The post Unlocking Masters secrets: 7 major champs dish on Augusta prep appeared first on Golf.

The post Unlocking Masters secrets: 7 major champs dish on Augusta prep appeared first on Golf.

“I spend all December working for Augusta,” says Brooks Koepka. “I’m five months out and already working on that. So my head is already there.”

Koepka was talking to our Dylan Dethier in an episode of Warming Up, but his point is consistent across major championship contenders: there’s no such thing as too much prep when a green jacket is on the line.

In fact, so many Augusta-centric topics have come up in previous Warming Up episodes that we created a supercut of the bunch, ripping out some of the most important Masters nuggets to splice into one handy video (which you can watch below).

The goal here isn’t just to entertain, but inform you. There’s a lot to learn from the seven major champs featured — Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Xander Schauffele, Shane Lowry, Wyndham Clark, Fred Couples and Koepka.

Below are a few quick takeaways — although you’ll need to watch the video to get a more thorough breakdown and see what I left out.

How major champs prep for the Masters

Lowry’s hole-by-hole ball flight never changes. “Down the 1st a hit like a low cut,” Lowry said. “Down the 2nd I hit a high draw. The 3rd I always lay up. Five I hit a low cut. Seven I hit a low cut. Eight I hit a low cut. Nine I hit a really high one.” And on it goes. Hearing Lowry break it all down is the perfect example of the shots, creativity and workability players must have to contend.

Mickelson’s practice includes putting on the range. He does this because when the rye grass is dry and sticky, like it is later in the day, he says it’s more difficult to chip because the greens will grab the ball more. So Mickelson will elect to use putter off the green more often — and the grass on the range is similar to what the fringe might be. “I think one of the mistakes that I have made in the past and that other players will make when they are putting from off the green is they’ll look at the green, and they will get this sense of the speed of the putting green but not the fringe,” Mickelson said. “So when I’m putting from off the green I don’t look at the green, I only look at the fringe and will try to get a touch for off the green as well as on.”

Schauffele confirms that, yes, the wind is no joke. “I’ve seen the wildest stuff happen being in some spots there,” he said. The year Tiger Woods won, in 2019, he said he could see balls get “absolutely stood up” on 12, which is when several contenders found the water at Rae’s Creek and when Woods took spin off his approach, made an easy par and eventually won the green jacket. The lesson here? No lead is ever safe on Amen Corner.

Lots of players prep for that par-4 opener. Both Clark and DeChambeau explained how they end warmups by playing the first hole of the upcoming round. At Augusta, that’s a par-4. Clark says he’ll usually hit 3-wood off that tee box then start his approach, usually a 7- or 8-iron, to the center or right-center of the green and try to hit a draw. Worst case it doesn’t draw and he has a somewhat low-stress 20-footer uphill for birdie. (This, also, is a good visualization strategy for amateurs beginning their rounds.)

You can learn a lot from Tiger. Just ask Lowry, who played with Woods for three rounds in 2020. “I remember the first day I played with him he shot four under, and I was like, you didn’t even play that good,” Lowry said. “But like off the 5th hole he would never hit in the bunker on the left. His second shot on 15 he hits it kinda long and right of the green where it’s the best leave. He leaves himself in the best positions and Augusta is nearly about that.”

You can watch more Warming Up videos here.

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The post Ludvig Åberg taught me 10 lessons in 30 minutes. Here they are appeared first on Golf.

The post Ludvig Åberg taught me 10 lessons in 30 minutes. Here they are appeared first on Golf.

How do you pronounce your last name?

“I always tell people “Oh-berg” is the best way to say it,” he says. “I don’t know where the ‘Oh-bear’ came from, or the ‘Oh-burge’ [said to rhyme with ‘purge’]. I don’t know where that comes from.”

So how does he say it?

“It’s different in Swedish and English,” he explains. “That’s where where it gets a little tricky, is people are pronouncing it in Swedish; you can’t do that in America.

“If I go to Sweden, I say Oh-bear,” he says [editor’s note: this spelling doesn’t quite do it justice either — his pronunciation is almost closer to Oh-bair, or Oh-baiy, but with a cool rolled R, sigh, just watch the little video below]. “But the G is kinda silent in Swedish. But then you look at, like, ‘Forsberg’, you don’t say ‘Fors-bear’ [in the U.S.], know what I mean?”

In other words, Åberg understands your confusion.

“If I were to read the alphabet in Swedish, it’s totally different than English,” he says with a shrug. “It’s just different.”

So we got that out of the way.

All that was left was introducing the Swedish star and then standing beside him as he launched a half-hour of clinical golf shots into a North Florida headwind, one missile after another sent into onto the bottle-green Tour pros-only side range at TPC Sawgrass — for the latest episode of Warming Up.

Here are 10 things I learned from Åberg. (Eleven, if you count the pronunciation.)

Or here’s the video, if you want it straight from the source himself:

1. Åberg likes to “touch every wedge” in a warmup.

Like many pros I’ve talked to, Åberg starts by hitting his 60-degree wedge. This wasn’t the only 60-degree in his bag on the day we filmed; while he denies the veracity of a report that he always travels with 22 clubs, suggesting it lacked context, he admits that “I travel with quite a few different options”.

He starts by hitting some half-wedges, getting a feel for “how the club interacts with the ground.” He hits one shot trying to swing from the inside, hitting a draw, and another from the outside, hitting a cut. He flights one low and lofts the next one high, calibrating, messing around, finding his feels.

But unlike some other pros, Åberg doesn’t skip straight to his irons after a wedge or two.

“I like to touch all the wedges,” he says. “I like to do sand wedge, I like to do gap wedge.” He works his way into full swings now, picking targets, ramping up his warm-up, dialing in his scoring clubs.

2. He likes to practice into the wind.

Åberg is firing into the wind on this range, which I point out has always intimidated me during warm-ups. This is, it turns out, just one of about two dozen ways we identify which he is my superior.

“Sometimes if you want to practice it’s almost nice to have it into the wind,” he says. “Because if you can come out of that session hitting it nice, you know that things are looking pretty good. If I’m working on something and it’s downwind, you might not get that same feedback. You feel great, but then that first tee shot is into the wind and you’re like, ‘ah, s—.’

3. His player-caddie meetings kick off pre-round prep.

Two (of many) things that set Åberg apart are his commitment and his consistency. Case in point: On tournament days he’ll arrive at the course just over two hours before his tee time and meet with his caddie Joe Skovron, “somewhere quiet,” he says.

They’ll review the day’s pin locations and wind direction, one hole at a time. And they’ll make a plan.

“I think it just simplifies things because when we do get to the golf course we just do what we said we were going to do and it takes away all these emotional decisions you make on a golf course,” Aberg says. “Because sometimes you’re like, ‘ah, I just made two bogeys…’ but no, dude, we said we were going to do this, let’s do it.”

