Golf is a tricky game. On the one hand, it can be relaxing—a stroll through beautiful scenery as you talk with friends about life. On the other, it can be frustrating and overwhelming if you’re not keeping up—especially if you’re golfing as part of a work event. The following will explore six skills that you can focus on to improve your golf game drastically.

Tension Awareness

The precise nature of golfing requires an acute awareness of each muscle in your body and how tense or relaxed this muscle is. One of the wonderful parts of this skill is that you can work on it anywhere at any time. Regularly check in with your muscles throughout the day by doing a full-body scan. Note any areas of tension. You can also practice by tensing muscles of your choice and releasing tension. You might even discover that you tend to hold pressure in a particular area like your neck, shoulders, hips, or forehead. Learning to relax these muscles can improve not only your golf game but your daily sense of calm as well.

Consistent Drives Across A Good Distance

One of the significant ways to improve your handicap is by focusing on hitting good drives across a decent distance on the regular. A solid drive sets you up for the rest of the game. It can make your approaches and short game shots easier. This could set you up for a better par.

Posture

Part of hitting the solid drive mentioned above involves having great posture. But good posture won’t just help with your drive—it applies to all of golf. Many golf mistakes begin with a flawed setup. It doesn’t matter how good the other elements are if your posture is off. Posture influences your muscle flexibility, your range of motion, and your muscle strength. Pay attention to your posture by watching yourself in a mirror or filming yourself and watching the playback. Compare the stance you see to that of an expert player.

You might want a coach to help you out with an analysis of your posture. When hunting for a coach, as your friends and colleagues for a referral or search the lessons available in your area. If you are located in, let’s say, Florida, you’d look up: Florida golf lessons, as local is usually ideal because you want someone who knows the golf options in your area, and you also don’t want a long commute for your lessons.

Decent Contact

To lower your handicap, you need a higher percentage of good shots. This means you need to contact in the middle of the clubface more consistently. Of course, excellent golfers do mess this up from time to time, but their experience allows them to recover. The majority of crisp shots come from good technique and solid contact. All in all, nothing that practicing cannot improve. 

The Ability To Stay Calm

Sometimes sports can be frustrating. We can have a bad game where nothing we’ve been practicing we manage to pull off. We can have those days where it seems like all of nature is interfering with our game. A big part of consistently playing great golf is being able to calm yourself.

Like practicing tension awareness, you can improve your ability to stay calm anywhere at any time. Breath is often the first step in calming ourselves, but countless techniques can keep us emotionally stable. Try out a few methods for self-soothing in times of frustration and see what works for you. Just like practicing tension awareness, you might find developing this skill helps more than just your golf game.

Being Able To Play In Your Head First

Playing in your head first might seem like a strange thing to include on a list of skills required to level up your golf game, but it is crucial. Consistently it’s been found that Olympic athletes who visualize themselves winning are more likely to succeed. When scientists told four groups to prepare for the Olympics with four different combinations of physical training and mental training, the ones who were given the most visualization work performed the best. The winners spent 75% of their preparation time in the mental sphere and only 25% physically practicing.

You might be surprised by how many of the above skills are mentally-focused, but you shouldn’t be. Part of the reason golf has been used by politicians and business people to close essential deals or as the setting of crucial meetings and negotiations is that the game reveals how mentally strong a person is, and therefore, can help indicate whether a person is stable and ideal for business partnership.