How To Improve Your Golf Health
Article by Herb Rubenstein, PGA
Introduction
The exact words in this order “how to improve your golf health,” have never been written and put online in the history of the internet, until now and until this article. I am a 69 year-old, Level 3 PGA Associate, who passed the Players’ Ability Test when I was 65. My goal is to continue to improve my golf game every year for the next twenty-years. I am no Gary Player or Jack LaLanne. I used to jog 40 miles per week, swim two miles of laps, and play 54 holes of golf a day walking and carrying my clubs. But, since my 30’s and 40’s, I have also been a lawyer, author, public speaker, educator, father, husband, person involved in civic affairs, avid reader, and have not been what most people would call an “athlete.” Now, I am a professional athlete, a professional golfer, trying to improve how golf is played by teaching others how to improve their game, playing tournament golf, and doing what I can to keep my mind and body strong so I can keep playing golf well into my 80’s, and, if possible, beyond.
This article was inspired by Bo Watson, PGA and his story that he told about himself during the April 14-16 Consistent Golf Summit that he created. This three-day virtual golf summit, now available on-line through its “All Access Pass,” included 15 excellent presentations by well-known leaders in the field of golf instruction in the fields of the not only golf technique, but also the mental and physiological sides of golf. See www.consistentgolfsummit.com. Bo Watson talked about some of the health challenges he had for many years that hurt his golf game and his entire golf experience. But, Bo Watson, with help from Dr. Quinto Pauletti and others, worked hard and smart, discovered the right nutrition and diet for his body, and dramatically improved his overall health, and especially his “golf health,” (my term, not his). Dr. Quinto Pauletti was one of the many excellent presenters at the Consistent Golf Summit.
Why “Golf Health” Is the Most Important Golf Concept You Have Never Heard About
As David Orr, PGA, the great putting instructor, stated so clearly in his presentation at the Consistent Golf Summit, learning golf has three steps.
• First, figure out technique.
• Second, practice the proper technique until you develop excellent golf skills, and then refine and improve the technique and practice more so you can improve your performance on the golf course and lower your score.
• Third, apply your golf skills on the golf course, in challenging, tough, pressure-packed situations, and improve your ability to execute the skill in toughest of situations including competitive situations, bad weather, and in dealing successfully with many of the factors that make the game of golf, on the golf course, so difficult.
Thus, becoming a good golfer, a good putter, a good bunker play, is a three-step dance. Easy to describe. Very challenging to do well and consistently.
What makes golf tough is that golf is not really just one game. I personally think it is 26 different games all rolled into one. Here are just three of the games: putting, hitting drives, and hitting greenside bunker shots. They have little in common with each other. When you add the games of reading greens, figuring how to hit excellent golf shots from uneven lies, different grass heights and conditions, figuring out the wind and temperature effects on golf shots, that is five more games, (or parts of the game of golf), and we are just getting started.
There is so much to learn when it comes to learning technique, because there are so many “techniques” to learn to play golf well on a golf course. The technique for a high short shot of say 15 yards that does not roll, and the technique for a low 200 yard shot that rolls forty or fifty yards are very different. In most other sports there are about five or ten techniques one needs to learn be good, like dribbling, passing, shooting, rebounding, blocking out, and playing defense. For basketball, a great sport, that covers most of the techniques one needs to learn to be a good basketball player. In golf, in one round a golfer is called on to use ten, twenty, even thirty different techniques to accomplish good shots in ever changing situations and ever changing conditions. And every day, regarding golf, the goal, the hole, is in a different place, even o the same course, and this can completely change the golf hole and the shots one needs to execute well to make a par or birdie!