4. He sticks to their plan.

This is directly related to No. 3, but once Åberg and Skovron have settled on a plan, they try to stick to it — eliminating frustration, momentum or emotion from the equation.

“It simplifies in my head because I can prepare for it in here,” Aberg says, pointing to his head. “So I know before I get to No. 7 that I am going to hit this tee ball with this club, most likely — unless something wind-wise has changed. And I know if I get to No. 12 at TPC Sawgrass [the drivable par-4] I’m going to hit driver and I’m going to go for it. It makes things easier than standing on the tee box, like, ‘Should I hit 4-iron, should I hit this,’ know what I mean? So that’s where I’m at with those things.”

Does he change strategy in-round based on how he’s hitting it? Not really.

“I try not to,” he says. “Because driving is one of my strengths, I like to use it as much as I can. And just because I miss a few doesn’t really change that.

“Maybe if you’re coming down the last couple holes of a tournament … that’s a different angle to it.”

5. He hits it really straight.

Åberg is almost sheepish talking about his ball flight because it’s just … very straight.

“On the golf course I like to do a little bit of both,” he says of hitting fades and draws. But even those don’t move much. A fade will fly straight and fall right. A draw will fly straight and fall left. Bubba Watson he ain’t.

“It’s just so straight,” I remark after one fastball down the middle.

“Yeah,” Åberg acknowledges, the way a mathematician might after putting down his chalk. “We’ve never really been working one way or the other, I feel like when I’m playing my best I’m able to do a little bit of what I want to.”

6. When Åberg does work the ball, it’s just through setup.

“I do it all in my setup,” he says. “If I’m going to play a draw right of this pin, I’ll aim a little bit right and close the face and my setup. I might move [the ball] back [in my stance].” But he doesn’t try to change anything in his swing or his release pattern — nothing more than a little feeling.

“Obviously moving the ball back in [my stance] it’s going to start a little further right,” he says. “I learned pretty quickly that’s the easiest way for me to feel it, because that way I’m keeping the big motion the same, and I’m just changing a little bit in the input to make that look different. And then obviously the opposite if I want to do it the other way [hit a fade]: move it up a little in my feet, open the stance and it should [fade] a little bit.”

Typically if Åberg misses something it’s because his setup was off, he says. That’s another reason that it’s helpful when your natural shot shape is straight and pure. Golf is tough enough; life is better if you only have to tweak the simple stuff.

7. He loves the nine-window drill.

The nine-window drill is popular with plenty of legendary ball-strikers, Tiger Woods among them. If you picture a strike-zone grid of sorts, with a high draw going in the top left, a medium draw going mid-left, low draw going bottom left — you get the idea.

“I think it’s the best thing ever,” Åberg says.

“I like to do it with my 7-wood,” he adds, a true sicko’s admission. “Because it really exposes like, hey I need to flight it, I need to hit it high…”

I jump in.

“How do you hit a low 7-wood?”

“Exactly,” he says.

8. He’s obsessed with 7-wood.

It’s not just for drills — high-launch fairway woods are way in vogue, and Åberg is in on the trend.

In college in windy west Texas Åberg mostly hit 2-irons. But now, from under a Ryder Cup headcover, he pulls a 7-wood.

“[Two-iron] was great off the tee, not as great into par-5s,” he says. “Whereas the 7-wood, when I tried it out [in late 2023], I started playing around with it even more. And some of the best shots I’ve hit this year have actually been with 7-wood because you can hit it so high, stop it softer, and it’s great into par-5s.”

You may remember the 7-wood Åberg hit at Pinehurst in 2024 that stunned Skovron into a meme.

He describes a high cut he hit on No. 11 at TPC Sawgrass, and another from the Olympics in Paris.

“I feel like I can hit it high and turn it over,” he says, motioning a draw. “Or I can hit it really high and cut it. Can’t really do that with a 2-iron.”

“I think so,” he says, as though he’s surprised himself. “It’s getting there, at least.”

9. He thinks playing is still the best way to get better.

We’re on the range, but still, Åberg admits, he prefers to be on the course.

“I still like to play a lot more in my practice than a range rat hitting balls all day,” he says.

Is that what he thinks is the best way to prepare for tournament golf?

“I mean, I personally think so. Because ultimately you play golf, you’re not swinging golf. Obviously the [range] practice is an important piece of that; you have to have that down. But I think you’re able to play really good golf even if your mechanics are a little bit off, just from decision-making, shot shape, chasing a score. What happens inside when I’m four-under through five or six-over through seven? There’s all these different things that you can’t really simulate on the range. But because I played so much [as a kid], I was able to handle that pretty well, I think.”

I laid things out on the Scheffler-vs.-Bryson spectrum — two of the best pros in the world, the former who plays constantly and the latter only during competition (or YouTube filming).

“I think it speaks to the personality of the player,” he says. “How your brain works, how it operates in the best way. People are just different, that’s what’s cool, there’s not a right way or wrong way to do it.”

10. He’s a golf romantic.

Åberg’s favorite thing about golf?

“That’s a massive question,” he says, before delivering his most expansive answer of the day. 

“It’s so simple, but it’s so hard. It’s logical, but it’s hard. And you’re never going to be finished. You’re never going to figure it out. You can think you are, and maybe you think you’ve come a long way, but there’s so much more to learn. There’s always a better score out there, or a better shot. And trying to figure that out is what excites me. On a good day, you can come out to practice and there’s just so much you can do, y’know? It’s never, ‘Oh, I’m done with that.’ That’s what excites me.”

Us too, Ludvig.

You can watch the entire video on YouTube here.

Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.

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The post Golf’s best twins taught me 10 lessons in an hour — here they are appeared first on Golf.

The post Golf’s best twins taught me 10 lessons in an hour — here they are appeared first on Golf.

That’s where I began, as I met the two young Danes, Nicolai and Rasmus, on the back of the driving range at Panther National, an enclave on the western edge of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

“What’s the secret?” I ask.

“The chubby one is Ras,” Nicolai says, twinkle in his eye.

“I was going to say that Nicolai is trying to grow somewhat of a beard at the moment. Trying to,” Rasmus counters.

They both laugh. It turns out to be an appropriate tone-setter for the hour that follows, our Warming Up interview, which largely becomes one twin ripping on the other interrupted by some occasional golf talk.

Luckily for me they’ve color-coded for the day: Nicolai is wearing a black hat while Rasmus’ hat is white, making it easy to keep track. And while they share a Florida rental home, a birthday and a set of DNA, by the end of the hour it’s easy to pick out differences between the two — in golf swings, in mindsets, in personalities. This is the first year that both Nicolai and Rasmus are playing the PGA Tour full-time. They’d love for the year to end with the two of them playing together for Team Europe at the Ryder Cup. In the meantime? Ribbing each other seems like a full-time sport.

