- 10 minutes ago
Joel Tadman runs through the Shot Scope data that demonstrates how good golfers break 80 on a consistent basis.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00Now for many golfers, breaking AT for the first time is seen as the holy grail, but if this
00:04milestone continues to elude you or you're struggling to know how to get there, in this
00:09video I'm going to give you some proven tips that are really going to help you break AT,
00:13whether it's for the first time or on a more consistent basis. The data in this video comes
00:17courtesy of ShotScope, one of the leaders when it comes to distance measuring devices and
00:22performance tracking. And if you're interested in starting your own journey with ShotScope to get
00:26some data on your own game, I've put some handy links in the description below where you can get
00:30your hands on their products for the best price in your area. Without further ado, let's dive into
00:34the seven proven ways you can break AT for the first time. Now more driver distance has a direct
00:45correlation on your ability to shoot lower scores. If you look at the data from ShotScope you can see
00:49that golfers shooting in the 80s are only averaging 236 yards off the tee with their driver, whereas
00:55golfers shooting in the 70s are averaging 261 yards. So that's a really big jump. So clearly there's a
01:01link between more distance and lower scores. But if you are able to increase your driver distance, it
01:07doesn't necessarily always work out to lower scores. If, for example, you're spraying all over the place
01:11with your added length and you're finding out of bounds, lost balls, penalty areas, that extra distance
01:16is not necessarily useful to you. But generally speaking, a little bit more distance will
01:20definitely help. I'm going to try right now. I'm going to try and hit this a little bit harder and
01:24get that driving distance up and hopefully it will help me shoot something in the 70s a bit more often.
01:36Pretty happy with that one. So there you go. If you can try and hit it further, keep it in
01:40play,
01:40it should help your ability to shoot slower scores.
01:48Now another big dividing factor between golfers that shoot in the 70s versus
01:52those that shoot in the 80s is their ability to find greens in regulation. If you look at the data
01:57from Shotscope, it tells us the golfers shooting in the 80s only hit just over five greens in regulation
02:02per round, whereas golfers who are shooting in the 70s hit nine greens a round. So that's a significant
02:09increase. Now, what can you do to increase your chances of finding more greens in regulation?
02:13Well, the first thing you do is find the fairway off the tee. The data from Shotscope tells us you're
02:18around about 9% more likely to hit the green if you're on the fairway versus if your ball is
02:22in
02:22the rough. So that's your first point. Luckily, I've hit a good tee shot here, so I've got off to
02:26a good
02:26start. Now, if you look at the trouble on most holes, you'll see that around the green, it tends to
02:30be
02:30short of the green. So you want to be choosing a club that's going to be favouring going slightly long
02:34of the flag. That's going to increase your chances of hitting the green. If you also think about when
02:38you're misstriking a shot, what tends to happen? You lose distance. If you lose distance, you're
02:43more likely to be finding that trouble short of the green. So choose an appropriate club. In here,
02:46for this particular shot, the flag is 150 yards away, give or take, and my A-time carries 155 yards.
02:53So that's the perfect club for this particular shot. I know I'm probably not going to come up short of
02:57the
02:57green. It's going to increase my chances of hitting the green. And the other thing you need to consider
03:01is where you're aiming. In this particular shot, you can see here the flag is positioned quite tight
03:05on the left-hand side. So that's a flag you don't want to go chasing. If you miss it short
03:09left,
03:09short-sided, it's going to reduce your chances of getting up and down from there and potentially
03:13making a bogey. So on this particular shot, I know I've got the right club, but I'm going to be
03:17aiming
03:17probably 10 foot right at that flag. The middle of the green is going to increase my margin of error
03:21and
03:21hopefully give me a better chance of hitting the green and shooting something in the 70s. So I've talked the
03:25talk here. Let's give it a go. I know I've got the right club. I'm going to be aiming just
03:30right at that
03:31pin. Hopefully we can find the green. Whoa. Now see, that's a perfect example. Didn't hit it great,
03:46but it just covered the bunker because I had the appropriate club and it's kicked forward on the
03:50green about 15 foot right at the pin. So I'm absolutely delighted with that. If you follow
03:54those tips, it should help you find a few more greens.