So, in golf there are thousands of books, videos, and instruction guides on all of the different techniques called for by the game. And most of those start with the premise, here is what you are probably doing wrong and here is how to fix it. But, skill is better developed learning a technique for that situation the first time, and then honing those skills by practicing that correct technique. Unfortunately, in golf and in life, we try to learn by watching others, copying the wrong people, and few golfers really learn proper golf technique. And to make matters even more challenging for golf, the optimal technique for how a golfer swings a golf club or putts is significantly affected by their body size, level of strength, coordination, ability to create and control speed, and many other physical factors. As we age, the swing we used when we were younger, will not only not likely work as well as it did in the past, it will not even be available to the golfer. And the golfer on the 18th tee is, in many ways, a different golfer from the golfer they were on the first tee, and the technique for hitting the same shot, the drive, off the first and eighteenth tees might be different for the same golfer. or the proper techniques to have excellent golf health. While golfers rarely learn the proper “good golf” techniques as they begin to play the game, most golfers also rarely learn the proper techniques, eating habits, physical workout habits, mental habits, and practice habits they need have optimal “golf health.” For those who have not learned some of the key techniques to have good “golf health,” this article might be a good place to start.
What is “Golf Health?”
“Golf health” has ten key components:
1. A body whose digestive works well and the overall body has has little inflammation.
2. A body that has strength, flexibility, speed, endurance, and hand-eye coordination.
3. A body that is managed carefully to minimize sickness, injury and pain, and deal with sickness, injury and pain sooner rather than later.
4. A body that has eyes that can see well, ears than can hear well, and hands that can hold, feel, and swing a golf club well.
5. A mind that can process, learn, and remember large amounts information and figure out how to perform all of the necessary techniques that good golf requires.
6. An attitude, mindset or grit that is willing to do the hard physical and mental work necessary to learn enough about golf and become skillful enough to be a good golfer. This is what Ben Hogan called “digging it out of the dirt.”
7. A psychological ability to be confident when your skill merits such confidence and the willingness to try new things with a great attitude when you have not yet developed the skill or confidence with this new technique or new type of challenging shot.
8. The psychological ability to keep fear, tension, nervousness, being scared, being uncontrollably angry, being embarrassed, being intimidated, and being impacted negatively by previous bad shots or bad breaks under control during not only during an entire golf round, but also an entire golf season, and an entire golf career whether you are a pro or an amateur.
9. The mindset and willingness to learn from past mistakes, accept personal responsibility for golf failures, and avoid despair and hopelessness when one does not produce satisfactory golf results.
10. The psychological steadiness to keep other negative emotions while playing, practicing, and thinking about golf under control, since they lead to muscle tightness, poor performance, lack of thinking clearly and effectively, and lack of mental “resourcefulness.” For example, In golf, you have to visualize and be mentally prepared to play in all kinds of weather and therefore, not have a point of view like, “I can’t play in the wind, or the cold, or on hilly courses, or ever learn how to hit a bunker shot.” In essence, golf health requires never selling yourself short regarding what you can do and never thinking you can do something on the golf course when you just can’t pull it off.
These ten components of good “golf health” are all premised on one key principle embedded in the ethic of the game of golf itself. One has to be honest with one’s self regarding how you stand in each area of “golf health.”
Almost every person can score reasonably well much of the time in their lives on each of these ten key components to golf health if they work hard to stay in good physical and mental shape, have an excellent diet and sound nutritional habits, and is committed to achieving and maintaining good “golf health.” However, in life, many people are faced with physical, mental, psychological, digestive, and pain situations that require careful study and proper diagnosis to figure out. Achieving good “golf health,” like achieving consistent good golf scores is not something that most people can achieve and maintain all of their life by themselves. The “lone ranger’ or the “I can take care of this myself” attitude that we called “rugged individualism,” is often the wrong approach to achieving good “golf health.”
How To Assess One’s Golf Health
We live in an era of specialization. Doctors specialize in one area of the body or the brain, even one joint. It is beyond the scope of this article to try to put together an assessment of the ten key areas of “golf health”.
However, there is important guideline this author can give you. When in doubt about any weakness you might have in any area of “golf health,” consult a professional in the area and get evaluated. Then develop a regimen and set of practices that will help you become you can and will score high in that area in the future. This is how to improve your golf game and your life without touching a club.