“Ras has almost like a quarter-life crisis haircut,” Nicolai says with a grin.

Here are 10 things I learned from an hour with the top twins in golf.

You can also watch the interview on YouTube here or below.

1. They each start with wedges.

It’s always interesting to hear how different pros begin their warmups — particularly when those pros are identical.

Nicolai starts by grabbing his lob wedge and putting down his launch monitor to help dial in some specific yardages with half-wedge shots: 50, 55, 60, 65.

“Just trying to get a feel for, ‘today, what does 50 [meters] feel like?'” Nicolai says. He hits one 48 meters. That’s within his two-meter tolerance. “We’ll go up to 55,” he says. He hits one. I check the monitor. 55.

Rasmus has several 60-degree wedges in his bag; it’s an off-week, so there’s a lot of testing going on, he says as he selects one with which to begin his warmup. While he’s not trying to hit as many specific numbers with his half-wedges — “I’m not as systematic when it comes to that,” he says — he, too, is calibrating the day’s feels.

“I like to see what I would call a smooth one, which looks like about 75, and then what is a full one, and that will be different in the morning and afternoon,” he says. He works down the bag from there.

I wonder aloud if Nicolai is more the technician while Rasmus is the artist; Nicolai immediately seizes on that, while Rasmus hates it.

“Did he just call himself Rasmus the artist?” Nicolai asks with glee.

“I didn’t say that,” Rasmus counters.

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2. They’ve learned a lesson from their pilot father.

Their father Ole is a pilot, which may not seem particularly similar to golf until you consider the attention to detail, the commitment to a process and the need for a cool head under pressure required for each.

“There’s a checklist to go through to make sure that I do the right things that’ll help me,” Rasmus says. It’s a different checklist for driving, for short game, for putting. It’s a different checklist for him versus his brother. But it helps with accountability and preparation.

“When something is going wrong in the plane; say you get an engine fire, a loss of cabin pressure, whatever. You obviously have to react pretty quick,” Nicolai says. “But you have to do it the right way. The only thing you can’t do is stress. No panic.

“So then you pull out the checklist and you go through it bit by bit, you do it correctly, because you can’t make a mistake there. And the same thing in golf, sometimes you feel like you’re in the fire, you’re in the mix, everything’s happening pretty quick and you’re like, ‘what you you do?’ I like the picture of being a pilot and losing cabin pressure: you pull the mask down, you open the book and you go through it so that you don’t stress about the situation.

“When there’s a lot on the line, when it’s happening quick, you’ve got to calm down and just take it one step at a time.”

3. Just thinking about Tommy Fleetwood can help.

Searching for something in your swing? These guys know that feeling.

“I always like to think ‘Tommy Fleetwood’. I love the way he hits those shots to this finish,” Nicolai says, holding an abbreviated followthrough with perfect upright posture, Fleetwood-style.

“When I’m a little bit off in my game, we always work on the Tommy finish because that just feels like you’ve got to be connected. That’s a little shoutout to Tommy there.”

4. Competing with your twin isn’t always easy.

“When we were 10 years old we entered our first tournament, not knowing what the level of golf in Denmark was at that time. So we played this Danish championship for our age, under 12,” Rasmus remembers. “We turned up with these junior clubs and everybody turned up with their Titleist clubs, they all looked so good and we were like, ‘we don’t belong here.’ But then we ended up finishing 1-2.”

In what order? That’s the key to the story: Nicolai ended up four-putting 18, he admits ruefully, to lose to his twin brother.

“I was winning that one and then ended up making that double bogey on the last to lose,” he says.

How do you deal with that as a 10-year-old? He can’t remember. He blocked it out. But Rasmus knows it was a quiet ride home.

“We’ve learned to deal with it,” Nicolai says. “When we were younger we’d be fighting and couldn’t speak, sometimes for days.”

There were stakes attached to their finishes, too: Low bro of the day would get to sit in the front seat.

“I remember I won an event and I go in the front seat and Ras goes in the back,” Nicolai remembers. “And he says to me, ‘Nico, don’t you think you’ve got the throne now?’ He was so pissed that I’d won in a playoff.”

5. Managing twins requires saintly parents.

“Our parents have been great,” Nicolai says. “It must have been very tough for them. I mean, we’ve never really spoken a lot with them about it … but they dealt with it very good.”

Rasmus points out the conundrum: “It’s a hard one, because who do you go up to: the guy who’s done well or the guy who’s not done well?”

I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but just to make sure I ask: Are you happy for each other when you’ve done well?

Rasmus ducks and swipes something from his face; Nicolai’s just hit him with a crosswind divot.

“That was on purpose, by the way,” Nicolai says.

6. They’ve never played their best at the same time.

“We’ve never really had situations where we’ve both played well at the same time,” Rasmus says. It’s remarkable looking at their results pages; it’s been clear at various points that one brother is playing better than the other — but then it flips.

“We’ve discussed it quite a bit. How can it be?” Rasmus says, referring to their intriguing push-pull.

“To be fair I think it’s been quite healthy for us. In a way that if one of us is doing quite well the other one is eager to come out and play well. And I think that’s been a good thing to get sharper when the other one is on his game. It’s frustrating when Nicolai’s on and I’m not. I’m happy that he’s playing well but I really want to play well as well. So it’s that balance, and I think that’s helping us.”

Jokes aside, they confirm they each other’s biggest fans. Take last fall at the Irish Open, when Nicolai and their friends were in the crowd — “literally the only ones celebrating,” he remembers — when Rasmus took down local favorite Rory McIlroy.

7. Play well enough for long enough and you make big-time friends.

Speaking of McIlroy: Nicolai finished second to McIlroy in the 2023 Race to Dubai rankings on the DP World Tour. Rasmus finished second to McIlroy in the Race to Dubai a year later. That’s fitting, of course. It’s a remarkable parallel. I’m also curious: Have they become friends with McIlroy as a result of good play and increased proximity?

They’re unwilling to go that far; perhaps it seems presumptuous. But they freely call him a hero.

“He’s been great to us,” Nicolai says. “There’s that saying that you’re not supposed to meet your heroes but we’ve been very lucky. He’s been absolutely great to us.”

The twins turned 23 during Players Championship week in 2024; Nicolai had lunch that day with Fleetwood, Justin Rose and McIlroy, his Ryder Cup teammates from 2023.

“Rory came over, tapped me on the shoulder,” he remembers. “‘Hey Nico, happy birthday! When I was 23 I was World No. 1 and I’d won two majors.’ I was like, alright, back to work. I loved that. It was pretty cool. It shows that you have a relationship for him to come and say that.”

8. Want to control your draw? Hit a bunch of fades.

One area Nicolai has been strong but has looked to improve is in his iron play, where he’s chasing neutral.

