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My Golf Rehab – Round 6

April 29, 2012 By Alex Leave a Comment

Today we played our 2nd round at Saunton Sands golf course. The weather was AMAZING! Just perfect for golf !

Short sleeve weather with just the tiniest of sea breezes and the views at this golf course are just gorgeous!

Anyway, I didn't start off very well, good drive, 2nd ( and 3rd ) into the nearest bumker, no score on that hole!

The next few holes were not much better and the old feelings of frustration and golfing misery were starting to re-appear!

I started working through the mental training that I've been working on in my golf mental programme and slowly, in my head, started to turn things around.

Now, who knows whether you feel better mentally because you start to play better golf, or you start to play better golf because you feel better mentally and I really believe it's the latter but slowly and surely, as my mental attitude improved, my golf game turned into that of another person.

I told myself that I was going to enjoy my game WHATEVER the score was and focussed SO hard on just hitting the ball in front of me and to be truthful, I played the best golf I've played in a long time and ended up with scoring 20 points on the back 9 !

My best score in forever and especially gratifying as it was on a course that was new to me. So together with my 'frustrated' front 9 score of 11 points I finished with a respectable total of 31 points so just dropping 5 points off my current handicap of 13 !

The mental golf game improvement is a slow, ongoing process but is most definitely working and I'm beginning to enjoy playing again.

More tomorrow when we play Ilfracombe Golf Course !

Filed Under: Golf Holidays, Golf Mental Articles, Golf Mental Game, Golf Mental Training, My Golf 'Rehab'

Golf Rehab: Round 1

April 28, 2012 By Alex Leave a Comment

So, today was my first day back on my home course after spending the past month in the Middle East playing on a rock hard dry course. My home golf course is in the UK, just outside London and needless to say, quite a difference in conditions to the sun baked course, today the course was wet and soggy, it was also freezing cold but I had so many layers on I was immune to the cold.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I didn't enjoy playing golf last year, in fact, most of my rounds I wanted to be any where else but on a golf course.

This year, I WANT to play, and THAT is the difference. My golfing mindset is TOTAlly different! I missed playing with my team mates, our handicaps range between 10 and 14 and we're quite a competitive group.

My handicap is 13 at the moment, I used to be 10 but it has slowly crept up, ( see my handicap explanation here ).

I didn't start my round too well, but kept mentally VERY positive and kept patient.

Here's my score today, I'll use this as a benchmark for future rounds:

Par	4	4	4	3	4	3	5	4	5	36	4	3	4	4	5	4	3	4	5	36	72
My Score	7	7	5	4	5	5	5	7	6	51	4	3	5	5	5	6	3	7	6	44	95

Well, at least I kept below 100! My back 9 was MUCH better than my front round and I was striking the ball really well once I got used to the mud and slush on the course.

What was important today was that I kept postitive the whole time and I didn't let the bad shots 'get to me' I literally played just one shot at a time and didn't think backwards or forwards.

A good start to my year and most importantly I enjoyed the round.

Next step for me is to start listening to the golf mental training downloads from the training course.

Golf Mental Game Training Answers

April 28, 2012 By Alex Leave a Comment

There are quite a few questions that I hope will get answered as I move along through Wade Pearse's Golf Mental Game Training Course.

Here are some of my questions, please feel free to post your own answers if you want:

1. As a very competitive person, the feelings of misery and frustration after losing a match can be crushing.

How do sports people deal with those feelings ?

At one point I used to feel SO bad after a loss that I would tell myself that it didn't really matter if I won or lost ( it's just a game, right ? ) and even to the point that I would mentally start preparing myself for a loss BEFORE the end of the match and that CAN'T be right!

You are welcome to leave your thoughts and answers in the box below:

Filed Under: Golf Mental Articles, Golf Mental Training, Minding Your Game, My Golf 'Rehab'