Ho Dirters,

My website has had a nice free PDF collection of neuroscience explanations cherry-picked from thousands of videos available on line, so that golfers and golf teachers can catch up to the past 20-25 years of revolution about the human brain and body. Neuroscience research has expanded human understanding of the brain and body by 350 times more than was ever known in all human history up to 1989. Golfers, golf teachers, golf "psychs", motor sports "experts", and even educational experts don't know any of this science. I checked, and have been checking for 20+ years. Public school teachers and university educational experts have "started" catching up about 3 years ago, at Harvard and a few other well-endowed factories, but generally, they are further down the track for catching up than anyone else in the above list.

Hi Dirters,

How can we gain the most benefit from our practice sessions?

Whenever possible do your practice in a controlled environment. By this I mean if your course allows you to hit your OWN balls at practice ....DO IT. The experience of hitting your own golf balls out into the distance can really help fine tune your learning experience. Growing up I had 100 balls in my shag bag. I would hit this entire bag of 100 balls with my wedges and then the same amount with my short irons and then onto mid irons and then long irons and ultimately the woods, which adds up to a lot of balls in a day. After each 'repetition' of 100 balls I would have to go pick them up. Knowing I had to retrieve my own balls zoned me in to taking more time between shots. It made me zone into my target. It made me be much more precise in my practice because I didn't want to have to walk too far off the beaten track to retrieve the balls. And God help me if I lost one and came back to start the next batch with only 99 or 98 balls in my shag bag.

I know many golf clubs supply range balls for revenue and for ease and people regard this as the easiest method, but hitting unsentimental range balls provides a different environment in the mind. From my experience I become less attached to the shot knowing I didn't have to retrieve the ball I was about to strike. However if you can get out to a field or hit balls on an unused hole (as Hogan did at Shady Oaks) and know each ball means something when the time comes for 'pick up' then you will be amazed at how much more in tune we become with our swing and mental capacity.

Having seen a lot of driving ranges in my time I always marvel at how many folks just use the rapid fire approach... Wham..wham..smack..... without even watching the ball land or use the outcome as feedback for their body and mind. They look like they cannot wait to just scrape the next ball over from the pile and feel content to just tell others that they are working hard because they hit 125 balls yesterday. Jack Nicklaus always said it is the quality of the practice and not the quantity. He practiced on the range with the same intensity as if he was on the 72nd hole of The US Open.

Most driving ranges are flat. How many perfect flat level lies do we actually get to play from on the course in a true round of golf? Not many at all except for tee shots. When we practice we have control of the ball. We bring it over from the pile with the toe of our club and place it on a beautiful tuft of grass. Sometimes we even tee it up at the end of our previous divot for a better sense of security in obtaining a good strike. Golf unfortunately just doesn't pan out like that when we are playing the course proper. When I had practiced for a while I would then grab a handful of balls and wing them up in the air or just spin around with my arm extended letting balls fly out of my hand at different intervals. I would do this with all 100 balls in the bag maybe 10 at a time. Where ever they came to rest that is where they got played from. It didn't matter if they ended up in tall grass, a divot, on pine needles or behind a tree. That was the result that ball had received and my only option was to admire the lie, plan the route and execute the shot. If it didn't come off as planned then I had learned something that I could implement into my thinking or feel the next time one of my random ball tosses ended up in the same predicament.

The same thing goes when we are working on our pitching or chip shots and bunker play around the practice green. The golf ball can be very discriminate in it's nature. When we are playing golf the ball seems to find it's way into some incredible positions that we can scarcely believe at times. My conclusion to this is if it got there.... there must be some way out of there also. And this is why practicing wisely, preparing for all conditions and possibilities benefits us out on the golf course. Not only will we have a reasonable knowledge on how to attempt the shot we are facing because we have actually played the shot before and experienced it before, we also welcome the opportunity to become less 'mentally scarred' from these supposed 'bad breaks' we are encountering. Our brain will become more aware and prepared and say "I've got his shot"... instead of the normal hands in the air and "why me?" reaction when faced with these 'unfair' breaks that want to wreck our pysche and our score all in one foul swoop.

Reminds me of the old saying... "practice doesn't make perfect"... "perfect practice makes perfect".....Perfect we won't be as golf is the most difficult game ever invented........ but we will be prepared....and that is half the battle.

Time for some current news and an update on some of what is in store for Secret In The Dirt in the upcoming weeks and month.  First as you have probably noticed we are now hosting our videos at YouTube.  The idea here is simple.  First the videos are going to be more easily shared throughout the web and will load faster for our friends in more distant parts of the world.  Second and more importantly all of the video in The Vault are now shareable and embeddable.  This makes them more usable now to everyone in forum posts, blogs and profile favorites and it also means that The Vault vids can be used not just in Secret In The Dirt but also pretty much anywhere that golfers talk golf on the web. The best thing a Dirter can do for The Dirt is to make sure that when you find a Vault Video you love whether here or at www.youtube.com/secretinthedirt please share it with your golfing friends.

For quite a while now I have been asked in personal messages and so forth to recommend drills for improving people's golf swings.  I've never been much of a "drill guy" except that in the 90's I became fascinated by Paul Bertholy and his static hold drills.  I thought Bertholy was a genius.  Still do. These were basically like dynamic holds of various positions in the golf swing and I actually pointed to some of those positions and demonstrated them in the original Sevam1 videos on YouTube. If I were to describe Bertholy's approach I would call it a static, macro or whole body approach to positions and drills.  These were essentially dynamic tension exercises tailored to Bertholy's informed vision of the golf swing.  He was revolutionary and largely ignored.  A shame, that is.

Every year around this time all of us up here in the north start to get that nagging itch to tip it up and play some golf.  We want to play but mother nature is just not quite ready to let us have a go out there.  If you can't play, the next best thing you can do is prep to play. To me, prepping for the season is mainly about conditioning and for my kind of swing action 90% of the conditioning I focus on is for the hands wrists and forearms and the legs.

Saturday, 5:20 am. It was a cold and foggy morning in Pacific Palisades. The only lights you could see were coming from my Riviera issued golf cart. The deer at this time were scurrying back into their homes on the outskirts of the course. The work day had only just begun.

The answer to the title is - we CAN DO BOTH...

Better golf without practice. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I recently picked up a book of the same title written by Alex J. Morrison in 1940. He is the same author who wrote “A New Way to Better Golf”, which by all accounts online seems to be the better and more widely read of the two.