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Archive for July, 2013

How To Do Visualization For Golf

Everywhere you turn, some instructor is talking about visualization for golf. You hear them tell golfers things like: While you’re doing your preshot routine…see the ball taking the flight path directly to the target you picked…or…see the line of travel on the putting green you think the ball will take on this break. Etc. Etc.

Well, I’ve got great news for some golfers. All of this standard advice that is repeated to golfers without the slightest thought to it’s effectiveness can actually HURT a golfer’s game. In this video, I am going to free you up from the shackles of this typical advice.

Always remember, if you haven’t gotten the message from me yet, that YOU ARE UNIQUE. Just because something works for one golfer, doesn’t it mean it works for you. Watch this video to “see” what I mean….(or just listen to the audio and it “works” just the same). Notice how solid this concept is….

Greens and fairways,
Craig

Transcript

Title:

Visualization in golf is WAY overrated. Yep, more heresy for the golf establishment.
You hear it from every golf instructor – “You must visualize your shot or putt” before you take it. Jack Nicklaus wrote: (show this in text next to pic of Jack Nicklaus. Find an old picture of when he was younger) “I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head.” Visualize, visualize, visualize…I’m really tired of hearing that word. Did you know that about 20% of the population is not visual? What are they supposed to do? If you give a golfer who isn’t very visual that advice then all you’ll do is confuse him or her and hurt their game.

I used to buy into this whole “visualization” thing until I watched this interview of Tiger Woods:

(Tiger Woods interview)

And now having worked with over a 1000 clients in person and thousands more online, I’ve come to realize that you don’t need to visualize anything in order to be great. Tiger proved that.
Ding!
So here’s the truth about visualization for golf…
When I work with any golfer or other athlete, I never use the word “visualize” …instead, tell them to “think, imagine, or pretend”

This is a huge breakthrough for some people. My point for you is to do it YOUR WAY and if you’re not very visual, like Tiger, it’s no problem at all.
Some of us, like me, are more auditory, meaning, words, voice, and sounds are more powerful than visions.
Others are more FEEL and touch oriented like Tiger.
If you can use all three modalities, great! Unless you know that you are really visual, then drop the word and do it your way…and you will be doing it correctly and it will help you lower your golf score! What I do is to replay my best shots from the past, in my head and body, right before I take my shot or putt. And…I do it MY WAY! YOUR WAY works for YOU!

I’m Craig Sigl and your swing is good enough to go low

How To Make Solid Contact On Golf Shots

It’s so frustrating when you top or chunk a shot. It happens to everyone, even the pros at times.

Now, you can spend your life trying to fix every little piece of your swing in order to find that perfect, consistent movement OR, you can focus on ONE simple directive to your unconscious mind that will tell it to hit the ball on the sweet spot of the club face.

In this video, I give you that directive.  Do this and watch how much more often you hit solid contact on your golf shots.

 

Transcript

Golfers get themselves so tied up in swing mechanics whenever they have a bad shot from poor contact. They look for swing problems that just aren’t there and all that happens is they end up creating even more problems looking for the cure.

One of the most effective ways to ensure solid contact on your full swings is simply this: Watch the clubface make contact with the back of the ball.

You know, sometimes I have to pinch myself after I go back to my own tips like this one because they just seem too simple…that’s the biggest problem in golf…we always seem to want to overcomplicate things but we don’t need to!

This simple tip, if focused on, will eliminate most of your poor contact shots and you’ll want to make it a permanent habit. Need a little proof that this works? Look at these pros and notice how far their swing has gone past hitting the ball and they are still looking down at the spot where they hit it. DO NOT twist this into “Keep your head down.” This is different.
Just let the momentum of your swing naturally pull your head up out of it’s contact position.

You don’t have to try, just think “watch the club hit the ball” during your practice swing and then swing away…

Emblazon this on your brain cells and focus on it now and during your range warmup and just watch your ball go farther and straighter. It’s such a simple game if you want it to be.

The Proper Golf Club Grip Pressure For You

I’ve seen dozens of pages attempting to teach golfers the “proper” way to grip a golf club. Instructors are clueless that their instruction in this area only confuses most of their students. My take: grip it how it’s comfortable for you. There’s more than one way to hold a club and swing it and you can be successful with any which way you choose.

How hard to hold the club seems to be a bit of an issue too. I think you’ll like what I tell you in this short video. It’s the shortcut secret to golf club grip pressure.

 

Transcript

Are you confused by all the advice on how much grip pressure to use when swinging your clubs? Supposedly, Sam Snead said to grip the club like you would hold a baby bird. And then Ben Hogan said: “what Sam Snead didn’t tell you is that the baby bird is a hawk.”

As with so much golf advice out there, you can find conflicting opinions on this but I’m here to clear it up for you.

Frankly, I’ve never paid any attention to anyone saying to grip the club harder or softer, I just pick up the club and hold it just enough so that it doesn’t fly out of my hand and I TRUST that that is the right pressure and I never give it a thought. If you follow me, you’ll know that I preach that TRUST is the most important thing in a golf swing.

