Why You Need This:

In this video, you’ll learn how to practice like the pros.

This is the third video in my Secret Science to Improve Faster Than Everyone Around You bonus course…

And the focus is on the crucial keys of deliberate practice.

Here’s an overview of the 4 keys that you’ll learn in the video…

#1: Specific

You’re not practicing deliberately if your goal isn’t specific.

For example, if you’re focusing on hitting a nice, clean divot ahead of the ball…

Then draw a line and practice hitting a divot ahead of that line.

That is a very specific goal for you to focus on.

#2: Measurable

Imagine the previously mentioned drill of hitting a divot ahead of the line.

After practicing some shots, measure how many times you succeeded.

Next time you do the drill, see if you can beat your previous mark.

#3: Increase Difficulty

It’s relatively easy to get a giant bucket of balls and hit your favorite shot over and over.

However, that won’t take your game to the next level.

Try this: decrease the landing area of your favorite shot…

Or mix it up by practicing shots that aren’t in your comfort zone.

Challenge yourself to improve your overall game.

#4: Variability

Plenty of research shows that varying your training can help speed up your learning.

In the divot drill example, instead of trying to hit the same exact spot every time…

Try to take one divot well ahead of the line, and the next one, try to hit the divot well behind the line.

This familiarizes you with 2 extremes in which you can later hone in to the correct spot, which is somewhere between the 2 extremes.

Essentially, you’re running experiments and developing feel for different shots.

The more feel you learn, the better you’ll be able to hit the exact shot you want.

Next Step

Watch this video now to discover how to practice like the pros and speed up your golf training!

What's Covered: How to practice like the pros.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:21

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, hey welcome back hope you guys are having a great time working through these. In the first video we talked about the brain, how we’re going to rewrite that neurological system to get better.

Video number 2 we talked about the three rings, it’s going to help us to bring things into our comfort zone so we become better golfers every week.

In this video, we’re going to talk about deliberate practice. This is a four-step piece that’s going to talk about how   set up your practice sessions, so that you will get better. Guaranteed to get better.

One of the toughest things in golf is we go out there, we have a great round. We’re working on our elbow, we’re working on our knee, something specific with our game. We have an awesome round.

Now the next day we try to focus on the same piece and we see a variety of results. What happens there?

We’ve got to shrink that down to what’s actually happening with contact, to what’s actually happening to the big pieces of the swing.

So number one is going to be specific. That’s the first piece to deliberate practice. Now K. Anders Ericsson wrote a book called “Peak,” where he goes over in a lot more detail about deliberate practice. I’m going to give you the highlights of it here.

He’s a very famous researcher who basically tracks how great athletes become great, and that book is really, really good to go through that.

The very first piece on this though, is very specific. Let’s imagine a middle handicap golfer, and I’m struggling hitting the ground at different contact points.

Maybe use something very specific, a way that I would measure this, and I can do it day in and day out, and really know how that’s going, is I can draw a line on the ground and I can do divots and try to take those divots in front of this line.

I’m just going to draw a few divots there so you get the idea. Now in the beginning, if I’m just trying to give myself a very easy target, just barely outside my comfort zone like we talked about in video number 2, maybe anywhere in front of that line would be good.

As I start to get more comfortable with that, maybe I want to see these divots a lot closer to that line. I can kind of shrink that in there. That’s a really good way to practice that also.

Maybe after I get comfortable with that, I can actually hit a golf ball doing this. The key is, I have to have a very specific way to measure this.

It’s not deliberate practice if it’s not specific. So maybe in my mind I thought about that great round, I thought about keeping that elbow in. I have no way of knowing if I’m doing it right or wrong unless I have a very specific way to measure that, which is difficult to do.

We’re going to focus a lot on contact in a lot of the drills we do in the Top Speed Golf System, especially as we’re going into some of the ball flight drills and things like that.

This is very specific. Now the next thing would be measurable. We’ve definitely done that in this one, where I know if I’ve done this correctly or not.

I’ve got the line of the ground, either the divot’s in front of that line or it isn’t. Now that it’s measurable, I can go back whether I do this drill tomorrow, a year from tomorrow, 10 years from now, I know if I’ve done drill this right or wrong.

