I recently watched a Netflix documentary called ‘My Octopus Teacher’ and was completely blown away by what unfolded in front of my eyes. I won’t give it away if you haven’t seen it but for one line in the movie. “What if I went every day?” How many things can you apply that to in life?
When golfers look for answers on how to improve they tend to look everywhere except for the simple concept of how often to practice. Notice I did not say how much or how many hours but how often. In fact, high performance coach David Alred says, “little and often” when referring to how to go about getting in the ‘Ugly Zone’ where you are practicing on the edge of your skills and pushing yourself into the struggle of improving them. Ben Hogan said, “Every day that I miss practicing takes me one day longer to be good.”
You may be thinking well I only have so much time in my day or my week but that is the point, just do a little every day. This allows for the strengthening of those new neural pathways that are created as you learn a skill. It may seem easier to find the answer that will make the path easier or it may seem that you need to allot huge blocks of time to make improvements. Neither one of those is true. You simply need to find a way to get into deep quality practice for short periods of time – quality over quantity.