The Shortcut secret to grip pressure that clears up the confusion is to grip the club as tight as you want BUT…do not let the tightness go past the palms and into the wrists.

Imagine that you have a boundary between your palms and your wrists that does not let the tightness or tension go past. Your wrists, forearms, elbows and upper arm should be loose all the way through the swing.

A number of teaching pros say that the bigger error in grip pressure with amateurs is that they have varying grip pressures throughout the swing while the pros have a consistent pressure from start to finish.

Whatever you do with this tip…DO NOT bring it to the course or even give it a thought out there. Think about and work on it in practice or swinging in your yard and get to a place where you can TRUST your swing and you’ll be perfect!

Greens and fairways,
Craig

Don’t Believe Any Golf Instructor or Coach

Quite often, I hear from my golfer clients that they are so confused by the conflicting swing advice…and sometimes conflicting mental game advice…that they are given by instructors and coaches.

One says to swing more around the body while another says you need to bring it more upright.

One mental coach says you need to play against par, and not your opponents while another says that you play for the love of the game (me).

Who do you believe? What to incorporate?

Well, I just made a short video to address this.
Click on the video below and let me know what you think in the comments below that.

 

Transcript

Don’t Trust Any Golf Guru!
Listen, as usual. I’m going to be controversial in this video. Why is it that we think that if a golf instructor has worked with a touring pro, or has been a touring pro himself (or herself) that that makes them a good golf instructor for you?

Let me tell you right here that what makes a good instructor for YOU has nothing to do with any of that! NOTHING.

The best golf instructors are the ones that flex to what’s best FOR YOU! They don’t try to fit round pegs into square holes. EVERY GOLFER IS DIFFERENT and cookie cutter swing methods do not work for everyone.
That’s the big problem with getting golf instruction online. You can’t do much of a personal approach when you’re selling generic information.

What you’re really looking for is results and you don’t know in advance whether or not some golf advice is going to work for us, right?. So we subconsciously look for clues that give us the confidence that we might get those results for the time and money we spend.

We tend to believe that since this guy was voted best golf teacher of the year well then maybe that increases the chances that what they have to teach will work for me. But there is NO DIRECT CORRELATION between those 2 facts.

So then, who is the best golf instructor for you then? YOU!

Nobody knows you as well as YOU do. I’m here to tell you, today…do NOT trust any golf instruction out there as gospel. Including mine!

What you want to do, then, is to take in golf instruction, from me, or anyone else and make decisions as to what you think will work for you…commit to it…AND IGNORE THE REST.

I don’t want you to blindly follow any of my advice. I want you to listen to the logic of what I or anyone else is teaching and test it with what you know about yourself. I can’t tell you how many golfers I’ve talked to who have studied or worked with big name teachers and gotten ZERO results…and then they blame themselves for it and feel ashamed to even admit it while the big name teacher goes around spouting tour names…blah blah blah

TRUST YOURSELF and your intelligence. Be a skeptic and don’t be one of the sheople who idolize the golf media’s pets.

I’m Craig Sigl and your swing is good enough to go low, right now.

How To Make All Your 3-Foot Putts

So I’m working hard on my game this year…using all of my own tricks and strategies. I decided a short while back to begin right next to the hole and eliminate misses on my short putts.

I did a little research, and went back to my memory banks and started experimenting and came upon this fantastic tip for making all of your 3-foot or shorter putts. It’s so simple I can’t believe I overlooked it the last few years.

Before figuring this out, I couldn’t make more than 16 3-foot putts in a row.

The moment I figured this out and replicated it, I made 40 3-foot putts in a row.

Watch the 3-minute video to see what I mean

 

Transcript

Title: How to make all of your 3 foot putts

Hi Craig Sigl here with today’s shortcut secret. I am SOO excited to have discovered this one because I have been working on how to crack the code for making all of my 3 foot putts as the foundation of confidence for my short game.

So, I’m at the practice green after a round trying to figure out why I missed two 3-footers that day and I’m experimenting with different setups and strokes and then my mind went back to a drill a golf pro gave me 20 years ago in my only set of lessons.

The drill is to start a putt with your putter touching the ball and just push it to the hole. No backswing at all. Something in my body and shoulder movements clicked for me when I did that. It felt really different than what I had been doing.

Another voice in my head came to me and this one was a video of a pro teaching how amateurs biggest short game problems could be solved by accelerating at the ball and through the follow through.

I put 2 and 2 together and came up with this:

The big secret for making all of your short putts is to take the club back as little as possible on the backswing.

As soon as that light bulb went on, I went back to my 3 foot half circle drill where I see how many in a row I can hit, and I hit 40 3 foot putts right then! I’d never made more than 15 before that.

This seemed TOO easy, I was floored, astonished! How could I have missed such a simple fix for my short putts.

So, I introduced other variables in my putting stroke to try to “disprove” my new theory.

I jabbed at the ball…and it went in.
I rested the club on the green after a putt..and it kept going in
I changed my stance and got my eyes off the line of travel…and it still went in!

