Why You Need This:

In this video, you’ll learn how to improve your ball striking every week.

This is the 2nd video in my Secret Science to Improve Faster Than Everyone Around You…

And you’ll learn the “3 Rings” that describes how comfortable you are for making different types of shots.

The First Ring: Comfort Zone

The first ring is for shots that you are already comfortable performing.

Let’s say you hit with a slight fade.

And if I offered you $100 to go out and hit a fade, you’d be able to do it easily since that shot is already in your Comfort Zone.

Other moves that you’ve performed many times would also be in the first ring, such as your grip and your stance.

The Second Ring: Learning Zone

Just outside your comfort zone is the Learning Zone.

In this zone are the shots that you’re in the process of learning.

You’re trying to learn these new shots and bring them into your Comfort Zone.

For example, if you can easily fade the ball, but struggle to draw the ball…

You could place the draw shot in the Learning Zone and practice it.

As you learn how to hit a draw shot consistently, you’re starting to bring that shot into your Comfort Zone.

The Third Ring: Chaos Zone

Sometimes you go out to the range and it seems like no matter what you do, you just can’t hit a certain shot.

Imagine you’re a mid-to-high handicap player with a severe slice…

And your goal is to hit your 7 iron to a small, 10 foot radius with a high draw shot.

To make it even tougher, you’re not going to stop until you hit it inside that area 10 times in a row!

Well, you’re probably going to have a long, frustrating time trying to do that.

Your goal is simply too advanced for your current level of play.

Instead of trying to hit the shot to a small area, simplify your goal to hit a draw without caring where it lands.

Put the simple draw shot in your Learning Zone first.

Once your comfortable hitting a draw, then you can learn more challenging shots such as a high draw into a tight area.

In Conclusion…

Really great golfers have a huge Comfort Zone.

They’ve focused their training on bringing new shots into their Comfort Zone from the Learning Zone.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore your bread and butter shots, but you should focus the majority of your training on attainable new shots if you want to improve as quickly as you can.

Watch this video to learn more about the “3 Rings” of training…

And bring more shots into your Comfort Zone to improve your ball striking every week!

What's Covered: The 3 rings of improvement

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 5:28

Video Transcription:

All right, so in video one we learned how the neurological system has to get supercharged so we can be better golfers. Now let’s talk about how we’re actually going to practice that. This is what I like to call the 3 rings.

Everybody has things that you’re comfortable with. Let’s imagine you’re a pretty typical golfer out there, maybe a mid-handicap golfer, maybe have a little bit of a fade, you’d like to have that nice, high draw like the pros have, you’d like to hit it a little bit farther.

But in your comfort zone, if somebody said hey, I bet you a thousand dollars, I’ll give you three golf balls. Go out there, and one of them just needs to be a fade that kind of leaks to the right.

Doesn’t have to be very far, you just have to hit a fade. Doesn’t even have to be that pretty of a shot. Well that would be in your comfort zone.

You could imagine a little spec of something that’s in your comfort zone. Or maybe you could say hey, show me a good golf grip, or the golf grip that you use. That’s built up, you’ve done that thousands of times. That’s inside your comfort zone.

You have all these little individual specs of things that you can do. Every golfer has things that are already in your comfort zone, then we have things just outside of that.

Let’s take that same golfer and we can imagine that maybe that fade that doesn’t have a lot of distance, it’s in their comfort zone. We want something a little bit better than that.

Well, just outside the comfort zone, we can imagine another circle just on the perimeter of our comfort zone, let’s call this one the learning zone.

In this zone, whenever we’re practicing in the learning zone, we’re trying to take things that are just outside our comfort zone and pull them in to our comfort zone. So maybe you have that weaker fade, but you have a tough time hitting that draw over and over again.

We’re going to go the practice range, and we’re going to practice maybe The Move section we have in the Top Speed Golf System, we walk through how to shallow out that club, deloft the face, and hit that nice draw.

Well, we’re going to practice those different moves, and over time because that’s outside of your comfort zone, it’s things that you’re not familiar with, that’s going to pull that into your comfort zone.

It takes a little bit of time, like we talked about in video number one, it takes a few weeks to really get things moving along with that. Now maybe you get that with an iron, a middle iron, you start to get The Move, start hitting those nice shots.

You’re feeling pretty good out there, but that driver is still giving you some trouble. That’s another thing that you haven’t quite pulled into your comfort zone, as you continue to practice more and more divers, give it more time, go through the drills, go through the videos, now you start to pull that driver in there.

Maybe you’re working on your wedge game, and you’re trying to work on a specialty wedge shot, like a flop shot, or a bump and run, or a shot that takes two bounces and then stops dead on the green.

Again, that’s barely out of what you’re comfortable with, which you’re always trying to pull new pieces into there. In essence what we’re saying here is, really good golfers have a huge comfort zone.

If you look at guys on the PGA Tour, they have thousands of little shots, and techniques, and pieces that they’ve pulled in to their comfort zone.

If you want to get that good, if you want to really improve every single day, we’ve just got to make sure that we spend most of our time working in this learning zone, constantly pulling in new pieces.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t go back and practice this stuff that’s your bread and butter shots, the ones that you can hit over and over. You can keep practicing those, but the main majority of our practice needs to be pushing the envelope of what we can do to learn new pieces here.

So now that’s great, why is it sometimes I go out there and I practice, and everything just falls apart, and I feel like I just don’t know what’s going on and I get really confused?

That’s a little bit outside your learning zone, which would be what we call the chaos zone. Here in the outside ring, I don’t want to be in the chaos zone. These are things that are just too advanced for me.

Let’s imagine that I’m a mid-handicap golfer again, I’m struggling to hit that draw. Let’s imagine that I have a little green that’s only 10 feet wide, and I’m trying to hit that draw into that 10-foot wide circle.

I’m trying to hit it dead center on the face. I’m trying to have that nice thin dollar-bill-sized divot that’s really, really pure. I want that ball to go nice and high, and land on this green, and stop, and check up, and I want to do it 10 times in a row.

I’m about to be really disappointed, because that is so far from my comfort zone that I’m going to fail almost every single time. We need to kind of structure these drills that are just barely outside the comfort zone.

Maybe if you were just working on starting to hit that draw, maybe you get rid of the green all together, and you say OK, I’m just going to hit a draw.

It may not be very solid, I may chunk it a little bit, I may hit it a little off the toe or the heel, but it’s going to turn over from right to left.

Once I get a little more comfortable with that, then I can say OK, let’s take a big green now, let’s have this area that we’re going to hit into, and let’s see if we can hit three or four in a row into this big target area.

So now maybe they’re not that solid, maybe they’re not that far, but I can hit it into this 40-yard area. Then when I’m comfortable with that, I’ve pulled that into my comfort zone, then I’m gradually building out.

As my comfort zone gets bigger and bigger, and includes more stuff, well now I can do those things that used to be in my chaos, but it takes time to get there.

So we don’t want to rush straight from everybody wants to rush to the end. We want to hit that PGA Tour caliber shot day one. That’s going to take a little bit of time.

Try to just barely push the envelope, just barely outside your comfort zone, pull in some new techniques and you’re going to improve every single day. That’s great to know.

In video number one we talked about how the brain works. Now we talked about the three rings, and how we pull things into our comfort zone.

Now let’s get a very specific kind of framework on how we’re actually going to do that, and what’s a good drill versus a very bad drill. I’ll walk you through that one in the next video.