mdl

That was the funniest thing I've seen all day

Pro shop, as in you can't just put $110 towards a new driver and make it affordable? In that case, stocking up on golf balls is the obvious answer. If you can order push-carts and don't have one, I'm a huge fan of those, so that's my other idea.

Maybe I should go easy on you because you don't know how to use google to make sure you're spelling incredibly famous people's names correctly. But you're just embarrassing yourself putting Seve on there instead of the Tiger, the best golfer of all time.

Yeah it's not rocket science. No sugar, no refined grains, no processed crap, lots of plants, no fried food or anything else you already know is bad for you, not too much alcohol. No refined grains is a key a lot of people ignore. Refined grain is basically the same thing as sugar once it gets into your digestive system. A big plate of white pasta with some not-bad-for-you sauce – as in, not cheese/cream sauce – and some veggies is a very bad weight loss meal. Like was said above, that's a big part of why keto or paleo or atkins type diets work for people. It puts a hard stop on grains. But reasonable levels of non-refined grains can very much be part of a healthy weight diet, and in my opinion that's more sustainable for a lot of people. Exercising is good for you and will improve your health and mental state, but honestly isn't super associated with weight loss. Not that I'm advocating not exercising. I'm pretty into fitness myself. But lots of people think they can eat just a bit healthier – as opposed to actually eating healthily – and start exercising seriously and still lose weight. Studies have shown that's not effective for weight loss.

I agree these all seem pretty much true except the cart thing and #11, the words/images/feels one. Though I agree that if you physically can and the course isn't ridiculous to walk, golf is a better experience walking) #11 seems just like a weird semantic point. If you're taking verbal advice, the only way you can really abide by the other things that relate to practicing (doing it enough and with a purpose) is to use images/video. You kinda need the words to understand what the feels are supposed to be getting you, and what images you need to see (and which you don't) to have good, consistent results. So it should really say something more like, you don't use video in your practice.

That's why I mentioned you could do a hybrid or something. Say start the same as now, first playoff just another tourney with extra fedex points to get into the top 70 to make it to the next week. Then maybe do a light handicapping like in the proposed system over the next two weeks to go to 50 then 32, then have a match play finale for the win. I hear you on the fact that only one tourney a year is match play, so it's making the championship about a slightly different game than what's really being played all year long. But, what the hell. You'd have a tour champion and a fedex cup winner. And it would be fun!

Why not just take the top 64 (or 32) in fedex points from the regular season and have a playoff like every other sport. Seeded match play! You could imagine some combo with the proposed change to have handicapped stroke play to say go from top 70 to top 32 or even top 16 with stroke play, then have a seeded match play to get the fedex cup champion.

Fair enough. My point was just that I'm always surprised when trying to find my NPR how close I can be to the right side of the path and still have NPR be left side. I just did the math, and assuming a flat lie and an 8 iron (mine are +1.5"), the distance at address along the ground from the points directly below the two ends of the shaft, plus the length of my size 13 shoes is 2 feet 8 inches. Figure another another 2" to the sweet spot and another 2" so my heels aren't impinged by the path, and you get 3 feet. Say a cart path is 6 feet wide, then I need to be > 75% of the way to the right of the cart path for the NPR to be right. If the cart path is skinny, you can be even closer to the right edge percentage wise and still have NPR on the left. So maybe I overstated by saying you needed to be way close to the right edge. I guess I've been near that 75% line before, or taken relief off of skinny cart paths, and felt surprised at how close I looked to the right edge while still having NPR be on the left side.

Maybe I'm just a big guy with long clubs, but unless you're on the way right edge of the cart path, as a righty, I've found that NPR is basically always on the left side of the path. If I stand with my heels on the left edge of a standard cart path, my club is quite close to the right edge of the path. When my predominant miss was right, I really liked this, as it usually meant my NPR was in the usually lighter rough towards the fairway, rather than in whatever crap was over the cart path. Now a lot of my misses are big hooks, and I like this less!

Your hips are maybe 50-60˚ open there, at most, and your shoulders are 80-90˚ open. This is not the issue IMO.

This reminds me very much of the argument around why short game is the key to all scoring. You *expect* (unrealistically) to make all your 8 footers, get it within 4 feet from around the green every time, and hit the green with every wedge, and stick it close a lot of the time. Those are incredibly unrealistic expectations (better than the best pros), but it's what a lot of golfers think they can do. But amateur golfers can't even trick themselves into believing that every drive should go 280 and split the fairway, or that every 4i into a par 3 should be within 20 feet, so when they spray a bunch of drives and a couple long irons and cost themselves 6 strokes, they don't remember that with as much frustration as the 3-putt and the 3 missed up and downs from close, where at most they're losing 2.5 strokes. Same here with Spieth. Yeah, Spieth's had a bad year with the putter. But you watch him play and feel like he's playing badly because he's one of the best in the world, and you expect (hope?) him to go out and play close to Tiger in his prime. I think Schaufelle's going to be a great player for a long time. I've got nothing against him. But you only feel like he's playing better than Spieth because you didn't expect him to do anything, so the couple times he contended in a major event, you remembered how well he was playing.

Interesting. Have you seen this pitching video? That totally changed my short game. The "float load" and paint brush feel, plus the other mechanics tips, gave me a great place to start from. And then I used to live in a place where I had space to practice pitches/chips up to ~35 yards. If you really bleed a ton of strokes around the green, this video plus some good practice could really drop your scores! Of course, some lessons so you can use your driver might help too

All the advice above is good. I'll just say that you can definitely get a nice improvement going from such old, cheap irons. I went from mid 90s RAM irons, from a cheap, SW through driver set I bought back then, to some Titleist 695 CBs, and the improvement was vast. And that wasn't even as much of a time gap, just some time gap plus a big jump in club quality. Also, on your note that most of your missed shots are inside 100, obviously I don't know your stats, but that's a very common misconception. I think it comes from the fact that everyone feels like most of the 8 footers should go in (even tour pros are only 50/50 from there), and their SW and LW shots should always hit the green and usually be really close, neither of which are reasonable expectations for someone anywhere close to your handicap. So they are mad about those misses and remember them. But they expect a decent number of tee shots or longer irons to go wayward and cost strokes, so don't focus on those. My point is, if you're shooting 83-90, unless you're honestly 3-putting 4 times a round and take 2 pitches to even get on the green twice every round from just off the green, or shank every 3/4 SW even though you absolutely never shank other shots, you probably only have a couple strokes to gain from improving short game. The path from mid 80s to mid 70s is significant improvement in tee shots and full swing irons.

Take some videos, FO and DTL, and see! And start a my swing thread if you haven't so the rest of us can see too! I like the my swing threads from super low caps. I like to feel bad about my own swing

I've found it's just practice. Every time I go to the range I line up one alignment stick close to where I want my feet, and another one fairly close to where I'm going to be placing the balls, both parallel to my target line. So then you're always perfectly aligned during practice. Do that enough and you'll get very familiar for exactly what it feels like when you look up from the ball at your target after you set up when you're aligned correctly.