Off-Season Series: Part I Rest & Effort

For collegiate golfers and coaches, the off-season is now upon us. If you’re in the northeast like me, daylight hours are more limited now — it got dark at 4:17pm today. I’ve gotten into plants lately and the limited sunshine and colder climate has made some of them go dormant. Indoor golf is ramping up in the area, and gyms are getting crowed.

For college players, it’s a great time to recharge the mind and body. The golf game is quite a repetitive motion sport, and it’s beneficial for injury prevention and longevity to take some time off.

The off-season also affords a good chunk of time for collegiate players to get physically stronger, and refine their golf skills. If you need to switch clubs and test new equipment, now is a great time. If you need to reconnect with your long game, short game, and mental game coaches, or perhaps reassess your working relationships with any of these experts, it’s a great time for that too. Slowing things down allows you to reflect on what’s to come. The goal is to single out aspects of your game that will ultimately have the biggest impact on tournament scoring, which is the point of the game for competitive players.

I’ll jump around a bit and share snippets on topics that are especially relevant to the off-season. This is the first of a few snippets.

Effort: how hard people feel they are working on their game is always an interesting topic. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing from pros, amateurs, and juniors on how hard they feel they’re working. While some put in 8-10 hours into their games per day, others put in 1-2 hours per day, or somewhere in between. Yet, individuals often feel they are working their butts off which is both interesting and head-scratching. I tend to think the reason for this perception is because golfers often live in their own heads, and aren’t always aware of what everyone else is doing. Some may be living under some misconception or with limited context of how their training compares with peers. Others may derive confidence from knowing they are putting in maximum effort (and more so than everyone else), and so they deserve to improve more.

There lies some of biggest challenges of golf and if you keep reading this blog, you’ll hear me say often that golf is often a game of opposites. What may seem like a good thing to do may in fact not be helpful at all. The difficult part of golf is that the output doesn’t always correspond to the input. You can have 2 players who put in the same amount of work get completely different results from the hours they put in. Someone who works efficiently for 2 hours can get so much more out of it than someone who gets in 6 hours of wishy-washy practice. Hard-work or long hours doesn’t mean you will beat the competition.

I would argue that the relationship between training hours and improvement corresponds less so in golf than some other sports, especially endurance sports such as cycling or running. Putting in more training hours in endurance sports often lead to increased performance, speed, better times, etc. Improvement in such sports tend to also be more trackable, more linear, more clear. In the game of golf, improvement can be more nuanced, and more tricky to track. If you picked up more swing speed, you’d still be tasked with keeping it in the fairway. Generally speaking, longer drivers tend to be less straight than shorter hitters. If you spent more time on the long game, the scales might tip too much and your short game might start to squeak for attention.

Given all of those considerations, it’s much more helpful for longevity and energy conservation to think you are working the right amount for your goals. It’s more beneficial to put your energy and effort towards figuring out what you need to improve and how to do it, rather than thinking about how hard you need to work and measuring those hours. Statistically speaking, chances are there is someone out there in the world who is working harder than you. It also doesn’t mean they will automatically be better than you. How you work on your game matters the most, so figure out how to work on things you’ve identified then get to it. Your game will be in a better spot for it, and you’ll be in a better headspace too. If you ever need to put in longer hours, you could easily scale up because you haven’t been working at the “maximum amount” — you’ve been working the right amount.