All I had to do was to make sure that the putterhead was squared up to the line to the hole and only bring back the club a couple inches…and it worked no matter what else I did!

I’m so excited by this…my days of missing 3 foot putts are over and so can yours.

See you on the next tip…

By the way…your swing is good enough to go low

The one best golf tip of all time

It isn’t too often that I have such “universal” tips that I think can help everyone. Most golf advice needs to be taken with a grain of salt and decided by the golfer if it’s going to work.
I think you will agree with me on this video, but more importantly, will you do it.
Click the video below to see what I mean

The One Best Golf Tip Of All Time

Transcript

Do you want to score lower? No really, I mean it because I’ve got a strategy here in this 2-minute video that if you adopt it in your game, your scores WILL go down and you will probably agree with me that it’s true when you hear it. The issue though, is that very few golfers will actually do this even though it’s so easy and here it is:

Every round that you go out there and play, dedicate that round to working on ONE thing that will make the biggest difference in your game. Did you hear me…ONE item that if you ingrain it, will really contribute to your consistency. Most golfers are just flat out, overwhelmed with advice and tips and tactics and all it does is cause tension and ruin their swing.

Instead, as you walk the fairway when you have time for spare thoughts, think about that one thing. When you’re going through your preshot routine with all your focus, bring in that one thing.

This is not only going to help you adopt that one thing into your body’s intelligence, but it will crowd out all of those negative thoughts and voices you normally have running around in your head.

Here’s some ideas to get you started on the ONE thing that can really make a difference for you. How about:

Rythm and tempo
Accept every shot as it is
Play in the present moment, one shot at a time
Target-focused
Easy, calm, and fluid
Smooth
Slow backswing
Solid foundation
Swing or play within yourself

Are you getting the picture here? We’ve heard all of these types of tips and tactics before, magazines and books are filled with them, but how often do we actually give any attention to any of them out on the course? Very little, I know. If you actually want to lower your scores, take a longer-term approach and work on ONE THING AT A TIME. Think of yourself like the stock market…on any given day you could be up or down but over the long haul, always getting better.
Your swing is good enough.

Visual putting more important than feel putting?

If you’ve been with me for any amount of time, you know that I tend to see things differently than your average golf coach or instructor. This is definitely true for my putting and it may be for you too and you’ve overlooked it. Maybe not, but it does merit taking a look at this concept to see if there’s any truth to it for you.

I’m actually not a very visual person and yet, something about putting really is all about how the putter squares up and, can I keep it on line with my target line.

Take a look and see if this helps you. By the way, what do golfers really mean when they say “feel” about putting? Other than the obvious of how it feels when a putter strikes a ball. How does that actually have an effect on whether a golfer can make a putt or not? Is it just a confidence thing?

I’d love to see your opinions below this video.

 

Transcript

For every part of the game of golf, you can find experts who will disagree with each other as to what is the best way to do X. Golf shortcut secrets is not about believing anyone but trusting yourself and going with this – “It Works For Me!”

I’m here to advocate for you and give you permission to find your own way in this game. There is no perfect….There is no “doing it right.” There’s is only getting the ball in the hole in the least amount of strokes as possible.

Today’s shortcut secret is about putting. I struggled for years as a below-average putter routinely missing 3-footers until I woke up to something and here it is. I had a friend stand behind me while I putted for a whole round and he didn’t say anything until the end. When it was over, he told me that I consistently did not line up the direction of my putter with my target line.

After the round, we went to the practice tee and found a straight putt to practice. He stood behind me and told me to tell him when I thought I was lined up straight. Half the time I was and half the time I wasn’t…and the times I was, often on my misses he would observe that my putter did not continue down the line. Basic stuff right? Well it wasn’t to me. Here’s the kicker. I was going around telling myself that I pushed or pulled it when I missed. “Well, what does that mean?” Those are just words that golfers used to explain misses but they don’t really mean anything substantial and certainly don’t help you with the fix.

Anyway, bottom line…I found out that my eyes had a very hard time aligning the putter with the target line and seeing the putter follow the target line during the stroke. When I thought I was lined up, my partner behind me said I wasn’t. The problem was my eyes or how I saw my putter.

Ok great…I knew my problem but didn’t know how to fix it…until one day…I’m walking around a sporting goods store…and I always go to the golf section…and I try out various putters on the display and practice green they had set up. After hitting a few others, my eye was drawn to this one particular putter that had a very large visual aid on it as you are looking down on it.

I started putting with it, using my normal putting method and I started hitting ball after ball straight to the cup. I couldn’t believe it! I switched back to the other putters and didn’t make nearly as many and it became obvious to me that I could SEE the putter head flowing down the target line behind and after hitting the ball. My eyes then automatically guided my shoulders and arms and today, I putt better than ever!

There’s a lot of science out there on how our eyes work with respect to putting but maybe the solution is to just look for a putter that strikes you as it did for me…focusing on your vision when choosing a putter…and not the feel of the putter. Remember when the 2 and 3-ball putter were all the rage a few years back when they came out…it’s because of this…you might help yourself by LOOKING into this. It’s such an easy solution.