“I’d love to hit a little fade, but I always end up drawing the ball. When I’m under pressure, I always draw the ball,” Nicolai says. He’s been working on zeroing out his swing path on the range, knowing that force of habit on the golf course is a completely different animal. He talks about being able to get it “to the corners” of greens, which can be a challenge if you’re only hitting a draw. That’s why wants something more versatile.

“This year my approach game has been pretty solid so far and I feel like it’s because I’m working more to neutralizing the fight a little bit more and have more options,” he says.

The way he describes it, that battle is a necessity. Jack Nicklaus would hit draws on the driving range so that on the course he’d just hit a gentle fade, for instance. Otherwise, your natural tendencies can get exaggerated past playability.

“If I start hitting draws [on the range] all the time when I get to the course, it turns into bigger draws,” Nicolai says. “So it’s always that balance of how do we neutralize it before it goes to the golf course?”

A little at a time.

9. Patience is, unfortunately, the key to everything.

Seventy-two holes is a long time. A season is a long time. It’s important, Nicolai says, to keep that in mind.

“You can play poorly for a long time and then you got nine holes, you shoot five under and you’re in the tournament,” he says. “Or you shoot a 65 final day from nothing and you’re at the top. There’s so much golf to be played. You just have to stay patient all the time, which is a thing everyone says: ‘Stay patient’. But it’s true. It’s true. I mean, we haven’t done much in this game yet, but we still feel like we’ve tried quite a bit and it’s the same thing everyone says, stay patient, focus on yourself and your own craft and then it will come over time.”

10. …but so is a temper.

“You’ve gotta have a temper to be good,” Nicolai says. He runs a little hotter than his brother, he says. Golf is frustrating, particularly with high standards. You can hit a decent shot but it’s not quite good enough. You want to achieve perfection while knowing that you never, ever will. Still, he sees running hot as a serious asset. “You just have to control it.”

Good news: That’s only half the interview! Watch the full thing on YouTube here.

Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.

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The post The hardest shot in golf? Lee Trevino’s nomination will surprise you appeared first on Golf.

The post The hardest shot in golf? Lee Trevino’s nomination will surprise you appeared first on Golf.

Early in the video, while hitting little punch shots to a nearby green, he broke down what he believes is the most difficult shot in golf.

We’ll let him take it from here.

“The hardest shot in golf is when you get in the trees on the right and you can’t go down toward the flag and you gotta go across the fairway to lay up,” he said. “The hardest shot in golf is to take a wedge or whatever club you are going to get out from under the trees to get to the fairway — and nobody would even think of this — and the hardest shot in golf is how hard do you hit that ball to clear the rough here, but then stop it before it gets into that rough [on the other side]?”

Dethier, our host, clarified Trevino’s claim. “The hardest shot in golf?” he asked.

“That’s the hardest shot in golf, besides a 60-yard bunker shot,” Trevino said. “And you got to get out of the trouble, and you are laying up, so you need the ball in the fairway, and people will hit it too low, never make it out of the rough. Or they hit it too hard and go on the rough on the other side. So this is something you have to practice. You can’t just go out on the driving range and hit golf balls. You have to have a purpose.”

There’s that practice with a purpose line again.

The can watch the complete video with Trevino below. The aforementioned clip starts around the 10-minute mark.

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The post Lee Trevino taught me 10 lessons in 38 minutes. Here they are appeared first on Golf.

The post Lee Trevino taught me 10 lessons in 38 minutes. Here they are appeared first on Golf.

“I’m not giving away any secrets!”

For a moment it wasn’t clear what he meant. Was Trevino calling off our shoot? A producer and I, enticed by time with a dream guest, had flown last-minute to Punta Mita, a golf course (and ridiculously scenic resort-slash-community) in southwest Mexico, to conduct a range session with one of golf’s all-time greats. A morning view of the Pacific lapping at the rocky shoreline was worth the trip, but we hoped to capture more than just a sunrise and a sunburn, so Trevino’s warning set off some alarms. Golfers can be finicky creatures, after all — and Trevino has earned the right to call his shots.

But Lee’s son Daniel, who’d arrived with him, rolled his eyes.

“I think he’s messing with you,” he said.

We breathed a sigh of relief. The elder Trevino was, in fact, messing with us, injecting a little chaos into an otherwise serene scene. Twinkle in his eye, Trevino grabbed a wedge from his bag, rolled over a ball from the pile and launched into our latest and greatest episode of “Warming Up.” And while there were a few things Trevino actually didn’t want to share — he saves certain secrets for his clinics, he explained — he wasn’t exactly holding back. What followed was 38 minutes of golfing gold, delivered by a six-time major champ and first-ballot Hall of Fame talker.

I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing; that’s sort of the point of the series, neither Trevino’s ball-striking nor his commentary come through via text, and you can find the YouTube link below.

But read on, too, for 10 things I learned from Lee.

1. He’s still got it.

Trevino is keenly aware of his age — “most people are in the ground when they’re 85,” he says — but he doesn’t let that stop him. Every morning he wakes up and makes his way to the range, where he’ll hit balls for two hours. He’s not prepping for a tournament. He has no competitive goal in mind, he says. But he knows his practice sessions are important nonetheless.

“Golf still means everything to me simply because this is what I did for a living. This has been my whole life,” he says. He laments losing swing speed. But does he ever wake up worried that his game will have abandoned him?

“Oh no, no, no,” he says. “The good Lord gave me a talent. And he has not taken it away from me yet.”

2. Every shot needs a purpose.

Does Trevino like to work the ball? Hooks, fades, highs, lows? Does he ever. To hear him tell it, that’s the entire point.

“I don’t care what shot it is, it has to have a purpose,” he says. “And you’ve got to work the ball to the right, you’ve got to work the ball to the left.”

There’s a philosophy here — one that involves some math.

“The reason for [working the ball] is simply because of the percentages. If you’re working the ball from left to right, you aim 20 feet left. And it doesn’t work right, you’re 20 feet from the hole. If you work it 20 feet, you’re right next to the hole. If you work it 30 feet, you’re 10 feet from the hole. If you work at 40 ft, you’re 20 ft from the hole.

“Now, if you try to hit it straight and you hit it 40 feet to the right, you’re 40 feet from the hole.”

This, of course, assumes that while attempting to hit a fade you will not suddenly hit a snap-hook some 100 feet left instead. (That would leave you 120 feet away!) But Trevino may not have missed by that much since the 1950s.

3. The “hardest shot in golf” isn’t what you’d expect.

The hardest shot in golf — other than perhaps a 60-yard bunker shot, Trevino concedes — is often overlooked. Nobody thinks much about it at all until the moment they’re messing it up: the punch-out from trouble.

“It’s when you get in the trees on the right and you can’t go down towards the flag,” Trevino says. “And you’ve gotta go across to the fairway to lay up.”

