Golf Mental Training

How to Recover from a Poor Round

Here are some simple golf mental training tips that are useful for improving your score and enjoyment of the game.

It doesn’t matter if you use every calming trick and technical swing aid in the book, you will eventually have a bad round of golf. Or, if you’re like most of us, you will often have rounds of golf that make you want to take your golf clubs, shred them into tiny pieces, and bury them on a particular tricky green to make sure that the grass will never grow there again and it will not live to torment anyone else.

Forget About It!

The basic advice in recovering from a bad round is easy: Forget about it. Of course, like everything else in golf, that can be an easy golf tip to give and a tough one to execute.

What are the Best Parts of your Round?

One way to start is to mentally focus on the best parts of the round. Just like every round has its putts that break the wrong way and approaches that dribble down the fairway, every round also has a shot or two that inspires the golfer to think “Man, maybe I should quit my job and focus on the PGA Tour.” Make sure those shots are kept in your memory bank, with every detail that you can remember.

Keep Score only for your Golf Handicap

Also, as much as possible, forget about the score. If you need to record it for golf handicap purposes, do so and then toss the scorecard in the garbage. If you don’t, don’t even bother taking it out of the cart. That number is meaningless in the greater scheme of things, and if you are going to dwell on the score rather than the better parts of your round, it is better to not have that kind of reminder around.

Make Positive Mental Images
Superseed all Frustrations

To get better the next time, take a few moments and figure out what parts of the game frustrated you the most. Were you really weak off the tee? Did you have a hard time making any putt longer than a tap-in. Forget about the details of the missed shots, because you don’t want those images in your brain – only the positive ones. But do make some golf mental training notes for when you hit the range to practice so you can physically and mentally focus on those areas before you hit the links again.