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How to Effectively Simulate Pressure in Your Practice Sessions

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How to Effectively Simulate Pressure in Your Golf Practice Sessions

Whether you’re approaching a personal best, on your way to sweeping a $5 Nassau, or standing over a shot that could win you a tournament; pressure is a part of everyone’s golf experience.  People have different coping mechanisms that have varying levels of success.  Obviously in the perfect world we wouldn’t experience any pressure or its most common symptom, tension.  Since that reality doesn’t exist, I’ll show you the next best thing.

This is a way to familiarize yourself with pressure so it becomes routine and therefore manageable and also a way to handle tension in any situation so you can flow freely through your golf swing.  These are two drills I learned from an interview with O.S.V.E.A. creator Iain Highfield.

Step 1.  Making the Extreme Feel Routine

As mentioned above, we all experience pressure during a round of golf.  Frankly, it’s my favorite part of the game!  The best way to handle it is to experience it as much as possible.  How do you do this on a consistent basis though?  You can’t just go out, flip a switch, and be on the 18th hole with the lead in a tournament with your heart racing and adrenaline pumping…or can you?

Well, we can emulate those symptoms with a practice drill called “Golf Suicides.”  I’m sure if you’ve watched Hoosiers, Miracle on Ice, or just about any football movie you’re familiar with the concept of suicides.  If you’re not, here’s a quick breakdown:  Sprint side to side across your gym/field/court/rink touching the ground at each end until you reconsider your life choices.

The golf version of this is a bit different and works best if you’re on a driving range that has about 20 yards of distance behind the tee box. Here’s how you set up (don’t forget to pick your target before you start this drill):

  • Setup 3-5 golf balls in a line so they can be hit in rapid succession.
  • Pick the club you will be using and set it on the ground about 5 yards behind your tee box.
  • Move your golf bag about 15 yards behind your tee box.

You’re going to start out by standing behind the tee box at the -5 yard mark, where your club is, then sprint (yes, I mean sprint) to your golf bag and touch it before turning around and sprinting back to the club.  Quickly grab your club, re-familiarize yourself with the target, address your ball, and hit the shot within roughly 5 seconds.  You are then going to drop the club and immediately repeat the process (sprint to your bag and back) for the remainder of the 3-5 balls you’ve setup.

Speed is the key here.  We want to increase the heart rate while hitting the ball that way you know what those pressure conditions feel like and you will be better prepared to deal with them on the course.  There’s a nice little bonus that comes with this practice routine and that’s being forced to learn what breathing regimen works best for you.

Here’s a video example:

OSVEA – Transition training, golf suicides

Actively discover how to get in a relaxed optimal state before you hit a golf shot.

If you don’t have the space to do the running you could always substitute it for something else, like sets of 5 jumping jacks.

Step 2.  Being Aware of Your Tension

If you haven’t been successful at familiarizing yourself to pressure you can help alleviate it by first acknowledging it, and second experiencing the extreme ends of the tension spectrum.

This drill is called the “Tension Challenge,” it’s extra helpful because it can be done on the range or on the course once you have mastered it (again, target and club selected before the drill).

If you are using this drill on the range you’ll step behind the ball facing down your target line with the club at your feet.

Stand in your address position with all your muscles as loose as possible.  You really want to feel as if you are completely relaxed, almost as if you’ve been hypnotized.  This is the relaxed baseline, a zero on the tension scale.  Then you slowly start to flex all of your muscles (toes to eyebrows) more and more until you are practically shaking and turning red in the face.  You really want to hulk out here!  This is a 10 on the tension scale.  Slowly work your way back to zero, shaking out any remaining tension before you work your way back up to ten.

Once you have gone up and down the tension scale three times you can proceed to hit a shot.  While hitting the shot you want to be at a one or a two on the tension scale.  This will allow your muscles to perform the action of swing in loose, easy manner.

If you are doing this drill on the course you probably only want to run yourself up the tension scale and back down once.  If you decide to do it more than once, that’s okay, just make sure you end on zero for the optimal performance.

Here’s a video example:

OSVEA – Transition training, tension challenge.

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If you can work these two drills into your practice routine it will help you transition that safe comfortable range feeling onto the course and into competition.


Marty Griffin is the Founder and Host of the Golf Strategy School Podcast. Golf Strategy School is ranked as the #1 Golf Strategy Podcast on iTunes and was featured as the #1 New and Noteworthy podcast in the Sports & Recreation and Games & Hobbies categories. Marty also provides 1 on 1 mental game coaching tapping into his 20 years of on course experience and massive amounts of research done through interviews with elite coaches in the industry. Find out more about Marty at GolfStrategySchool.com.

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