Then as I get more and more advanced, I start making that tougher and tougher, now I add the ball, now maybe add a target, maybe I make that target bigger or smaller.

That brings us to our third piece, which is increasingly more difficult. So this is a really tough one for golfers. I know everybody struggles with this.

We like doing stuff that’s in our comfort zone. So we’ve got the three rings up here, I’d love to dump over a big pile of golf balls, make the same swing over and over again, hit my favorite type of shot and stay in my comfort zone.

The problem with that is, we’re not getting outside our comfort zone and actually growing and learning. We’re just doing the same thing that we already know how to do more and more.

Then when we go out to the course, we’re faced with a lot of different types of situations. We’re switching from one club to another, there’s wind, there’s hills, bunkers, all these different things, we start to fail.

We’ve got to practice like we’re going to play out there on the course. So it’s always going to get more difficult.

At first, any divot in front of the line was great. That’s going to count. Now I’m going to tighten up those divots where they’re barely in front of the line. Then I’m going to add a golf ball and hit those.

Maybe I’m going to hit them to a big target. Then I’m going to increasingly make that target smaller and smaller. This happens over weeks or even months, but that’s a good way to say I’m going to make this increasingly difficult and follow my deliberate practice.

In the final one here, if you really want to speed up your progress, is with variability. What this means is I’m going to vary to feel both extremes, and then I can find that middle ground really, really quick.

There’s been a lot of research out there, there’s one that did free throws in basketball, where they took a hoop, basketball goal here. We’ve got our free throw line, I’ll just draw it for you really quickly here.

Normally people would shoot their free throws from right around in here, and they’d see how many they can make.

They took some test subjects, and they had them practice free throws from just a few weeks, shooting I think about 40 free throws every session.

Now one group just shot from the normal place you’d shoot free throws, and another group moved up here, and moved over to the right, over to the left, and over to the back. They basically varied that practice.

They found that the second group that moved around and varied their practice improved about 11 percent on their free throws, while the group that just stayed in the same spot every time only improved about one percent.

What that showed us is, if we vary and move around, we get a better feel for what’s going on and we actually learn a lot faster. Let’s take that variability, that same idea, and let’s imagine that we’re hitting those shots on the ground.

We’ve got our line here, we’re kind of inconsistent right now, how would we vary this to get a better feel for where the ground is, and get a better feel for hitting in front of that line?

Maybe first we just try to hit a divot in front like we talked about. Now, we find that OK, that’s a little bit better but we’re still hitting everything, even though we’re trying to go here, everything is way back here.

So time, after time, after time, my divot is way back there. Let’s go to the extreme. Take a divot way up here, right? We’re just kind of thinking of this as an experiment. Try to go from one extreme to another.

I’m going to go extreme on this side, and then I’m going to go extreme back here, maybe feel one back there, and now I’ve got kind of a framework, I’ve varied my results to see what can happen.

Maybe on one I try to take a really deep divot, it’s really down there in the ground. Maybe the next one I go really thin. But all I’m doing is I’m running experiments to see can I get a good feel of where the ground is.

Once I practice that for a while, I will actually improve faster that way to where now when I get that good result of improving and hitting the divots up here every time.

I will have gained a lot of feel for how to do that and my divots will start getting where I want them to be a lot faster rather than just trying to do the same thing over and over, I’m varying that around so you’re getting a feel for how high or low to swing.

You’re getting a feel for what way up here feels like, and what way back there feels like, so that you can go right where you want to go every time.

That’s the deliberate practice. That is an absolutely awesome blueprint to really improve your game. Must be specific, you’ve got to be able to measure it.

Every time we get good at something, you just always try to raise that bar higher and higher, and then we’re going to vary the practice to force ourselves to learn faster.

You follow this blueprint, you’re going to do really good.

Now the last video I’m going to show you next, we’re going to talk about a few different drills and show how these tie in with all three of these pieces, I’ll just give you a couple more examples that are really going to help you to take it out there in your own game.

I’ll see you guys soon.