Better Golf Academy: Strategy to Awesome Golf

Tiger Woods' dad used to drop golf bags, jingle coins, and rip open Velcro right in the middle of his son's backswing. It sounds a little crazy until you find out what scientists learned by making dart players throw while hanging off a climbing wall.

I'm sharing the easiest way I know to bring a little pressure into your practice, no Green Beret required. It might be the most fun way to get tougher on the first tee.

I always assumed you learn golf from the tee box forward, because that's how everyone I know learned it. Then I found out Tiger Woods learned the entire game in the exact opposite order, and his book is even written that way.

There's also a fun study with a projector, some circles of light, and golfers who suddenly started making more putts without changing a thing about their stroke. It changed how I'm planning my next practice session, and I think it'll change yours too.

Some of the best soccer players in the world react to the referee's whistle almost as fast as Usain Bolt reacts to a starting gun. That stat stuck with me, because I'm pretty sure I do the exact same thing over a big putt when my partner's counting on me.

This is the finale of our team golf series, and it's about the kind of pressure you only feel when someone else is on the line with you. I'll give you a simple way to handle it next time it shows up, and we'll bring the whole series together.

Some researchers at Berkeley spent a season counting high fives in the NBA, and what they found actually predicted which teams would play better. I laughed when I first read it, and then I realized it explains a lot about my own bad partner habits.

I'll also take you to the final hole of Saturday's last match at the Presidents Cup, where two teammates pulled off a pretty great finish. Then I'll share the five things great partners do after a bad shot, and the three things most of us do instead.

The best golfer in the world has an alternate-shot record that looks like a typo. And on Friday at the Presidents Cup, the whole format went sideways for the Americans in a way I've honestly never seen before.

I'll explain what Olympic relay swimmers have to do with it, and why the usual way of thinking about alternate shot might be backward. Then I'll give you four things to do before and during the round that are basically free strokes.

There's one swing I only ever make in a best ball, and it's usually the best swing I make all day. That tells me something about my golf that I didn't really want to hear, and I think it's true for most of us.

I'll take you to a wild moment from Saturday at the Presidents Cup and break down the simple math of best ball in plain English. Then I'll give you a five-second conversation to have with your partner before every hole.

There's a swing I hit in almost every scramble I've ever played, and I'm not proud of it. It happens right after somebody else already hit a great one, and it turns out a French engineer with a rope explained exactly why more than a hundred years ago.

This kicks off The Team Game, a brand new series on team golf, inspired by a weekend of watching the Presidents Cup. I'll share the one simple habit that shuts this problem off, and it'll change how your team plays the greens.

Two golfers start at the same level, same goals, practically the same handicap. A year later, one of them is a completely different player, and the other is standing in the exact same spot. The difference wasn't talent, and it wasn't effort, it came down to one mechanism running quietly underneath everything they did.

This is the finale of the Atomic Habits series, and instead of just recapping four episodes, I'm building one real golf habit with you, live, using everything we've covered, the kind that actually compounds into a different golfer a year from now.

A hospital cafeteria changed nothing except where the water bottles were sitting, and soda sales dropped over eleven percent in three months. Nobody's willpower changed. Just what was easiest to reach.

Part four of the Atomic Habits series gets practical, into habit stacking and redesigning your own environment so getting yourself to actually practice stops depending on how motivated you feel that day.

There's an ice cube sitting in a room that's slowly heating up, one degree at a time, and for a long stretch, absolutely nothing happens. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, it melts. That's not really about ice.

Part three of the Atomic Habits series gets into what James Clear calls the Plateau of Latent Potential, and why the exact moment most people quit a new habit is usually right before it was about to work.