04:01Now this might look like a relatively easy shot. I'm going to get my rangefinder out here and it's
04:06going to tell me that we are exactly 70 yards away from the pin. But if you look at the
04:12ShotScope data,
04:13it tells us that golfers shooting in the 80s are much worse at minimizing wasted shots from this
04:18particular distance, i.e. they're not hitting the green on their first attempt and they're often
04:23pitching or chipping again, which is no good if you want to shoot lower scores. It's around about
04:27one more time per round that golfers in the 80s are doing this. So you absolutely need to make sure
04:32you practice shots from this particular distance. There's a few things you can do to increase your
04:37chances of not having to pitch or chip again. First thing is obviously making sure you're achieving
04:42clean contact from this distance with your wedges. So practicing strike, making sure you're getting ball
04:47then turf is obviously a good place to start. But I think the real key here is having some sort
04:52of
04:52system in place that's going to allow you to control your distances. So it could be a simple
04:57clock face drill, for example. So we know that swinging the club back at different lengths is
05:01going to control the speed that you put into the wedge and that's going to control the distance output
05:05at the other end. So for example, for me, I know that my lob wedge outfall goes 85 yards, but
05:10my nine
05:11o'clock swing with a lob wedge, so left arm parallel to the ground, goes around about 70 yards. So
05:15that should be
05:16the perfect swing and club for this particular shot. And obviously the last thing you want to do
05:21is just make sure you're airing on the side of safety in terms of where you're aiming. Don't go
05:25chasing those really tight pins. If it's just over a bunker and you're getting a bit too cute with it,
05:30you could get into serious trouble there. So make sure you're favoring longer the pin in that particular
05:33situation or just aiming at the slightly fatter part of the green. That's going to increase your chances
05:38of not having to pitch or chip again. So I know this is a perfect nine o'clock swing for
05:43my lob wedge.
05:44I'm going to aim just right at the pin and hopefully we can knock it close.
05:52Just right at the pin. It's not a great shot, but it's on the green and I'm not chipping or
05:58pitching again.
06:03Now arguably one of the easiest ways you can go from shooting in the 80s to shooting in the 70s
06:08is to reduce the number of what I would call troublesome tee shots you have during a round.
06:12And what I mean by troublesome tee shots is any tee shot that ends in a fairway bunker,
06:17a lost ball, out of bounds or in a penalty area. And if you look at the data from ShotScape,
06:22you'll see that golfers shooting in the 70s are only having around about two of these tee shots per round,
06:26whereas golfers in the shooting in the 80s have it almost double that. So clearly there's progress to
06:31be made off the tee if you want to break a tee. And there's a few things that I think
06:34you can do to
06:35reduce the number of troublesome tee shots you have during a round. The first would be to use
06:40what technology you have available to scope out what lies ahead. So on this particular hole here
06:44at the beautiful Stoke Park, you can see here there's obviously a massive penalty area on the
06:48left. We'll come onto that in a second. But there's also trees on the right that sort of stick out.
06:52So it's like, can I use my rangefinder to see exactly how far those trees are away? So I know
06:57that
06:58they're sort of 215 yards away, so I can definitely carry those. So that's useful information to me
07:02to know that I can actually go a bit further right here and probably carry those trees.
07:06But the biggest bit of advice I would say is to get some technology that allows you
07:10to see where the widest part of the fairway is. ShotScape has the G6 watch, which has whole maps,
07:16which is really useful to see exactly what lies ahead and choosing a club that's going to hit the
07:20ball to the widest part of the fairway. It's going to increase your margin for error on your tee shots
07:24and hopefully reduce the number of those troublesome tee shots. Right is obviously a
07:29slightly miss here, but I'm going to try and hit it straight. It's a drivable par four,
07:32so I'm just going to aim pretty much just right at the green and hopefully we won't go left in
07:39the
07:39penalty area and we might even find the fairway. Yeah, pretty happy with that one just down the
07:50right hand side. So try those tips in terms of finding fairways more often, less troublesome
07:55tee shots and your scores should come down. Now, this might sound obvious, but golfers who want to
08:06shoot in the 70s more often need to reduce the number of three putts they have per round. If you
08:11look at the data from ShotScape, it tells us that golfers shooting in the 80s are basically having one
08:16more three putt per round versus golfers who are shooting in the 70s. If you look a little bit
08:20deeper into the data of a five handicap golfer versus a 10 handicap golfer, you'll see that putts
08:25per green in regulation, golfers who are 10 handicappers are actually having more three putts
08:31than they are one putts, whereas the opposite is true for five handicap golfers. It's obviously a
08:36two-pronged attack in terms of reducing three putts. You need to be better at short range. There's a
08:40couple of things that as a three handicap golfer myself that have really helped me reduce the number of
08:45three putts I have during the round. The first is if you're short on time before a round, just spend
08:49a couple of minutes having some long putts on the practice putting green just to get a feel for how
08:53the ball's rolling on that particular day. It'll help you calibrate your brain and just get a feel
08:58and understanding of how fast the greens are on that particular day. The other thing I like to do on
09:03really long putts is to break the putt down into thirds, but also really focusing on that final third
09:08because that's when the ball is slowing down. It's going to be affected the most by the slopes of the
09:13green, so really focus on the final third of the putt. Read it as if you had a putt from
09:17that
09:17shorter distance versus from back here and that'll just give you a better sense of what the ball is
09:22going to do as it slows down and should hopefully reduce the proximity of the hole from long range
09:27and that would obviously then correlate to reducing the number of three putts. So give those tips a try,
09:32focus on reducing three putts and that could well get you from shooting in the 80s to the 70s.
