Pete's Programme (Single Digit to Tour Player)

**Nosevi** · August 10, 2015

Guys, it was just a bit of fun, not being serious, and both of us really enjoyed the day, lots of banter going on. Yep we played with handicaps but I won no matter what scoring system he used - he tried several :-) He didn't play to his and I'm below mine. How much by isn't really relevant other than it was comfortable but the point was just the approach I'm taking was somewhat vindicated at least in the debates we've had about it over the past year or so. Reporting that pretty long drive on the course could be seen as boastful or it could be seen as demonstrating what you can do with correct use of launch monitors, focused practice, targeted gym work etc. Fact is the longest club I had into a par 4 was a 9 iron when I was into the slight breeze (not much there) but it was normally a wedge of some sort and that made the game pretty easy. I sort of thought telling people what can be achieved with the techniques, approach and kit I'm using was the point of this thread. If not I may as well just crack on on my own and not bother with it. There'd be no point in starting to see really good results in one area or another like increasing your on course driving distance significantly and being coy about it by not reporting it. Putting numbers to it seemed the only sensible way of doing that :-) Anyway, like I said, I'm going to knuckle down for a few weeks and see if I can make some tangible progress rather than reaporting every other day which was never my intention. Good luck with your golf all.

**Lihu** · August 10, 2015

Guys, it was just a bit of fun, not being serious, and both of us really enjoyed the day, lots of banter going on. Yep we played with handicaps but I won no matter what scoring system he used - he tried several :-) . . . Anyway, like I said, I'm going to knuckle down for a few weeks and see if I can make some tangible progress rather than reaporting every other day which was never my intention. Good luck with your golf all.

Sounds like something I should remember to do when I play my son. :-D Seriously, good luck with your changing the picture as well. :-)

**Nosevi** · August 10, 2015

[quote name="Nosevi" url="/t/80287/petes-programme-single-digit-to-tour-player/288#post_1182263"]Guys, it was just a bit of fun, not being serious, and both of us really enjoyed the day, lots of banter going on. Yep we played with handicaps but I won no matter what scoring system he used - he tried several :-) . . . Anyway, like I said, I'm going to knuckle down for a few weeks and see if I can make some tangible progress rather than reaporting every other day which was never my intention. Good luck with your golf all.

Sounds like something I should remember to do when I play my son. :-D Seriously, good luck with your changing the picture as well. :-)[/quote] Thanks :-)

**ZappyAd** · August 10, 2015

I sort of thought telling people what can be achieved with the techniques, approach and kit I'm using was the point of this thread.

If that is the goal then you are 100% spot on imho. Very interesting to read about your progress and looking forward to the next update.:dance:

**MacDutch** · August 10, 2015

Keep up the good work, Pete. I am rooting for you. And your thread is a very good read to me.

**MattM** · August 10, 2015

Yeah.....I gotta be honest. Some of the arguing in here is kind of annoying. People just arguing semantics etc. Guys cut this guy some slack he is doing good things. How about we root for someone for a change!

**b101** · August 10, 2015

Yeah.....I gotta be honest. Some of the arguing in here is kind of annoying. People just arguing semantics etc. Guys cut this guy some slack he is doing good things. How about we root for someone for a change!

Agreed, for everything else, we have The Dan Plan thread :)

**Nosevi** · August 12, 2015

I've said before that I really don't want to go down the road of trying to tell people what they should or shouldn't do in order to improve their game. That said I'm in a pretty lucky position where I can practice full time and if I stumble on something that works it seems only fair to pass that on. After all, I'm getting help from others on here, if I can help others in a small way I'd like to.

When I set out on the programme, before deciding how I was going to go about getting better at golf (coaching, swing studio, link up with some tour pros to learn from them etc) I made a list of things I'd need to be able to do in order to have any chance whatsoever of being able to compete. Right up there was having an acceptable length off the tee. I could have put "Be epic with a 2 iron into your average Tour length par 4." but increasing driver distance to a point where I could compete seemed more reasonable. I use a launch monitor pretty much every day, in fact it's a GC2 so I can use it on the course if it's quiet, so I know what my numbers are and even though it's early on in the programme (months into what I'm expecting to be a 5 year deal) I've rapidly got to more or less where I need to be, normally carrying the ball between 270 and 280 yards in still air and on our fairways at the moment they tend to roll out to about 290 to a little over 300 for a normal drive. If I rip it (and don't lose the ball) it'll go a bit further. Getting to this point so quickly is well 'ahead of schedule' as I was expecting (or hoping?) to be at this point in about year 3. I expect my distance to go up as I put a bit more effort into my gym programme next year but we'll just have to wait and see.

I'm still working on 'remodeling' my swing a bit, if you have any comments feel free to post on the swing thread (http://thesandtrap.com/t/72433/my-swing-nosevi/18) but to save people having to nip over there to see it, to give an idea of my swing and to put some numbers to it this was a video taken today which gave a carry of just over 270 yards and a total distance of just over 290 yards.