Golf is the game, the sport, that most mirrors “life.” Good “golf health” means “good health” or more likely means “excellent health.” Even though this “truism” seems so self-evident, just look around you and see how many “golfers’ who genuinely want to improve their game, would score low on one or more of the areas of golf health and are not doing anything to improve their “golf health” in this area. In fact, they may not even be aware that they are not doing well in one or more areas of good “golf health.” I am not here to blame these golfers.
No article has ever been written with the title “How to Improve Your Golf Health.” You may have never heard the term “golf health” before. Therefore, it is not surprising the many golfers would not realize that one important key to improving their golf game would be to improve their overall “golf health.” There has been significant attention to “golf fitness,” and “sports psychology,” and both of these elements are necessary to help golfers improve their game. “Golf health” included physical fitness and sports psychology, but it is more than that. It is a holistic approach to developing an important, multi-faceted, but manageable path toward becoming a better golfer.
Golf Wisdom From The Past
Why did Bobby Jones say that “Golf is the only game I know of that actually becomes harder the longer you play it?” (Robert Tyre Jones, Jr., Bobby Jones On Golf, (New York: Broadway Books, 2011, xi, as quoted in Bob Mullen, Golf: Learn From The Legends, Pinole, CA: AR Publications, 2019)
I don’t know the answer as to why Bobby Jones said this, but I believe it has to do with the huge challenge it is to maintain good “golf health.” Bobby Jones, possibly the greatest golfer who has ever lived, retired from competitive at the age of 28. Bobby Jones died of syringomyelia when he was only 69, a disease that can cause paralysis.
Not everyone is even born with good health or “golf health”. Those born with it must work hard to maintain it as golf presents many challenges to one’s health, and especially to one’s “golf health.” Those who are not born with good health often can never achieve good health, and if they do, they must work even harder and smarter to maintain good health or “golf health” as they age.
The problem is that people think they can improve how they play golf while they ignore clear signs that they do not have good “golf health.” Golf is a tough, injury prone game, and it can wear down a person mentally as well. There are bad breaks every round. Golf is as much a recipe for mental anguish and frustration as it is a recipe for pure joy and exaltation. Some would say that golf is “addictive,” and I will never argue with them about that. Golf can be hard on families if not kept in balance with one’s other responsibilities in life. And to put it mildly, golf can bring out the worst in people, just as it can bring out the best in people.
I was once asked by a golfer with whom I had played many rounds where I shot in the 70’s and he shot around 100 (the average score of golfers who keep score and record their scores for a handicap) “Why didn’t I get mad when I hit terrible shots, got unlucky breaks, or missed short putts?” What made this person’s golf game so interesting was that in every round he hit some great shots, even made some birdies, but would “blow up” a round with the best of them and find doubles, triple, and quadruple bogeys littering his score card. He would tense up when he had to hit any shot over water, and thus often failed at this simple golf task. At the time, I did not have a good answer for him, but said in all earnestness, “I don’t have time to get mad. As soon as I hit a shot or putt badly, or get a bad break, I have to begin to get ready to hit the next shot.” That answer came from my “management mindset.” I had figured out a way not to let a bad shot affect my next shot, an accomplishment in golf.
Today, I would answer him differently. I would say that getting mad on a golf course, and not controlling my emotions well on a golf course, would not be good for my “golf health.” Without reading this article, I don’t think he would have understood what I meant by that answer.
Conclusion
This article has been written to make three key points. There is a real “construct” or useful tool or building block we can deploy when we want to improve our golf games and I call it “golf health.” The golf industry addresses pieces of this “construct” or building block, but in 2020, there is no body of literature or golf writing about the concept of, or definition of, “golf health.” Second, in 2020 while we have all of these fitness and psychological assessment tools, we do not have a simple, easy-to-administer “golf health” assessment system. So, today there is virtually no way a person can measure one’s golf health and systematically improve it.
If one wants to improve their golf game, and millions of people, probably tens of millions of people in the US and globally, fit into this category, I recommend taking concrete actions to improve your “golf health.” Even if your golf game does not improve right away, your life will improve with every improvement in your “golf health”.