A golfer's skill profile

[andyh]

I agree 100% with your statement. when I play against players that are at my handicap level it always comes down to putting.

For me it was the other way round. My ball striking is now catching up with my short game and putting. I went from 36 down to single digits by mainly working really hard on my short game and putting. I got into single digit handicap in a year by learning to putt correctly and get up and down from around the greens. Of course there was slow progress with my long game at the same time.

It was quite embarrasing for a while because I would be with low handicappers who strike the ball really well and I did not. Yet around the greens I was saving alot of shots. My ball-striking is now the thing i spend most of my time on as this is my weaker area. Almost everyone who advises golf improvement says to dedicate most of your time to the short game. I have done this for over 2 years and now I have switched to spending almost 75% of my time working on ball-striking. i.e on the range. I still spend 30 minutes every session working on putting and chipping and sometimes put in a good hour or two on this part of my game. Funny how we get there in different ways.

[jschen]

Funny how we get there in different ways.

I'm relatively new to golf, but as they say in cycling, "Train your weaknesses. Race your strengths."

As a beginner, I found ball striking to be job 1. If you don't get the ball going roughly where you want, then everything else doesn't matter. Now that my ball striking is improved (not "good", mind you), I found on a short executive course that putting was slaughtering my score. Now that I'm a bit more confident on the greens, I'm finding that I have little clue about pitching. I figure it will be much the same as any other sport. Identify the problem holding me back the most, and improve it until something else is that problem.

[Parker0065]

For me it was the other way round. My ball striking is now catching up with my short game and putting. I went from 36 down to single digits by mainly working really hard on my short game and putting. I got into single digit handicap in a year by learning to putt correctly and get up and down from around the greens. Of course there was slow progress with my long game at the same time.

That's the great thing about golf, there really is more than one way to get it done, or as they say what matters is the score on the card, not how you got there. I have a Uncle that in his 60's and 70's was able to maintain a 5 handicap simply because he was so good around the greens. As he got older he lost distance every year and it became more and more difficult to reach greens in regulation. His short game stayed sharp and enabled him to play very well for a long time.