The dilemma, he explains, is carrying it far enough to get through the rough and into the fairway but not so far that it skitters into the rough — or trees, or worse — on the other side. It’s critically important to escape from trouble, but nobody works on this specific shot when they practice.

“So this is something that you have to practice. You can’t just go out on the driving range and hit golf balls. You have to have a purpose. You’ve got to change your grip. You’ve got to change ball position. You’ve got to change how far you are from the ball.”

Instruction

4. There’s one junior golfer he admired: Scottie Scheffler.

Trevino and World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler have more in common than elite ball-striking and happy feet. They’ve also been members of the same Dallas-area club, Royal Oaks, since Scheffler was about eight years old. (Trevino has been a member since 1970.)

“He comes out and joins and he’d come out there and he’d be putting on the green; he’d want to putt for nickels,” Trevino remembers. “I wouldn’t putt him because I couldn’t beat him.

“And he always had long pants as a little junior. He never wore shorts. [We’d ask], ‘Why aren’t you wearing shorts?’ ‘Because I’m gonna be a pro someday. And pros don’t wear shorts.'”

Even at a young age, Trevino says he’d never seen anything quite like Scheffler.

“I’ve played with [Jack] Nicklaus my whole life. Nobody ever hit a ball like this guy.”

5. He’ll never change a person’s swing.

“I never change a person’s golf swing because he has an instructor,” Trevino says. “But not 10 percent of the people that play golf, including the pros, know the mechanics. Know why the ball did something.

“See, the golf ball will tell you what you did,” Trevino says, then tops a ball on purpose. “People will say, ‘Oh, Jesus. I moved, I…’ No you didn’t. You were fine. You had the ball too far forward [in your stance].

The golf club, Trevino explains, is like a pendulum in the golf swing. Find the bottom of the swing. Make sure the ball is there when you do. Changing the swing itself is a much tougher battle and not one you necessarily need to take on.

“You own [your swing]. You’re not going to change it. It’s like trying to teach a guy to walk differently. It’s like trying to teach someone to talk differently. You can’t do it. But you’re not changing a person’s swing — you can change his hands and you can change the position and it makes all the difference.”

6. There’s one pro on Tour who swings it a little bit like Lee.

Trevino is such a beloved presence in the golf world that it’s easy to forget how he got here.

“The question has always been who instructed me, who taught me how to play,” he remembers. “I learned how to play in a pasture, in a field by myself. I didn’t start playing professionally until I was 27, almost 28. I was in the Marine Corps for four years. When I got out of the Marines I went to work on a construction crew building a golf course, didn’t even play golf. I started playing when I was 22 years old. By the time I was 25 I’d won the U.S. Open.”

Five more majors (plus nearly 100 worldwide wins) would follow.

“But I learned how to play blocking the ball. The only guy that plays like that right now on tour is [Daniel] Berger. He leads with the back of his left hand. That’s what I do. The back of the left hand doesn’t rotate. The trunk hits [the ball]. The trunk moves the limbs.”

Tiger Woods has described the sound of Trevino’s strike as different than other golfers. Trevino says that’s because he compresses the ball so well. There’s no flip of the hands involved. There’s no timing involved. He blocks it, swinging down on the ball with the back of his left hand. It worked then and it works now.

7. In the wind, Trevino could hit it as far as anybody.

Perhaps my favorite line of the session came when Trevino transported himself to a windy British Isles weekend some decades ago.

“When I went and played the Open Championship, when I got up in the morning and looked out the hotel window and saw the flags going whoosh, I said [here he grins wide], ‘Bring me a cup of coffee, we’re fixing to go get somebody.'”

He followed that with another one-of-a-kind one-liner — “I don’t like to hit the 3 because the bugs end up having to wear their helmets” — but explained a little bit of the genius that helped him to two Open titles.

“I could make it tumble. I could take the driver and make it tumble.”

8. Even as an all-time great, he got the putting yips.

I mention that Trevino could tee it up in the Open this year, based on the ball-striking clinic he’s putting on display. He agreed. One thing would hold him back, though.

“If I could putt,” he says. “I got the yips so bad that I have to wear four pair of underwear when I play. And then I change about every six holes and I finally finish with one clean pair.”

9. Open your clubface when you chip.

It’s tough to transcribe this tip — you’ll have to watch it — but Trevino insists that you don’t chip with a square club face but instead start with your club facing towards first base.

“The body brings it to the ball,” he says. “The trunk will close it.”

Lee shows off another way to think about this (don’t kill a fly — you might do that with an overhead smash — but catch the fly instead) but you’re better off just watching this one. You’ll get convinced.

10. It went fast.

Want to know how it feels to accrue decades of legendary accomplishments, decades of golf knowledge, decades of meaningful golfing life? One line Trevino shared was from a cherished round, the last of Arnold Palmer’s competitive career. The two were sitting in the locker room post-round and Trevino could see his longtime peer was feeling the weight of the moment.

“He’s getting tears coming down his cheek, and now he’s got me emotional,” Trevino says. “I didn’t know how to get him started because his lip was quivering and he couldn’t say anything. 

“And I looked at him and I said, ‘It went fast, didn’t it?'”

The decade since that round has gone fast too, Trevino says, even though it’s been another memorable decade in a memorable golfing life. There’s some deeper lesson there, one that’s tougher to confine to a simple list.

You can watch Warming Up with Lee Trevino here or in the player below.

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The post Xander Schauffele taught me 10 lessons in an hour. Here they are appeared first on Golf.

The post Xander Schauffele taught me 10 lessons in an hour. Here they are appeared first on Golf.

In the process, we learn plenty from what he said and how he said it, about golf and about Schauffele, too. Want to learn something about the game and want to know what it’s like to spend some time with golf’s latest two-time major champ? Watch the video below. Or, if you’re more in the reading mood, keep on going. Either way, enjoy!

1. He’ll watch coverage before a round

I asked Schauffele to imagine he was warming up for the final round of a major where he was in contention and this was one interesting insight; I’ve always wondered how guys in contention at big-time tournaments handle this. What’s it like to have golf on TV on before their round when you’re a featured piece of the coverage? Some ignore it. But not Schauffele. While he’s wary of watching too far before his tee time, when conditions may be dramatically different, he’ll flip it on three or four hours before he goes out.

“I like to,” he says. “I’ll watch a little bit of coverage. Maybe I’ll see a putt to a pin that guys are making or missing for some reason and try and remember it. I’m here to get any edge I can.”

2. He likes to be ‘playful’ in his warmup

Playful with shot shapes, specifically. As he starts with wedges and works his way down through his irons, Schauffele will mix up his ball flights to settle in on something comfortable for the round. Calibration, he says, is one of his father’s favorite words — he’s adopted it, too.

