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Tyler Ferrell is the only person in the world named to Golf Digest's list of Best Young Teachers in America AND its list of Best Golf Fitness Professionals in America. Meet your new instructor.

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Improve Or Repeat

In this video, I discuss a small study conducted by Jon Sinclair. The study reveals the tendency for amateurs to react too strongly to ball flight instead of focusing on making a repeatable swing. Make sure part of your practice is geared toward grooving your swing, not always trying to improve your pattern.

Playlists: Find Your Best Swing Quickly, Beginner Program

Tags: Practice Strategies, Mental Game, Member Question, Concept, Beginner

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This concept video is, are you trying to improve rep to rep or are you trying to repeat?

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So, I had a good discussion with a buddy of mine, John St. Claire, and he was talking about some research that he did really casually, but he did some research with Torpros looking at consistency.

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And he did the same research with amateurs and looking at consistency. And one of the really interesting things that he found was that Torpros, when he just told them,

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I want you to hit 10 shots, just hit him pretty much exactly the same. 10 shots, 10 shots, 10 shots.

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And Torpros were able to consistently repeat a lot of the numbers, angle of attack, path, face alignment to pretty good tolerances.

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Amateurs were pretty much only able to control the path. Now, he's got a cool studio in between Dallas and Fort Worth, and what he did was he re-ran the study, but he closed the net.

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So, that amateurs couldn't see the ball flight. What was interesting was that the amateurs couldn't see the ball flight. They were able to repeat their swings much more consistently.

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So, they were almost able to have as much consistency as the Torpros when they couldn't see ball flight, and they were just focused on making the same swing time after time again.

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So, it leads to a couple more questions, but what it gets me thinking about is that basically many times amateurs hit a shot and then they try to correct the ball flight,

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where a Torpros is going to get their swing to a point where it may not be a perfect ball flight, but it has a playable pattern and playable miss.

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So, at least some part during your practice and during your training should be shifting from trying to optimize and trying to improve every single rep to just trying to repeat and kind of dial in the pattern or fine tune the pattern.

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Because, while you may not be able to duplicate the Torpros performance, the way our movement patterns work, you're capable of repeating it to a high enough level.

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And John's study there showed that while they might have been hitting big blocks that wouldn't be going at their target or they might have been hitting poles, they were able to repeat the same swing once they took trying to correct it and trying to hit the perfect shot out of play.

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So, I've talked with many good players and during when you're on the course, it's more important to know your pattern and make some and try and make consistent repeatable swing rather than try to hit the optimal or the perfect shot.

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So, part of your practice, let's say you start by working on some mechanics and then you do some games at some point, especially if you're getting ready to play.

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If scoring is something that is important to you, you have to go from trying to improve every single swing to trying to repeat and just trying to memorize and own the pattern that you're currently developing.

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If you don't do that, you're always going to struggle with consistency and performance issues on the course.

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