Right, how did I go about getting longer off the tee?

As you'll find out as I continue this thread and as Randy already knows, I'm pretty meticulous in the way in which I go about my training programme and in this case I broke it down into the science behind making a golf ball fly a long way and then looked at how I could actually put that into practice.

Driving a golf ball a long way is simple physics - give the ball enough speed and launch it in the right parameters (launch angle, spin etc) and it'll fly a long way. I'm lucky enough to have a launch monitor to use but rather than spending countless hours of trial and error to see what sort of parameters I needed the ball to launch at, I used a golf ball flight simulation that's free to use and where you can type in ball speed, launch angle and spin and it'll fire back the carry numbers that'll give. I used Flightscope's which is here:

http://flightscope.com/products/trajectory-optimizer/

By using this and the launch monitor in tandem I could see what sort of launch parameters I was getting - say 160mph ball speed, 4500rpm spin, 14 degrees launch - and then 'play' with the numbers on the trajectory optimizer to maximize my distance. In addition, with a Ping G30 driver I could adjust the loft of the club as well. So taking this example you can see that with 160mph ball speed, 14 degrees launch and 4500rpm spin the ball will carry about 258 yards. If you change nothing except the spin goes down to 2600rpm the ball will fly about 274 yards. Much less spin and the ball doesn't have enough lift and so falls out of the sky losing distance. So I used a combination of the ball flight simulator, the launch monitor and adjusting the loft on my driver to maximize the carry given the power I had available.

The second part of the equation was to increase that power and also making sure I could deliver that power while remaining in balance - there's no point in having all the power in the world available if you fall flat on your butt on the tee trying to deliver it to the ball and sit there watching the ball sail out of bounds. My physical routine so far has concentrated on core stability (because I didn't have any) and dynamic strength rather than raw power. Looking at power will come later on in the programme once I have a base of fitness and strength. Core stability involved things like situps, dorsal raises, planks that sort of thing, and basic strength mostly involved free weights and exercises like squats. I was trying to build strength not power so it has all been low weight, high rep work, benching very light weights for 100 reps for example.

At the same time as I was doing this I did quite a lot of what really amounted to using my driver as an exercise tool. I'd basically do practice swings as hard as I could but with the proviso that I had to remain in perfect balance throughout. You really don't need to see some of my early efforts where I ended up sitting on the mat, no matter how amusing that may be, but this was after doing this exercise for some weeks every day. No ball involved but if you put the volume up you get at least an idea of club head speed. Hope you can also see this is in balance, I'm swinging within my ability to remain balanced.

So that was it really - understand the science, use the kit to maximize what I had physically while undergoing a physical programme designed to allow me to increase club head speed while delivering that to the ball in balance and under control. I'm sure there are other ways of going about it but this is just the route I took and as I said, the results were far quicker than I thought they would be.

**Nosevi** · August 13, 2015

Now that's an experience I've not had before. Just spent the afternoon with Brian in the swing studio (crikey can that guy hit his irons well!). Came inside, sat down and switched on the golf recorded on ''Sky Sports' a couple of days ago to see him being interviewed after a pretty good final round to put himself in contention in a tournament down on the south coast :-)

**b101** · August 13, 2015

Now that's an experience I've not had before. Just spent the afternoon with Brian in the swing studio (crikey can that guy hit his irons well!). Came inside, sat down and switched on the golf recorded on ''Sky Sports' a couple of days ago to see him being interviewed after a pretty good final round to put himself in contention in a tournament down on the south coast

Nice! Hope you found something to pick him up on...!

**Nosevi** · August 13, 2015

[QUOTE name="Nosevi" url="/t/80287/petes-programme-single-digit-to-tour-player/288#post_1183951"] Now that's an experience I've not had before. Just spent the afternoon with Brian in the swing studio (crikey can that guy hit his irons well!). Came inside, sat down and switched on the golf recorded on ''Sky Sports' a couple of days ago to see him being interviewed after a pretty good final round to put himself in contention in a tournament down on the south coast :-) [/QUOTE] Nice! Hope you found something to pick him up on...!

I'll think of something :-) Truth is he came over pretty well. Good thing, I think he'll probably have to get used to interviews in the future. We'll see......

**ZappyAd** · August 13, 2015

Really enjoying following your progress - keep going! I was wondering if you have something built into your plan where you practice making shots in a pressure situation? I've been reading a lot of golf books lately as I'm just getting back into golf after a long time away and it does seem like a lot of tour players had to play shots that mattered from a very early age. Whether it is playing for quarters or a bag of fries on the putting green or hitting chips over your parents house without smashing a window. Not necessarily a full round of golf but just getting used to dealing with the I've got to make this shot thought from an early age. Is that something you do as part of your routine now or is it covered at another point in your plan? Strategies for getting the mind under control before making a shot are quite interesting to me as I think it is something I struggle with so I'm always interested to find out how good players do it.

