6 shots over two rounds through poor shot selection. At this tournament, these 6 shots were the difference between winning and obscurity. Not scoring your best is frustrating at the best of times, but particularly when you’re playing great golf! I want to share with you how I am now helping him with his golf psychology, to give you mental golf tips to lower your scores by playing PERCENTAGE SHOTS. Much is said about the importance of playing the percentages, but little is said on HOW to do it…

1. Know YOUR percentages by knowing YOUR shots

To accurately choose your best landing zones and targets, you need to know what to expect from yourself. You will have different trajectories, distances, carry, roll, and shapes of shot for each club. Knowing that you can hit a driver 250 yards on a good day is not enough information when you’re faced with a bunker at 200 yards on the left of the fairway – will you carry it? Would you be better off with a 3 wood that hits it 225 yards but with more carry? And will your shot shape fade away from or draw toward the bunker?

Unless you have access to monitoring equipment to work out your averages, use a practice ground that has yardage markers – a range can work but they may use different balls to you. Play a dozen shots with each club, writing down the carry, roll, total distance and shape for each shot. To work out your averages for each club, remove the 2 extremes for each, add up the totals and then divide them by 10.

2. Plan each hole backwards based on the conditions

Visualising each hole backwards from the hole to the tee, clearly shows you where on or around the green to land your approach, and where on the fairway to position your drive with confidence.

On a calm day with normal ground conditions, your yardages will serve you very well. But what if it’s particularly windy, wet or dry. The carry, bounce and roll can alter dramatically, changing the route in to the hole and shots you will need. Your whole mental golf game may need to adjust to this.

3. Use your heart AND your mind

Finally, I like to include confidence levels over the shot. For example, when confidence is high, the normal percentage shot may be TOO safe, so if you play it, you might not commit and play it half-heartedly. If confidence is low, the normal percentage shot may not be safe enough, so you might play before you’re really ready - again producing a poor shot. This is where you need to know your normal shots but add in your gut instinct as to whether or not you are going to play a “normal” shot. The key here is this:

Choose the shot whose outcome you KNOW you will be happy with.

This approach takes into account confidence levels (heart) as well as logical percentages (head) so that you can commit 100% to your decision. This may lead to taking higher risks than normal (eg going for the green in 2 on a tricky par 5) or lower risks than normal (eg laying up) in order to stay committed.

If a tour pro could save 3 shots per round by using these 3 simple mental golf tips, how many shots could a similar tweak to your own golf psychology save you?

If you would like more help in using golf psychology to score less without changing your swing, I’m giving away more mental golf tips through a series of six free audio tipcasts for the toughest parts of the game. I’m committed to helping you develop your golf psychology and lower your scores, so sign up for my newsletter now if you would like to receive these.

Love every shot!

Adam Sprackling