I’ve spent the past few months working on two large personal goals. Weight loss and speed training. Both have gone better than expected, and that success for me comes from balancing long term goals with short term measurements. I’ve had to consciously separate the current results I am getting from the results that I want, and focus on the trends overall versus what I did on a given day.
For me, one of the biggest challenges in setting long term goals is that all progress is incremental. I’d love to decide to swing the club faster and immediately gain 10 mph of club head speed, but quick wins like that are rarely possible. I’ve found the best way to approach things is to keep the goals set in my mind, and then track my daily action towards those goals, and accept that not every day will have forward progress.
I do 3 training sessions most weeks, so this is 8 weeks of results. I set an early high speed average of 110, so my last and best session was “only” 3 miles per hour faster, but in that last session ⅗ swings were at 113 and one was a 114. 113 was the fastest I had ever swung the Stack, and I had done it 3 times total before the last session.
8 weeks of work and 3 mph. Was that time well spent? There are many different ways to calculate the value of my time vs the results. Mostly, it kept me focused on golf improvement and I spent more time in my club’s simulator than I would have had I not been doing it. There are definitely other areas of my game that need more attention, but they are significantly harder for me to work on in a simulator and probably would not have gotten the same level of commitment.
The Stack held me accountable, and kept me going into the simulator to get my reps in. I’d spend 30 minutes doing focused wedge practice as a warm up before transitioning into full swings. The goal of adding club head speed might be a vanity project, but I believe putting in the work will have long term benefits across my entire game because I stayed focused on golf over the winter.
On the weight loss front, I weigh every morning. While the number isn’t always lower, the long term trend has been down. My progress is not linear, but forcing myself to weigh each morning gives more impact to the decisions I make every day. Knowing I’ll be stepping on a scale tomorrow morning helps me make better decisions for my eating. Thus far, it has been great at keeping me accountable and helped me make better food choices.
Once the golf season is back into full swing, things will be more challenging. As much as we love to focus on golf score, it’s not necessarily a true reflection on how well we are playing. There is a large amount of variance in a golf round. Starting at about 7 feet, putts become coin flips. Some days you will “get lucky” and make a couple longer putts and save multiple strokes. Other days the ball will take a funny hop and end up in the rough, costing you a stroke. Shooting a single good round is not indicative of improvement. It’s simply a data point needed to draw a conclusion from.
It’s very easy to get wholly focused on the result of one round. One good day can make our season, and one bad day can wreck our confidence. The reality is, they are simply data points we collect to figure out where we need to put in work. Strokes gained is a great tool for this, as it shows you the trends in the various parts of the our game.
My goal for this season is to worry less about each individual score, just like I don’t worry about each individual stack session or weigh in. If I have put in the work, the trend will be towards improvement. I will still celebrate the wins (Just as I celebrated hitting 114 with the stack!) and wonder about off days, but I will not let an individual result derail me from my overall goal. Over time, I will build out a history of scoring, and it will be a better indication of my improvement than any singular round.
This is a large mindset shift for me. I’ve always focused on the round at hand. Playing good golf has been “proof” that what I’m doing is working, and a bad round shows the futility of trying to improve. Neither option is particularly good for actual improvement. This season, I want to let go of the individual score, and try to have a resume of playing the best golf I’m capable of each time I tee it up. Some days, my best won’t be particularly good, and that is OK. It’s just another data point to use to continually improve.
Great lessons! I am working too on weight loss (scale every day) and improving my golf game. The incremental improvement mindset is the only way of achieving success. One will go crazy otherwise. Thanks, Will, appreciate your insight.
Great