“I’ll try and hit little cuts, little draws. I’ll see what sticks, what doesn’t,” he says. “And then I know certain tendencies in my swing that would promote one thing or another. And if I’m hitting a cut or draw, one or the other better, I’ll favor the worse one.”

Schauffele has an easier time hitting a draw — gun to head, he says, that’s the shot he’d lean on — but he likes to be able to work the ball both ways.

3. He thinks there’s a real difference between contending and winning

We often wonder this from the outside: Is there something different between the guys in contention and the guys who actually end up with the win? Or is it basically luck and chance? Schauffele contended in major after major but didn’t break through until this summer, when he bagged two of ’em. He thinks the difference between contending and winning is very real.

“You never know how you’re going to react once you’re in the spot,” he says. “You practice everything you’re supposed to do the right way, the process, all this stuff. But I would get in some of these spots and I felt like there were certain holes in my game.”

He cites Carnoustie as an example, calling back to the 2018 Open Championship where he was in the mix on the back nine Sunday.

“The way I was swinging the club, it was hard for me to hit a controlled sort of cut; everything was off the toe, crashing left. And that’s still my tendency now; I just have more of an understanding of it. But I’d get in these spots and I would see this back right pin. I’m like, ‘Well, the perfect shot is a cut.’ And I’m sitting there and [I’d been] so disciplined the whole tournament to try and just hit like a low draw, just left of it. And then all of a sudden, you know, I’m so good, I’m going to try and hit the cut and then I mess it up. And now you’re all in your head. You just start to unravel. And so a lot of that was happening to me, where I felt my game was so close, I didn’t accept what I had. I always wanted more.

“And so I guess it’s like the pursuit of perfection to where you want to hit all the shots at the right time in the big moments. And along the way you learn it’s not really all about that.”

4. He leans on his talented neighbors for training

Schauffele moved to south Florida, where he lives near big-time pros like Patrick Cantlay, Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler and plenty more.

“That’s another nice part about being here,” Schauffele says. “There’s so many awesome players to play with here. So sort of my whole deal is if I play nine holes or 18 holes and if I’m able to get one or two, even just one pressure putt, like, the entire day is worth it. If I’m able to hit like two or three pressured iron shots that I have to hit, the entire day’s worth it.”

Iron sharpens iron, they say. Apparently irons do too.

5. The wind at Augusta is as crazy as they say

Schauffele had a famously unfortunate experience with the wind at Augusta National when, while in contention on Sunday, he hit 8-iron into the water short of No. 16. That still stings, but after several more trips to the Masters, Schauffele knows he’s in good company. After all, he still recalls in detail the experience of watching Tiger Woods make the veteran play at No. 12 in 2019, when most of his competition found the water short and he hit a no-spin 9-iron to the center of the green.

“The swirl in the trees is insane,” he says. “I really want to conquer the place. I mean, I feel like I’ve played pretty well there, but it’s a really fun place to be in contention, just with the history and knowing a lot of the shots and being in a lot of the spots … like, I know exactly how the shots are supposed to work. If I can execute it, it’ll be good, you know? And so there’s a different sensation when you’re playing there versus other majors.”

6. He still loves hitting balls

Schauffele is at home on the range.

“My first love was, for sure, the range,” he says. The range was one specific driving range in San Diego, near what was then-Qualcomm Stadium. “That’s kind of how I fell in love with the game at first was just sitting there beating golf balls. Just love watching the golf ball fly.”

He learned to play at a course called Doubletree, where his dad befriended the director of golf and she let him learn; he’d start from the 100-yard marker and, as he got older and better, back to the 150, then the 200, then the red tees and so on. That course is an apartment complex. The stadium isn’t called Qualcomm any more, either. Schauffele’s 31 now. But he says this is just the beginning.

“I haven’t entered my prime yet,” he says matter-of-factly.

7. A driving-range shank doesn’t faze him

Not anymore.

“I used to shank it a lot. Warming up in college, for some reason,” he says. “Not a lot, but like, there were probably four tournaments in a row where I hoseled it, and it kind of helped me understand how insignificant a warm-up is. It was a big learning lesson for me then.”

8. He’s a different person off the course

Schauffele knows that he keeps things even-keel on the course. But away from competition?

“If I’m with my buddies or, y’know, out to dinner — which rarely happens — my wife would say, like, I’m goofy. Very different than what I am on the course. And I try to be the same person on and off, but I can’t focus and be goofy at the same time.”

9. He’s never been late to a tee time — but he’s been close

Schauffele takes a somewhat nonchalant approach to his arrival on the first tee. He never leaves himself time to hit as many drivers as he wants to, he says. So his caddie, Austin Kaiser, will often leave the range before he’s ready, sending a strong suggestion to his player that it’s time to get going.

“The worst was at the PGA at Harding Park,” he remembers. “I had to do a little quick-step.” Schauffele got across the line with 38 seconds left, realizing he’d given the starter a scare. Even better, his playing partner, Steve Stricker, still hadn’t arrived; he made it with six seconds left.

“Of course, I get up there and I snap-hook my tee shot and then Stricker hits the fairway,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘this feels right.'”

10. He has a first-tee mantra when he’s nervous

“It’ll be over soon.”

Undeniably true.

You can watch the full video below.

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The post Here’s why Shane Lowry says the range can be a ‘dangerous place’ appeared first on Golf.

But, as he explained to GOLF’s Dylan Dethier on the latest episode of Warming Up, that’s the whole reason why he says the driving range can be a “dangerous place.“

Dethier and Lowry were talking through how Lowry would hit a low fade to one of the polls down range when Lowry explained that even if he hits what would be a good shot on the course, it may not look like a good shot on the range.

“I’m just trying to get it finish in on the yellow poll. And that’s why the range can be dangerous place at times as well,” Lowry said. “Because you stand here like and let’s say I stand there with a 3-iron and I, I hit it on it misses my target by like 10 yards, on the range that doesn’t look like a good shot. But on the golf course it’s a good shot when you’re playing a tournament.”

Lowry said it’s easy to get too precise on the range when you have a much larger margin for error in actuality.

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At the same time, Lowry explained how it’s it during his warm-up and what is game is actually like on the course can actually have a bit of an inverse relationship. He’s hit enough balls to know that if he hits a couple loose ones on the range, it won’t necessarily mean he’s going to hit it bad.

But it goes the other way too.

“I’ve had some of the best warm-ups in my whole career and went out and shot 75,” he said. “And I’ve been the other way. I’ve hit the ball really badly. And it’s almost like the other way around is when things are not feeling that great, it kind of focuses in more to go out and just try and shoot the best score you can.

“Whereas when you’re feeling great and hitting the ball well, I almost feel like you got like a little complacent or something.”

You can watch the full Warming Up episode with Shane Lowry below.

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The post Shane Lowry’s advice for pro-am partners is good for every golfer appeared first on Golf.

