65/20/15 Practice Ratios: Where to Devote Your Practice Time

[ppine]

I have been playing golf since before 1960 and more or less following your suggestion.  

It occurs to me that the weakness in my game has always been from 40 yards in, not ball striking, so now I am going to turn your numbers upside down and spend the vast majority of the practice time on wedges, chipping and putting.

It would be obvious if we played a round.

[iacas]

1 hour ago, ppine said:

I have been playing golf since before 1960 and more or less following your suggestion.  

It occurs to me that the weakness in my game has always been from 40 yards in, not ball striking, so now I am going to turn your numbers upside down and spend the vast majority of the practice time on wedges, chipping and putting.

It would be obvious if we played a round.

You posted that already, didn't you? My response is about the same.

[ppine]

The moderator combined two posts. 

The new post is "If we played a round it would be obvious."

I have been reading Dave Pelz, and I agree with him.

[iacas]

4 hours ago, ppine said:

I have been reading Dave Pelz, and I agree with him.

Dave Pelz is, well, I'll just go with "misguided" about a lot of things. And it makes sense why… he teaches the short game and putting. It's in his best interests to over-state their importance.

For example, he says "you should spend 50% of your time practicing the short game and putting because they're 50% of your shots."

To which I ask you this: a PGA Tour pro who shoots 72 averages about 9 tap-ins per round. That's 12.5% of his score. Should he spend 12.5% of his practice time practicing his tap-in putts?

[boogielicious]

14 hours ago, iacas said:

Dave Pelz is, well, I'll just go with "misguided" about a lot of things. And it makes sense why… he teaches the short game and putting. It's in his best interests to over-state their importance.

For example, he says "you should spend 50% of your time practicing the short game and putting because they're 50% of your shots."

To which I ask you this: a PGA Tour pro who shoots 72 averages about 9 tap-ins per round. That's 12.5% of his score. Should he spend 12.5% of his practice time practicing his tap-in putts?

He also bends over to get the ball out of the cup 18 times a round! He should practice that too!

[1badbadger]

Just saw your post on dividing up practice time iacas.  Your explanation and reasoning is really well thought out with solid statistics to back you up.  I completely agree with your assessment and for once there is nothing to debate!  Ha!

I didn't read all 32 pages of this thread, so I'm not sure if this was mentioned, but last year a guy named Peter Sanders wrote an article where he compared a scratch amateur to a PGA Tour pro to see how much difference there is in different areas (driving, approach shots, short game and putting). The article starts off with the overall difference in scoring…a PGA Tour pro has a scoring average 2.25 strokes better than a scratch amateur, but Tour pros also play courses that are 3.2 strokes more difficult, so the difference is 5.45 shots which was rounded to 5.5.  The breakdown looks like this:

Tour pros are 4 shots better than a scratch player in driving and approach shots, and 1.5 shots better for short game and putting.  This supports the 65/20/15 concept as well.

It might be hard to change the perception that has been preached for so many years, but I am a believer.

[p1n9183]

Good read!

As i started practicing this year i´ve changed my stats methodology in orden to know where i lost more strokes against a tour pro in orther to focus my tranning session in my weakest areas.

Stroke Gained Against a tour Pro

Long Shots: 2,5
Approach to green: 2,8 (long 1,3 | mid 0,5 | short 1 | wedges 0)
Short game: 0,8
Putting : 1,5 (short 1 | long 0,5)

Long game: 5,3 -->  70%
Short Game: 0,8 --> 10%
Putting: 1,5 --> 20%

My currect practice it´s more like 33% - 33% - 33%.

Guess i have to change my routine and focus more time on my long game, specially driving and long irons.

 

[Kalnoky]

14 hours ago, 1badbadger said:

It might be hard to change the perception that has been preached for so many years, but I am a believer.

I am a 100% absolute believer in this ^^^. Not only do the numbers not lie, but it seems to be common sense... People try to make up strokes in the short game to compensate for poor ball striking in the long & intermediate game - not the other way around. 

Edited February 2, 2017 by Kalnoky

[iacas]

16 hours ago, 1badbadger said:

Just saw your post on dividing up practice time iacas.  Your explanation and reasoning is really well thought out with solid statistics to back you up.  I completely agree with your assessment and for once there is nothing to debate!  Ha!

I didn't read all 32 pages of this thread, so I'm not sure if this was mentioned, but last year a guy named Peter Sanders wrote an article where he compared a scratch amateur to a PGA Tour pro to see how much difference there is in different areas (driving, approach shots, short game and putting). The article starts off with the overall difference in scoring…a PGA Tour pro has a scoring average 2.25 strokes better than a scratch amateur, but Tour pros also play courses that are 3.2 strokes more difficult, so the difference is 5.45 shots which was rounded to 5.5.  The breakdown looks like this:

Tour pros are 4 shots better than a scratch player in driving and approach shots, and 1.5 shots better for short game and putting.  This supports the 65/20/15 concept as well.

It might be hard to change the perception that has been preached for so many years, but I am a believer.

For the information he has, that particular set of data had some obvious issues. HE does great work, but that wasn't an example of it.

