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How Stats Should Influence Your Practice Blueprint
Danial Gray
Elite Instructor: Sea Island Golf Performance Center
Owner: Measured Practice
Practice efficiency is an area most players shy away from but could be the reason they are not gaining traction in their games. If the player is applying max effort and not seeing lower scores there are two possible avenues regarding practice to explore. One avenue is how to correctly retrain your motor pattern, and the second is what type of practice sessions are you designing and do those practice sessions align with your on-course statistical weaknesses relative to your goals. In this series of articles, we will be focusing on the latter and how to design your practice sessions to help you gain traction in your game.
The first question to answer before you can design your practice sessions efficiently would be, where do your on-course stats guide you, relative to your goals. On-course stats are the blueprints for designing your practice sessions. That being the case, tournament golf is the best place for stats to illustrate your true strengths and weaknesses due to the nature of tournament play and the stressors that are a part of the competitive environment. You can certainly keep your stats on non-tournament days, but when prescribing practice sessions, they need to be based off your tournament stats. Since recording your on-course stats will be a large part of designing more efficient practice sessions, lets take a further look into the stats that Measured Practice helps you keep.
Strokes Gained and Lost
Strokes gained and lost is the method that the PGA Tour has been using since 2001 when professor Mark Broadie, a Columbia University professor, designed this form of stat keeping. This is a saber metrics method of stat keeping that allows you to see the quality of each shot in factions of strokes. Each shot on the course has a stroke average and essentially you take the stroke average of two shots, subtract the difference and then subtract one for the shot you hit. This leaves you with a small fraction of a number and that is your strokes gained or lost depending on the positive or negative result. Here is an example of a tee shot:
Par 4
- Hole Length 450 = stroke average 4.37 strokes on average to hole out
- Finished in the rough at 170 = 3.47 strokes on average to hole out
- The difference = .90
- Minus 1 for the shot you hit = -.10
- This would be a loss of .10 against a scratch player
Here is an example of a Measured Practice results page after a round and the breakdown in putting per putt:
It is important to understand this method because Measured Practice also measures your practice in the same method,
so you can compare your on-course stats to your practice stats. This is also a breakdown of some players, they have
great games off the course, but are difficult to compare to their on-course stats.
Traditional Stats can be Limited
Stats such as Greens in Regulation, Putts Per Hole, Total Putts Per Round, or even Fairways Hit Percentage can be
skewed or miss leading. If stats are miss leading this can lead you to design practice sessions that are not focused on
what will lower your scores and can lead to slower improvement rates. For example, Greens in Regulation combines the
skills of tee shots and approach shots, so that makes it difficult to know which the weakest skill is. In the case of
the Fairways Hit Percentage the element of distance is not factored into the equation and the player could have hit 14
fairways but maybe at a short distance that would make their second shot difficult to score from. In the case of Putts
Per Hole players do not know the proximity of the first putt, so if your average proximity to the hole is 29 feet then
you will have a higher Putts Per Hole than the player that has an average proximity to the hole of 20 feet. Also, if
you miss a lot of greens in regulation that number will be much lower than someone who hits a lot of greens and has a
longer average first putt.
Broadie has taken distance, proximity, and lie into account and combined it into one number so you can analysis the
quality of one golf shot at a time and group them together as a whole for the round. The importance of evaluating
individual skills on-course allows you to know which specific skill set need to be improved relative to your goals.
With Measured Practice you can analyzes your on-course stats and in addition to that your practice stats in a
strokes-gained and lost method. The baseline for Measured Practice is a scratch player, but Measured Practice has the
capabilities for you to set their goals for each area of their game.
What Starts the Process of Designing Your Practice Sessions
The first step to better practice is understanding where to begin the process. Players typically like to practice
what they are good at or they look at their weakest stat and think that is the obvious place to start. However, your
weakest link is not always the place to start. You have to be honest with yourself and look at the strokes gained and
lost results of your rounds over time. Realizing when you have a solid putting day relative to your game, the strokes
gained or lost associated with that round can help you set some expectation for the putting category goals. You can
also get a since on what the trend is over time and that too will help you set your goals for each category. Then you
could consistently work on the areas that are weakest relative to your goals, not the baseline scratch player.
The ability to set goals in sub categories is also a very important capability as well. For example, in putting to
be able to set goals in 5 feet increments allows you to break down your goals further. Setting goals in the
subcategories will allow you to set goals that are obtainable but also ones that will challenge you. That's the issue
with goals they must be realistic and obtainable, but also push you to strive harder.
This is how players set their competitive goals with Measured Practice and their subcategory goals:
First Step
First step will be to start keeping your stats on Measured Practice. You might not be able to set appropriate goals
until you record 4 or 5 rounds in a tournament environment, but after that you will be able to set realistic reachable
goals. After that we will start to dive into how to analyses those stats and set practice plans to gain traction in
your game.
The following articles will help you continue in the process of designing your practice blueprint.
