How to Have a Better Pre-Shot Routine
My golf coach Garrett Louis, instructor for Top 50 Teacher In America and PGA Teacher Of The Year Martin Chuck’s, Tour Striker Golf Academy in Phoenix Arizona, teaches me how to have a better routine and also why it’s important.
There’s a cool video I like to show people when I’m explaining to them routine and the importance of it. And it’s Tiger 2000. It’s when he won the US Open in 2000 by 15 strokes. And it’s a cool clip of him walking into the shot, hitting it, seeing it, visualizing it. And it’s kind of like he… He looks like he had turned golf into some sort of meditation. It was remarkable.
But if you watch the best players in the world, they all have a routine and they’re all consistent about it. Everybody wants consistency. But what we can do right, when we hit a ball, we have no control. After we’ve hit that ball, it’s left our club face. We can’t control it, but we can do right is we can walk into the golf ball correctly every time.
And so what I want you to do is I want you to start behind the golf ball. You’re going to start behind your ball on your target line, and you’re going to take one, maybe two at most, primer swings. And a primer swing is something that you want to feel. When you watch people take practice swings, you don’t know what they’re thinking. Alex Noren’s got this crazy rehearsal. You’ve seen Jordan Spieth’s crazy rehearsal swing before he hits a golf ball. And so the important thing here is you’re feeling what you want to feel in your golf swing. So I’ll take one for you. And notice, too, I’m swishing air. I don’t ever want to brush daisies down here. I want to keep a really clean club face that is super important. And then after I’ve done my primer swings, I’m going to stand on my target line.
I’m going to pair a nice lead left hand, or in lefty’s case, a right hand, but a lead hand to the club. I’m going to walk in, I’m going to pair my trail hand to the club, set the face, take a look, set my feet, take a look. I’m going to waggle the club head. I want to fill the weight of this thing in my hands. I don’t want to be super stagnant. I’ll see people, they’ll walk into a golf shot and they’ll get over it, and they’re… And if we played guess they’re handicap, it’d be pretty high. All right?
So when you see a good player walk in… Or when you see someone, rather, walk into a golf shot, you can tell if they’re a pretty good player or not just by how they approach the ball. All right? And so, again, I’ll start back here behind my golf ball. I’m going to walk back here. And when you get this down, it won’t take you very long. All right? We don’t want to slow play up or anything. We don’t want to take 30 practice swings. Just one’s good enough. And you don’t have to do it at full speed. It’s rhythmical. It’s kind of slow, going through the feels, standing on your target line, visualizing the shot, pairing a nice lead hand to that, walking in, set the face, take a look, set your feet, take a look, and then let’s hit one or miss one, and then we can assess what we did. And then on to the next one we go. So that’s how we have a better routine, and that’s why it is important to have a nice routine.