Though it was close, it wasn't really representative of the way those golfers play. I think he only took the rounds where someone played to scratch, not how a scratch golfer played, for example. That eliminates 70-80% of the rounds a scratch golfer plays.

Plus he rounded everything to 0.5 strokes, which when you're talking about putting getting 1 and short game getting 0.5, can skew the percentages and things quite a bit.

I like Broadie's numbers quite a bit more… 28%, 40%, 18%, and 14% I think, are what separate two players of any range. The numbers are pretty close regardless of the players you pick, too.

Note that this thread used to be 65/25/10, and existed long before these numbers were common and well before ESC or my own book LSW were published. In looking at the data super closely while writing LSW, I moved 5% from the short game to putting, particularly due to the importance of putts inside of about 10 feet and distance control on putts outside of about 30 feet. (5% is not a very big shift.)

[1badbadger]

17 minutes ago, iacas said:

For the information he has, that particular set of data had some obvious issues. HE does great work, but that wasn't an example of it.

Though it was close, it wasn't really representative of the way those golfers play. I think he only took the rounds where someone played to scratch, not how a scratch golfer played, for example. That eliminates 70-80% of the rounds a scratch golfer plays.

Plus he rounded everything to 0.5 strokes, which when you're talking about putting getting 1 and short game getting 0.5, can skew the percentages and things quite a bit.

I like Broadie's numbers quite a bit more… 28%, 40%, 18%, and 14% I think, are what separate two players of any range. The numbers are pretty close regardless of the players you pick, too.

Note that this thread used to be 65/25/10, and existed long before these numbers were common and well before ESC or my own book LSW were published. In looking at the data super closely while writing LSW, I moved 5% from the short game to putting, particularly due to the importance of putts inside of about 10 feet and distance control on putts outside of about 30 feet. (5% is not a very big shift.)

So it was tweaked to 65/20/15, correct?

[iacas]

Just now, 1badbadger said:

So it was tweaked to 65/20/15, correct?

What was?

My main point there was that the bar graph was good but not great, and had some small but obvious issues.

Also, 65/20/15 doesn't necessarily follow the same scoring separation pattern, because if putting was 50% of the scoring separation, I don't know that we'd give it more than 30% of your practice time, because it's relatively easy to do. The ease of the motion and how well and quickly you can get good at it matters, too. For example driving is 28% but we don't recommend that you spend nearly half of your time working on the full swing just doing driving.

[1badbadger]

2 minutes ago, iacas said:

What was?

My main point there was that the bar graph was good but not great, and had some small but obvious issues.

Also, 65/20/15 doesn't necessarily follow the same scoring separation pattern, because if putting was 50% of the scoring separation, I don't know that we'd give it more than 30% of your practice time, because it's relatively easy to do. The ease of the motion and how well and quickly you can get good at it matters, too. For example driving is 28% but we don't recommend that you spend nearly half of your time working on the full swing just doing driving.

My bad...I misunderstood.  I meant to say it was tweaked from 65/25/10 to 65/20/15

[iacas]

34 minutes ago, 1badbadger said:

My bad...I misunderstood.  I meant to say it was tweaked from 65/25/10 to 65/20/15

It was. Originally, this thread was 65/25/10.

That was before we were doing all the research in writing LSW. Then we saw how relatively poor golfers were from the short game, so we moved the 5% to the putting from the short game.

[golfintheworld]

On 6/8/2012 at 6:24 PM, iacas said:

And when you practice, make it dedicated, good practice . Don't just aimlessly whack balls

Thai is what nobody practices at the range! The preshot is the creation of the shot and the swing replicates it.

[iacas]

2 hours ago, golfintheworld said:

Thai is what nobody practices at the range! The preshot is the creation of the shot and the swing replicates it.

I don't worry about much of a pre-shot routine when practicing. It's not very important at all IMO when you're working on your priority piece.

[golfintheworld]

This is why I like discussions. IMO you still have to have a mental image of what you're practicing. I understand you go to the range with a swing thought to work on. I believe practicing the start to finish makes it easier to replicate on the course.

[DaveP043]

On 2/3/2017 at 10:04 PM, iacas said:

I don't worry about much of a pre-shot routine when practicing. It's not very important at all IMO when you're working on your priority piece.

 

23 hours ago, golfintheworld said:

This is why I like discussions. IMO you still have to have a mental image of what you're practicing. I understand you go to the range with a swing thought to work on. I believe practicing the start to finish makes it easier to replicate on the course.

I think this is a bit of apples and oranges.  I know that @iacas recommends the use of short swings, rehearsals,  and drills to institute and ingrain swing changes,

With this method of practicing, I can see why preshot procedures aren't necessary most of the time.  If all you're worried about is a single small piece of your swing, any preshot routine that deals with visualizing ball flight, or even simply aligning at a target,  really isn't important at that time.  That might change as you progress from changing your golf swing towards hitting golf shots with that improved swing.

[uitar9]

Man oh mani-the math is killing me. I can never follow math logic. I had no idea that I needed math skills to this degree to allocate my practice time correctly. 

But...despite my almost exclusive indoor winter long finesse swing target practice regime with my irons/wedges, I'm gonna give this a try once I get outdoors. I gotta say tho, it appears full swing direction control has benefitted form the target practice, at least it appears that way indoors.