09:42Now golfers who are consistently shooting in the 70s are getting up and down when they missed the
09:47green more than golfers who are shooting in the 80s and if you look at the shotscape data you can
09:51see
09:51that five handicapped golfers who are breaking 80 most of the time get up and down when they miss the
09:56green 47 percent of the time which is pretty much one in two attempts whereas 10 handicapped golfers who
10:01are breaking 80 not much of the time it's 39 which is closer to one in three attempts so clearly
10:08scrambling is a very important metric if you want to shoot lower scores there's a few things you can
10:13do to increase your chances of getting up and down and breaking 80. The first thing would be to choose
10:18the the right club for the shot at hand so you see here I've not got loads of green to
10:22work with in
10:22this particular shot so my 54 degree wedge is going to work wonders but if the pin was at the
10:28back of the
10:28green there's a lot more green to work with I'd probably switch to a lower lofted club maybe a
10:33nine or an eight iron to get them all running a little bit more like a putt and getting it
10:37running
10:37out towards the hole one thing I really like to do on shots like this like short chip shots is
10:42to read
10:42the green so I'll stand at the edge of the green and have a proper scope out of the the
10:47slope and
10:48obviously choose the line accordingly and the last thing that's really helped me in reduce my proximity
10:54when chipping is just have the mental approach of trying to hole it obviously when you aim small
10:59you miss small and having that real sharp focus on trying to hole it I found has really reduced my
11:05proximity obviously I'm not going to hole it a lot of the time but it should help you hit the
11:09chip shots
11:09a little bit closer than you did before so I know this is like a right edge part I've just
11:14had a read
11:14of it and I'm really focused on my landing spot and trying to hole it there we go not a
11:26bad result
11:26focus on holding it choose the right club and that should increase your chances of getting up and down
11:36now another way you can make inroads on your scores and hopefully move from shooting in the 80s to in
11:41the
11:4170s is by missing fewer putts from this particular range inside five feet it's a critical distance
11:47keeps momentum of your round going if you look at the data from shot scope you'll see that golfers
11:52shooting in the 80s are missing around about one more putt per round from inside five feet versus
11:58golfers shooting in the 70s so clearly there's progress to be made from this distance it's important
12:02to remember you don't have to be perfect from this distance even pga tour players from three to five
12:07feet are only holding out on average 87 percent of the time so what's that one in seven but if
12:13you
12:13can hole out once more per round from this distance it's going to make a real impact so what are
12:18the
12:18things that you can do to increase the likelihood of holding out from short range well there's a few
12:22things I like to do the first thing is once you've read the putt and picked your line you could
12:26choose
12:27a spot that's in between the ball and the hole to roll the ball over that's a good thing here
12:30so there's
12:31a little blemish on the green there that might work another thing I like to do is pick an
12:35imperfection at the back of the hole that also helps me to be a bit more committed through the
12:39stroke but in this particular putt which is probably right half there's a little bit of mud on the cup
12:43there which is a really good aiming point another thing you could do is switch to a golf ball that
12:47has some alignment assistance on it so this is the tailor-made tp5x stripe if you struggle to start your
12:52ball online this is a really good option to try you can just line the ball up on your intended
12:57line
12:57and then obviously when you're addressing the ball just make sure those the sight line on your putter
13:01is a line to the line on the ball and stroke away and hopefully you'll hold a few more putts
13:05that
13:05way but this particular putt there's a speck on the hole which I really like it's just right half
13:10perfect for this particular putt you're going to just really be committed on that particular line
13:15get the sight on the putter aiming at that and put a committed stroke on it
13:21and in we go so if you could just hold at least one more putt from inside five feet it
13:26might well take
13:27you from shooting in the 80s into the 70s so hopefully this video has given you some food
13:31for thought in terms of the things you need to do to break 80 whether it's for the first time
13:35or just
13:36on a more consistent basis if I had to give you three key takeaways they would be to hit at
13:41least
13:41nine greens in regulation have no more than two three pups per round and no more than two failed chip
13:48or pit shots from inside 70 yards those are the three things to really focus on but if you focus
13:53on
13:54those and the rest of the tips in this video hopefully you'll be breaking 80 in no time big
13:59thank you to shotscope for providing the data in this video and as I mentioned earlier if you're
14:03interested in trying any of the shotscope products I've put some handy links in the description so you
14:07can get hands on those but that's all from me here from stoke park we'll see you next time
Comments