All your practice should be geared toward creating a transfer of your best practice form to the golf course.  Smart golfers realise this and that’s why they spend a lot of time in activities designed to build pressure in practice; to replicate on-course situations.

Most golfers complain they leave their best shots on the range.  Is that like you?  Do you struggle to transfer your range form to the course?

What if you already transferring your form as effectively as you can?  I can hear your protests: but I’m not!  Perhaps you are if you consider applying the 80/20 rule to your golf performance.

The mathematical formula called the Pareto Principle states that in many different circumstances about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

The golfing version states that the 80% of your best practice efforts are likely to occur on the golf course 20% of the time.  The inverse also applies; the lowest 20% of your practice performance is likely to occur on the golf course 80% of the time.

An example of how this works is that if you hit 10 pitch shots to a target, the two which finished furthest from the target other ones that you are most likely to produce on the golf course.  That doesn’t mean you won’t hit good pitch shots on the golf course, it just means that statistically you are not likely to reproduce your very best practice form on the golf course.

With players I coach, I monitor how they score in practice training drills compared to that same statistic when they are on the golf course.  In every case the results show that the performance in practice is always better over time than what it is on the golf course.

When you are hitting those 10 pitch shots in practice do so with your attention fully on the task at hand:

• Create a mental blueprint which includes visualising and getting a feel for the shot you are about to play.
• Have a practice swing to reinforce the correctness of the feel that you imagined.
  • Hint: for pitching it is especially important to focus on swing length and rhythm.
• Go through the same routine you would use on the golf course.
• Engage with the target and play the shot as if you are reproducing your mental blueprint.

You can expand the 80/20 rule to not only include the results of the shot you hit, but also your approach to playing those shots.  That means that if you have a sloppy mental preparation 20% of the time in your practice, then that is the mental preparation you are likely to use on the golf course a majority of the time.

You can never separate what you do physically, technically and mentally in competition from what you doing practice.  The feelings might be different because of the nervous energy that competition brings, but this is only more likely to make the poor habits rear their ugly heads.

Hold the 80/20 rule as your guiding philosophy and practice so that you are focusing on ensuring that the worst 20% of your practice is still pretty good.  If that is the case then you will excel on the golf course, enjoying a low handicap and a personal best scoring rounds.

How will your practice improve when you use this principle?  Let me know.