The post Shane Lowry’s advice for pro-am partners is good for every golfer appeared first on Golf.

I documented 10 things I learned from my first-ever pro-am last summer, which was an unreal experience that tested my mental game as much as my physical game. And while I’m appreciative of the guys I played with (which featured four guys per team), with all due respect to my playing partners, I would’ve much rather had Shane Lowry as a teammate.

Instruction

Lowry is one of the more successful pro players in the world, and tends to find himself hovering around the top of the leaderboard during most tournaments — as evidenced by his five T10 finishes this season. And as someone who frequents pro-ams himself, Lowry is more than happy to share some advice for amateurs playing in them.

So what pro-am tips does Lowry have? He recently revealed some to our Dylan Dethier on GOLF’s Warming Up (and talked about a bunch of other topics, too), which you can see in the video below. (Ed. Note: The tip begins at the 19:14 mark in the video below, or on YouTube here).

2 pro-am tips from Shane Lowry

Dethier starts the conversation with Lowry by asking about his tendency to play in pro-ams, and wonders if he’s happy to lend some advice or if he’s more of the quiet type. Lowry gave a pretty funny answer.

“I wouldn’t be a good coach,” Lowry quips in response to Dethier’s question. “I’m not very technically-minded with the game, but I can give quick tips that will fix someone.”

Lowry then shares one of his favorite things to do on the golf course: Giving advice and seeing the recipient instantly play better.

“My favorite thing to do is to give someone a quick tip, and then see them start playing well for the rest of their pro-am,” he adds. “Then they think you’re an absolute hero.”

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When asked about the most common piece of advice he tells amateur players like you or me, Lowry first asks the person how much golf they play before diving into sharing tips.

“I try to fix their setup,” he replies. “When they tell me it’s their second round this year, I’m like, ‘well I’d be sh*t too if I played only twice a year.'”

Lowry then serves up a quirky reminder for all amateurs to remember — especially when it comes to managing expectations on the golf course.

“I play golf with the best players in the world everyday, so you’re not going to impress me today, so don’t try to,” he quips. “I think that’s a good piece of advice because, they’re generally very nervous. If you put me on a football or soccer field and got me to do that in front of loads of people, I’d probably have a little bit of anxiety.”

So while performance anxiety is certainly a mental barrier that many golfers often battle, Lowry reminds players of all levels to stay within themselves and just play their games.

You can watch the full Warming Up episode with Shane Lowry below, and get other great golf tips by following GOLF’s YouTube channel.

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But after an hour at this one, it feels like he was just getting going.

It’s a sweltering summer’s day when Lowry kindly agrees to meet me at Chris Cote’s Performance Center, a lovely green slice of rural Connecticut just down the road from TPC River Highlands, where he’s gearing up for the Travelers Championship.

Before Lowry, our most recent episode of “Warming Up” had featured Bryson DeChambeau, whose approach is proudly outside-the-box, proudly technical and proudly range-centric to the point where outside of tournament weeks, he almost never plays golf. His approach has also been extremely successful — he just won the U.S. Open, after all. Lowry recognizes all of that — but still.

“Obviously that works for Bryson — he’s a pretty good player,” he says with a chuckle. “But if I spend all my time on the range, I think I’d just be thinking about it too much. And when I start thinking about it, that’s when it goes wrong.”

Lowry practices plenty; he loves golf but also treats it as his job, which is why you can find him on the course or at the practice facility most working hours of most days. But the beauty of golf and my favorite part of this series is just how differently these pros approach the same goal of getting the ball in the hole as effectively as possible.

The session with DeChambeau was more X’s and O’s. During the session with Lowry, it often felt like the actual ball-hitting was secondary. Here are 10 things he taught me.

1. He can’t roll from the car to the first tee like he used to

Lowry practically rolls his eyes as he says it.

“I do, like, a little — it’s not a workout. Just something with my physio, like 20 minutes that I do.”

He’d started feeling the effects of a life on the road, a rotational sport and the realities of life in his mid-30s, so the past couple years he’s built in a bit more time. So Lowry gets to the course about an hour and a half before the round. He meets his caddie on the range 45 minutes pre-tee time. And then it’s go time.

2. He skips his odd irons, too

Another former “Warming Up” guest, Brooks Koepka, admitted that he never practices with his odd clubs. Turns out Lowry’s the same way. He starts with his 50-degree wedge and then goes 8-iron, 6-iron, 4-iron.

“Always evens. Never odds.”

I find myself drawn to the 8-iron during warmups, too, and it feels logical to drop to the 6 from there — or the 4, if time is tight. But I’d never considered that this might be a universal preference. Or just a thing with Srixon players?

3. Setup is everything

Lowry likes shaping shots in both directions, but his go-to shape is a small, left-to-right fade. How does he make that happen?

“I actually play with my ball position quite a bit forward, and that encourages a fade,” he said, explaining that if he keeps the ball in front of him, his club will exit left, promoting a left-to-right shape for a right-hander

“Probably the main thing I work on with my coach is setup stuff. As long as my alignment, posture, ball position, all that stuff is pretty similar to what it is, I’m going to play well. And when I’m not playing well, that just gets off,” he says. “I had a really bad weekend at Memorial and you feel a million miles away. I spent a couple hours on the range with my coach and it was just setup stuff. I was aiming way too far left. I was getting the ball too far back [in my stance] with my irons. I was getting a two-way miss and it just kinda spooked me, because my iron play has been so good all year. But it’s generally something pretty straightforward when it comes to us.”

As for amateurs? Setup is still the place to start, he says.

“I play loads of pro-ams and you see guys coming out and their setup is so wrong, but they’re working on something with the club back here,” he says, mimicking a complex swing adjustment. “And I’m like, if we get your setup correct, you’ve got a better chance of hitting a good shot.”

4. Speaking of pro-am partners: Shane has two messages

“I wouldn’t be a good coach,” he says. “Not very technically minded with the game.”

Still, he can dial up a quick, well-placed tip now and again.

“My favorite thing in the world to do is give someone a quick tip and then they start playing well for the rest of the pro-am and then they think you’re an absolute hero,” he says.

Those two messages both have to do with expectation management.

“To be honest, I ask them how much golf do they play. And they’ll be like, oh, this is my second game this year. And I’m like, well, I’d be s— too if I played only twice a year,” he says, laughing.

“I say to them, I’m like, I play golf with the best players in the world every day. You’re not going to impress me, so don’t try to,” he adds. “I think that’s a good piece of advice because they’re generally very nervous … it’s an intimidating place. Like, if you put me on a soccer field or something and got me to try and do that in front of a lot of people, I’d probably have a little bit of anxiety.”

5. He likes a driving-range drive-by chat

Pros have all sorts of different game day personalities as they warm up before tournament rounds; Lowry says he’s a talker.

