In Lowest Score Wins (and on The Sand Trap .com) we recommend a generalized practice ratio of 65/20/15. In the absence of a glaring weakness, we recommend players spend 65% of their practice time working on their Full Swing Motion, 20% working on their short game, and 15% working on their putting.
It’s a broad perspective look at the SV charts that come earlier in the book: the Full Swing Motion consists of Driving and Approach Shots. Putting consists of Green Reading, 3-15 foot putts, 15-25 foot putts, and 25+ foot putts. The Short Game consists of Greenside Shots, Greenside Bunker Shots, and more (like 20-60 yard shots, which you should almost never practice unless you’re blading or chunking nearly every one of them).
We recommend this 65/20/15 ratio be applied, again absent a glaring weakness, whether you want to move your game forward evenly, or simply maintain your current level of play.
But what, then, is a “glaring weakness?” How do you identify these glaring weaknesses? How do you know when to break from spending approximately 65% of your time on the Full Swing Motion to spend more than 15% of your time on your putting? Or vice versa?
We look at it like this. Because you’re already spending 65% of your time on your Full Swing Motion, unless you develop a clear and obvious case of “horrible shots” — shanking short irons, topping your driver, slicing the heck out of anything with a number smaller than “7” on it… we recommend you not spend more than about 70% of the time on the Full Swing Motion. You’re already spending 2/3 of your time on it – there’s rarely a situation that calls for increasing that time very much — and when there is, it should be pretty darn obvious.
This simplifies the question into “how do you identify a glaring short game or putting weakness.”
At first, our initial reaction was something like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s reaction to defining pornography: “I know it when I see it.” But this doesn’t really work. Though we (Erik and Dave) might know it when we see it, you may not. All you can see is the game you and your buddies play, and the games of the guys in contention on the PGA Tour.
The gap there is wide. If you’re shooting in the 90s from 6300 yards, there’s a rather large difference between you and someone who is shooting in the high 70s from 6900 yards. Yes, most of that gap is in the Full Swing Motion, but how can you tell whether it’s a putting or short game issue?
Let’s start with putting. Unless you’re a raw beginner, most golfers average between 29 and 34 putts per round. A guy who hits 12 GIR will have several long first putts in the 25+ foot range, while a guy who hits 2 GIR will have 16 opportunities to chip the ball inside that 25+ feet from the hole, but who isn’t as good a putter. In the end, virtually everyone – from the PGA Tour on up – averages nearly the same number of total putts, making it a lousy metric.
For putting, we recommend you consider the SVs we’ve assigned related to putting. They are:
- SV③ – Green Reading
- SV② – 3-15 foot putts
- SV② – 25+ foot putts
- SV① – Under 3 foot putts
- SV① – 15-25 foot putts
We can immediately throw away the SV① skills. Unless you have the yips on putts inside of three feet (which would be obvious) or only on 20-footers (which we’ve never heard of), any putting problems you have from those ranges will show up in the other ranges.
Let’s start with the most important: green reading. Fortunately, this is one of the easiest things to knock off, because you can’t really “practice” it on your own. The solution here is simple: take an AimPoint Express class. If you have taken one, spend 10 or 15 minutes with your level on the practice green or on the course re-calibrating yourself.
LSW defines SCOR values for the remaining skills: short putts (3-15 feet) and long putts (25+ feet). For example, on 3-15 foot putts, we define the S-Value as 0.2 for a 90s shooter, 0.15 for an 80s shooter, and 0.1 for a 70s golfer. We define a ceiling, too, based on a PGA Tour player: make 95% of your three-foot putts, 50% of your eight-foot putts, and 25% of your 15-foot putts.
Remember, though, that the ceiling compares your current skill level to that of an average PGA Tour player. If you lose 0.2 strokes per opportunity from 3-15 feet and you shoot in the 90s, you are exactly where you should be and your putting from 3-15 feet is not a weakness at all, let alone a glaring one. After all, if we based everything on a PGA Tour player, you’d be WAY behind in your ball striking as a 90s golfer.
Instead, take the 0.2 strokes lost each opportunity and apply it to the 95/50/25% markers for the ceiling. Do you make 75% of your three-footers, 30% of your eight-footers, and 5% of your 15-footers? If you do, you’re right where you should be. If you make only 50% of your three-footers, though, you’ve got a glaring weakness.
The same math holds for 25+ foot putts. A 90s golfer loses 0.3 strokes per opportunity because they three-putt too frequently. An 80s golfer loses 0.15. A 70s golfer loses 0.05. In this case, the math doesn’t seem to work because we didn’t define a make percentage. Instead, the C-value or Ceiling is “hit all of your long-range putts to less than 10% of their starting distance. “All” is the percentage here: 100%. So if you’re not getting 70% (100% – 0.3 or 30%) of your putts within 10% of their starting distance (4 feet on a 40-footer, 6.5 feet on a 65-footer, etc.), you’re losing strokes to other 90s golfers and have identified a potential weakness in your long putting. If you’re an 80s golfer, that number is 85% (100%-15%). A 70s golfer should get 95% within 10% of the starting distance.
If short or long putting is a weakness, consult LSW to figure out why. Remember the three Keys to putting: Read, Bead, and Speed. Read comes into play on all putts. On short putts, look also at Bead. On long putts, consider Read and Speed.
Now let’s look at the Short Game. The only SV③ skill in the short game is “Greenside Shots.” There are SV② skills for Greenside bunker shots and 20-60 yard shots, but we can eliminate them immediately as they tend to be pretty obvious when they are a glaring weakness — if you routinely chunk and blade your bunker shots or mid-length pitch shots, they’re a glaring weakness.
In looking at the SCOR for Greenside Shots, we see that 90s golfers lose 0.55 shots per opportunity, 80s golfers 0.35, and 70s golfers 0.2. This is based on a PGA Tour player taking about 2.25 strokes from 20 yards or less off the green. They scramble for par (including putts from the fringe, remember) about 65-70% of the time (and occasionally hole a putt from the fringe or chip in). The percentage math we did above works here too: a 90s golfer will average about 2.8 (2.25 + 0.55), an 80s golfer about 2.6, and a 70s golfer 2.45. If you average more than that for your scoring level, you may have found your glaring weakness.
The only “gotcha” in Greenside Shots is that quite a bit of it has to do with your 3-15 foot putts. If you routinely chip inside 15 feet and are converting very, very few of those putts, consider “doing the math” on the short putting above to see if your short putting is causing the poor scrambling. If you determine that your short putting is fine, then you should read the section on practicing your Greenside Shots in Lowest Score Wins and bump your short game practice up to 30 or 40% for a little while.
Though we often think “the eye test” is a great way to judge whether we have a weakness or not, it’s often not the case. We often place far too much importance on what happens near the hole and not enough on what happens away from the hole in determining a weakness. For example, John Graham told me a story about caddying for a player on the LPGA in a big tournament this past summer. His player, from the middle of the fairway uphill to a green with a flag pretty much in the middle, hit her chip shot 12 feet past the hole. She missed the putt and bemoaned how horrible a putter she was, because that was the stroke that registered as a “miss” to her. In reality, her chipping was terrible (at least on that hole), and was about 80% responsible for the lost shot.
Our eyes can fool us, and our perceptions of things are not always aligned with reality.
We hope this article helps, and can help you to identify any “glaring weaknesses” that you may have which will require a temporary change to the 65/20/15 guidelines.