A Mid-Season Pause

Well, this year has been a pretty rough year.

The small glimmer of hope that I had to start the season that I might finally get down to a single-digit handicap has been all but extinguished. Starting the year at a 10.8 index - my lowest ever - I've now ballooned up to a 13.9 and, at one point, sat at a 14.1. The good news here is that there was a point last season where I had gone as high as a 15.0 before hitting my all-time low. So, there's a bit of a confidence booster that I may be able to turn this year around.

I've taken a couple of lessons, which seemed to help until they didn't. I think a lot of us can relate to that. My instructor had me focusing on rotating through the swing - and that was working well for a while. But lately, when looking at my swing on video, it seems like I really can't get my body to do that. Even when it feels like I'm trying to really exaggerate that movement, the video playback shows that I'm barely turning at all.

But this past Sunday, I hit a wall and decided that the only thing left for me to do was to take a break and try to reset mentally. All my tinkering has clearly not been helping and has potentially been doing me more harm.

Sunday was a very active day - featuring 18 holes of golf, followed by a surprisingly high-tempo scrimmage with my beer league hockey team for our first ice time in months, with another 9 holes of golf after. It would be easy to blame my poor performance on fatigue but the fact is that the worst part of my golf game was the first nine holes of the day - a score of 58, 20 strokes higher than my 2 lowest rounds of the year on that same nine. So no, I don't think that I can blame my issues on fatigue.

Looking back at this season, I realized that I've probably only enjoyed about 10% of my rounds so far. So, after all of this, I decided to take a week-long break from golf. During which time I won't even touch a club. This has worked for me in the past, but I have been stubborn this year and attempted to continue to grind on my swing much longer than I normally have. Here's hoping this provides the mental reset that I really think I need.

What's gone wrong?

More often than not, it's the dreaded shank showing up to ruin my round. Things can be going fine for most of the round, and then when I put a wedge in my hand, there's a good chance it's going hard left (reminder: I'm left-handed). And the worst part is, this is even happening with chipping and short punch shots out of the tree line. It's awfully humbling when you try to hit a 15-yard shot and it only goes 5 yards forward and 7 yards left.

But after spending some time trying to correct that on the range before my first round of golf on Sunday, I managed to also work in a massive hook which led to 3 lost Pro V1x's on the first three holes... An expensive start to the day.

My theory on why my year has gone so far off the rails is that, after messing around with more neutral grips and setup positions at the start of the year to take some strain off my elbows, I have completely lost my natural grip and setup positions. So, that's where the idea to take a break and mentally reset came from.

However, there is something else that might help get my swing back on track...

My TPI Screening

A few weeks ago, I found a local TPI-certified physical therapist and set up an appointment to check it out for myself.

For those unfamiliar, TPI stands for Titleist Performance Institute. Titleist runs this program focusing on improving a golfer's game by identifying issues in their body movements that prevent them from playing their best golf and improving their fitness. It wasn't anything quite as glamorous as going to one of their national centres, just a local physical therapist who had gone through and received his certification with the TPI program.

At my initial appointment, we started off with some questions about my history, including anything that I personally believed was holding me back. I've always had bad shoulders and very little wrist extension mobility, so those were what we focused on. After running through a few movements with the physical therapist, it was determined that those issues were much worse than I thought. I left with some exercises to work on for a few weeks and a plan to come back for the full assessment in a bit of a better starting place.

After about 7 weeks of working the exercises that I was given by my physical therapist into my regular workout routine, I headed back to go through the official screening. Now, those exercises I was given to begin with weren't TPI exercises, just some odd exercises to help address some limitations. There was one exercise in particular, involving wrapping a resistance band around my forehead like I was pretending to be a Ninja Turtle (something I swear that I haven't done in at least 25 years), that I'm definitely going to keep doing, as that made my neck feel absolutely fantastic after. My physical therapist, Nick, had me do a couple of head turns and wrist flexes and seemed happy with my improvement (other than my wrists still being almost impossible to flex backwards), and we were able to move on to the full TPI screening.

The screening involved me taking my golf stance to evaluate my golf posture, as well as going through various movement exercises. Afterwards, Nick gave me a score through the TPI grading system, which assigns you a "Golf Fitness Handicap". My current handicap is listed as a 23, which falls in the category of a "weekend golfer." According to Nick, a score in this range can still let you play some pretty good golf, but fatigue will expose a lot of these swing faults and lead to some wild shots throughout a round. And boy, did that ever make sense as he was explaining it to me (he explained it much better than I just did).

I didn't pick up a club throughout the whole session; however, after the full screening, Nick was able to give me a stunningly accurate summary of how all this was affecting my golf swing. I was honestly shocked as he ran through explaining how the way my hips move likely led to things like early extension and slicing of the ball as well as some fat shots. My response to all of that was basically "Uh, yeah. That's pretty much most of it."

He also went on to say that a lot of my issues could explain why I was able to hit my driver so well and still struggle with the irons, since hitting up on the ball is good for the driver swing and bad for the irons. After that, I mentioned how my launch monitor has been showing 99% of my iron shots with a positive angle of attack, and he confirmed that it was almost certainly because of that as well. I knew that my hip rotation was holding me back, my instructor had said as much and I've been trying to work on incorporating that into my swing as much as possible.

It was a bit of a relief to hear that the reason I have been having such a hard time getting my hips to rotate properly through my swing wasn't neccesarily a "skill issue" but due to a limitation in how my body can move. Hopefully, clearing this up will help me to be able to fully implement what my instructor had set out for me as a goal.

As long as I keep up with this exercise plan, Nick seemed to think that I could have this cleared up by the first week of September and have some time to work that handicap back down before the end of the golf season. So far, I've been able to work in either the full 45-minute workout or the 15-minute workout/warm-up routine every day since I had my assessment. I may have to calm down a bit to make sure that I don't overdo it, but I'm feeling pretty good about having something actionable to work on to improve my golf game now and to make sure I continue to play the game I love well into the future.