“I talk to people and walk down the range and say hello to people, and if there’s one of my friends, I’ll stop and watch them hit a couple, see how they’re doing.”

Still, he’d prefer not to end up next to certain types of pros.

“There’s some players, I won’t name any names, who can get quite talkative on the range … some people will talk to you through the whole warmup,” he says. “To each their own, but if their coach is with them and they’re working on something and you’re listening to what they’re working on, it’s quite off-putting.” Fair enough.

6. True Tour friendships are valuable in many ways

Lowry says it’s not a long list of pros he’s close with, but he values those friendships. There are European Ryder Cup pals, guys like Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood and Tyrrell Hatton; McIlroy in particular has become a close friend in recent years.

“I’d say in the last five years we’ve only become quite close. Like, our wives have become really close. They’re close as sisters, and our kids are similar ages, they hang out a little bit,” he says. The two teamed up for this year’s Zurich Classic, which they went on to win in a playoff. That’s no coincidence.

“It’s great because like, I play a lot of golf with him and playing against one of the best players in the world, it drags you towards that level.”

There are also Jupiter neighbors, guys like Erik van Rooyen.

“We live like 400 yards from each other,” he said.

And there are men from the same island, guys like Padraig Harrington, Graeme McDowell or Darren Clarke. On Harrington: “We’re not that close in age. But we get on very well — and two very different people, as well. But he’s great for me. I miss him out on Tour, actually. I like having him around, y’know, weeks of majors, the PGA, the Open.”

7. The range can be a “dangerous place”

Lowry takes aim at a yellow flag. He doesn’t spend much time visualizing virtual holes or creating fairways out here; he hits at targets.

“I’m just trying to get it to finish in on the yellow [flag],” he says. “And that’s why the range can be dangerous place at times as well. Because let’s say I stand here with a 3-iron and I miss my target by like 10 yards on the range. That doesn’t look like a good shot. But on the golf course it’s a good shot, when you’re playing a tournament, y’know what I mean? You can almost try to get too precise when you’re on the range.”

Lowry has also experienced the same sensation as every other golfer — that a good range session doesn’t always translate to the course. I liked the way he articulated this bit:

“I’ve had some of the best warmups in my whole career and gone out and shot 75. And I’ve been the other way; I’ve hit the ball really badly, and it’s almost like the other way around. When things are not feeling that great, it kind of focuses you in more to go out and just try and shoot the best score you can. Whereas when you’re feeling great and hitting the ball well, I almost feel like you got like a little complacent or something.”

8. His favorite part of pro golf? It’s the anticipation

Most pros have favorite tournament weeks. Lowry? He has favorite practice weeks.

“The week before the Masters is like, my favorite week of the year,” he says. “Because I’m home in Florida, I always go up on the Monday-Tuesday before, spend two days there. I come back to my house in Florida. I just practice every day, in bed early every night, taking it easy, I love it. And then the week before the Open as well, I’m in Ireland and I go and I play golf around Ireland with my friends.”

Presumably that’s where Lowry is now, enjoying his week, soaking in the excitement of what could still come as he celebrates the fifth anniversary of his Open Championship win at Royal Portrush.

“When you’re on the flight on the way to a tournament, that’s it. Like I always say that’s why we do — that’s why we play golf.”

9. If he wants to hit a shot, he’ll picture it in his head

How do you hit a specific shot shape and trajectory? As Lowry alternates low and high balls with his 3-iron, he explains.

“We do it so much, we do it every day, it just becomes instinctive. I’ll try and explain this to my friends as well, guys who are good golfers, and I’ve got this one friend, I won’t name him, but he doesn’t hit the ball very high and all I try to get him to do is, like, look in the window, look higher and you’ll start to think higher and naturally he’ll just do everything to try and hit it higher.

“But he won’t listen to me.”

Lowry went on to explain the difference between a poor tournament mindset, where he’s trying to swing the club, versus a positive mindset in which he’s trying to hit the shots and play golf. Trust yourself and your instincts, in other words. Especially if you have the instincts of Shane Lowry.

10. He loves a Diet Coke

I point out that some golf fans have a caricaturish impression of him, believing that he’d be finishing each round and heading for a few pints of Guinness. How accurate is that?

“I wouldn’t say it’s very accurate at all, but yeah, I’ll let people think what they think,” he says. “I do love having a good time with my friends when I get the chance, but you don’t get that much of a chance anymore. I’m married with two kids now and they take up more of my time.

“But one of my favorite things to do is to sit there and have a Diet Coke. People think I love drinking so much, and don’t get me wrong, I like having a drink. But sitting back, having a Diet Coke, I’m a pretty happy man. Diet Coke in the evenings and a coffee in the mornings and I’m pretty happy.”

There’s a good place to leave it; even if you can’t swing it like Shane, you can borrow some of his satisfaction for the simple joys of life. Coffee in the morning, Diet Coke in the evening, occasional drink with a friend? They do say golf is a game of balance.

I hope you watch the entire video below or on YouTube here.

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The post Bryson DeChambeau says this is the key to becoming an elite golfer appeared first on Golf.

The post Bryson DeChambeau says this is the key to becoming an elite golfer appeared first on Golf.

For Bryson DeChambeau, the journey to improvement has never been conventional. He’s experimented with everything from side-saddle putting to packing on as many pounds as possible, all in the name of shooting lower scores. As you can likely guess, his philosophy on improvement is far from conventional as well.

In the latest episode of Warming Up, he shared with GOLF.com’s Dylan Dethier that he almost never plays golf on his own time.

“I’ll go out and play three holes every once in a while to make sure that nothing has gone crazy awry, but I focus on being able to repeat motion,” DeChambeau said. “If I can do it again and again and again and have the same shot shape, that’s literally all that matters to me.”

The “to me” qualifier is important in this answer. While this all-practice, no-play philosophy works for DeChambeau, that’s largely because of the amount of on-course experience he already has accrued. For the average joe looking to improve, it’s important to get reps on the course in a variety of situations.

Putting

“You need to play enough rounds of golf where you can go to the reds, go to the blues — any tee [box], and shoot damn well under par,” DeChambeau says. “If you can do that, you know how to strategize on the golf course with any situation that occurs.”

In the past, DeChambeau said that he taught himself how to go low by playing from the forward tees as a teenager. This helped him get comfortable with shooting low scores and taught him how to think his way around the course.

“I learned how to score from a young age. I shot 58 once, I shot 59. And so I got to a place where I was like, ‘Man, I know how to score. I know how to get a golf ball to a place where I’m comfortable. I know how to strategize on this type of hole,” he said. “Once I got comfortable with strategy on the golf course and was able to learn how to score with wedging and was pretty consistent with everything around the greens, it all became how repeatable can I be.”

Check out the entire episode of Warming Up below.

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