**Nosevi** · August 13, 2015

Really enjoying following your progress - keep going! I was wondering if you have something built into your plan where you practice making shots in a pressure situation? I've been reading a lot of golf books lately as I'm just getting back into golf after a long time away and it does seem like a lot of tour players had to play shots that mattered from a very early age. Whether it is playing for quarters or a bag of fries on the putting green or hitting chips over your parents house without smashing a window. Not necessarily a full round of golf but just getting used to dealing with the I've got to make this shot thought from an early age. Is that something you do as part of your routine now or is it covered at another point in your plan? Strategies for getting the mind under control before making a shot are quite interesting to me as I think it is something I struggle with so I'm always interested to find out how good players do it.

I'm not sure if I qualify as a good player just yet (but I'm working on it) but I do try to do that when I practice. My former career as an Air Traffic Controller does, I think, give me an advantage when it comes to performing under a certain amount of pressure. That said, whenever I'm involved in a practice session with one of the better players I now practice with I always insist that we compete. I normally lose but there's always competition involved. Doesn't matter if it's putting, bunker play or on the simulstor, we'll have closest the pin competitions or 'par 18' tournaments (up and down from more and more difficult lies around the practice green) every time we practice. Sometimes it's just for 'bragging rights' but we've played for change sometimes and even who's buying lunch based on a single shot. On top of that I always try to put myself on the spot to hit a shot if the situation presents itself. A while ago I did just that. Now this will come over as mega cocky but it was simply to put myself on the spot as I really see the value in it. I was standing on the practice ground with a tour pro and a PGA teaching pro, the subject being discussed was the tour pro's tendency to hook the ball and the teaching pro was giving advice. I said that all you really need to do is rotate more and hit it between those trees off the end of the range like this.......... Picked up my driver and hit a near perfect drive which carried the end of the range right between the 2 trees with a slight draw. Was I just being cocky? No, I was trying to put pressure on myself. I could very easily have looked like a right pratt but the fact that was a possibility put pressure on me to execute the shot. The tour pro was Brian shortly after I had met him for the first time and the teaching pro was a guy called Alec Bradley. Had I duck hooked it I'm not sure I would have got off on the same foot with Brian as I did who afterwards said he liked the fact I backed myself regardless of who was watching. In my opinion, to a certain extent, golf is about confidence and while I have a fair amount of confidence anyway (my previous career required it) I'll take any oportunity to put myself on the spot if I can. The above example is just one but I tend to try to put myself under pressure when I can in practice sessions. I'm not sure if it's been because I consciously think I need to, more because I enjoy the challenge and competition. On a different note, my bedtime reading has now changed...... What was a dawn to dusk programme is now a dawn till well after dusk one. Interesting read so far though.

***iacas*** · August 13, 2015

On a different note, my bedtime reading has now changed......

What was a dawn to dusk programme is now a dawn till well after dusk one. Interesting read so far though.

Let me know what you think.

**Nosevi** · August 14, 2015

[QUOTE name="Nosevi" url="/t/80287/petes-programme-single-digit-to-tour-player/288#post_1184070"] On a different note, my bedtime reading has now changed...... [SPOILER=Pics] [/SPOILER] What was a dawn to dusk programme is now a dawn till well after dusk one. Interesting read so far though.[/QUOTE] Let me know what you think.

Will do.

**b101** · August 14, 2015

On a different note, my bedtime reading has now changed......

What was a dawn to dusk programme is now a dawn till well after dusk one. Interesting read so far though.

You'll enjoy that!

**Nosevi** · August 14, 2015

[QUOTE name="Nosevi" url="/t/80287/petes-programme-single-digit-to-tour-player/288#post_1184070"] On a different note, my bedtime reading has now changed...... What was a dawn to dusk programme is now a dawn till well after dusk one. Interesting read so far though.[/QUOTE] You'll enjoy that!

From just reading the first part I think you're right. I think I've made an 'ok' start in year 1 which ends at the beginning of September, set a baseline to work from, but moving into year 2 I want to step it up a little and that's why I want to read this now so I can look at bringing it into how I move forward in year 2. My target line for on course performance (score against CR) is a shallowing curve but to maintain that I believe the effort required will be a steepening one (ie I'll need to put in more and more effort and time etc). Just for intetest this is the way the programme is looking so far (thanks to Randy). All the stats that make up the grades on the bar charts are on the separate tabs, the line represents my target on course performance and the dots are where I am at the end of each phase.

**Nosevi** · August 14, 2015

Quick update to the swing thread: http://thesandtrap.com/t/72433/my-swing-nosevi/30

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