Decisions Decisions

Many of today’s top executives are doing something odd in the morning. They are getting dressed in the same clothes every single day. I don’t mean they are wearing literally the same thing, without washing. I mean that they own 5 identical outfits and that’s what they wear every day. They will wear the same charcoal suit with the same color shirt and same color tie every day. They wear the same style socks and the same shoes. Same belt, same watch, all the way down the line. What they wear is just the start.

They have a highly structured morning routine that contains as much similarity from day to day as possible. That routine is designed to eliminate any choices they have to make each day. They eat the same thing, get up at the same time, do the same things in the same order, and yes, wear the same clothes every single day.

Why are today’s highest level performers standardizing as much of their morning as possible?

Decision fatigue

It’s been shown in studies repeatedly that the human brain has a harder time with each successive decision it has to make in a given day.

Basically you start the day with the ability to make a limited number of decisions well. Once you pass that number, your ability to make good, well thought out choices decreases with every decision. This is why at the end of many days you can’t even decide what you want for dinner let alone decide on anything of consequence. This phenomenon is known as decision fatigue.

The odd thing is that our brains don’t really distinguish between big decisions and small ones.

To our brains, deciding what to eat for breakfast is a decision. Deciding what to wear is a decision. Deciding what route to take to work is a decision. If those things aren’t standardized, by the time we get to work or school, we’ve already made too many withdrawals from our decision bank to be able to successfully make it through our day.

Decisions and Disc Golf

So what the heck does this have to do with disc golf? A lot. Disc golf is 18 holes of decision making. If you are playing in a tournament, it’s often 36 holes. Every shot requires you to decide on a disc, decide on a line, decide on a stance, and decide on many other variables that come into play.

I often look back at the mistakes in my rounds and can point at bad decision making as the culprit. I chose a shot I shouldn’t have thrown. I threw a disc I had no business throwing. It’s these bad decisions that often cost us the match.

On top of that, we then beat ourselves up because we realize we made bad choices. We know that we “knew better” but did the dumb things anyway. What we didn’t realize was that we made those bad decisions because we used up all of our ability to make good choices before we ever started playing. We are playing our rounds in the midst of a serious case of decision fatigue.

That leaves us with the obvious question of how to keep this from happening. It turns out that there is quite a bit you can do to avoid decision fatigue on the course. Here are 10 tips that will help make sure you hit the course with your brain’s decision bank as full as possible. Hopefully full enough to make it through that day’s play without choosing poorly.

10 Tips For Making Better Decisions

1. Pack your disc golf bag the night before. Don’t spend the morning trying to figure out which discs you want to bring with you. If you carry 15-20 discs, that means that you have already spent 15-20 decisions just putting discs in your bag. (Here’s a checklist that might help with the other things you might want to have in the bag)
2. Pack your car the night before. Get all your extra clothes, hats, sunscreen, bug spray, etc. loaded up before bed. Instead of running around in the morning trying to remember if you have everything, all you have to do is get in the car and go. (It’s also helpful to use checklists like this for your disc golf trips)

3. 

   Pick out your clothes the night before. Yep, just like your Mom did for you in 3rd grade. Lay them out so all you have to do is put them on in the morning.

4. Decide what you are going to have for breakfast the night before. Don’t spend the morning fumbling around the kitchen looking for the cereal you like and then change your mind and decide you want to eat out that morning. Wake up with the plan already made.
5. If you are driving a distance to get to the course, map it out ahead of time. If you have GPS, make sure to use it. Let your smart phone or navigation device do the thinking for you.
6. Check out the course before hand. Even if you do it on line. Try to decide on at least your tee shots for each hole. Remember to allow for different winds. It’s powerful when you can step up on each tee and automatically reach for the disc you decided on days ago. If at all possible, don’t play tournament rounds blind.
7. Carry fewer discs in the first place. The less discs you have, the less of a chance that you are stuck between one of several. Get rid of all overlap in your bag. The shot you face should decide on the disc for you. What you throw in any situation should always be clear.
8. Stick to the same warm up drills before your round(s). Always do the same stretches. Always do the same amount of putting with the same number of putters for the same amount of time. Do the same light field work and throw the same warm up shots each time.
9. Try not to play any holes before your round. If you’ve properly scouted the course, then field work should be plenty before you start. Every hole you play before the round requires multiple decisions. If you do play a few holes, make sure they are worth their cost in decisions. Play the ones that you really need to practice.
10. Practice. The more you practice, the more you take game time decisions out of the mix. The more you have practiced the more sure you are of what to do in any situation. If you can make your in game decisions more like automated responses, you’ll save your decision making power for the more important situations.

After compiling this list, it was surprising to me just how many decisions we can take off of our plate. Making good choices is a critical skill in playing great disc golf. It’s also critical in just about every other area of life you could think of. It makes good old common sense to do everything you can to make good choices in both disc golf and life. It works for those high level executives, it will work for you too!

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At my home course, we have leagues on Wednesdays. I’m very happy to have Wednesdays off. This allows me to get there before they start and get some practice in. Being that it’s a very busy course, it also allows me to see group after group show up to get in a round after work.

I noticed something the other day as I watched these people get out of their car and head towards the first tee. I almost never see someone warm up. At best, they’ll hit the practice basket for 5-10 putts. Then it’s on to the first tee. I not only see this when people play casual rounds, but I also see this at tournaments. Not everyone, of course, but enough people don’t warm up that I notice it.

If you go to any professional sporting event. This is definitely not what happens. In baseball, they have batting practice, stretching, calisthenics, fielding practice, and then they’ll play catch for a while. Only when they are fully warmed up do they play the actual game. All major sports do something similar. In fact, most organized sports at any level will include a decent amount of warm up before the game starts.

So why not disc golf? Why does person after person just pull up to the course, get out of their car, step up on the first tee and throw? At best they might do a couple of windmills with their arms. But aside from no physical warm up, their first drive is their first throw of the day. Their first putt is the first one in the round, and it counts towards their score.

It seems to me that if we only get to play a set number of holes, and all of them count, it makes sense to warm up at least a little bit before playing. It doesn’t even need to be a lot. Just give yourself 10 minutes. Show up 10 minutes before your buddies and get some practice throws in. That short amount of time is more than enough to get a good amount of pre round practice in.

At worst, play catch for 5-10 minutes with a friend.

One step better than that is to play catch and then play a quick game of PIG or DISC at the practice basket.

One step better than that is to grab a few putters and put them all in from 15, 20, 25, 30, 50, 100, and 150 feet.

In the end, the point is to do something. It’s sure to save you at least one throw once the real round starts. It’s sure to prevent at least a little bit of frustration. It might even prevent an injury if you include some stretching and mobility work. On top of all of that, it’s fun! You’re still throwing a disc. Isn’t that what you came to the course to do?

The next time you head out to play, give yourself that 10 minutes. You will probably find that you play better. It will get your mind ready for the round. It will get your body ready to throw. Best of all, it will get your score card ready for lower scores!

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One of the many flaws of our primitive monkey brains is that they often don’t do what we tell them to.  So many times, they have their own thoughts and agendas.  What you actually think and what you want to think are often two completely different things.  This is one of the major sources of frustration in our lives when we try to go one direction and our brains want to go the other.

Confidence is one of those areas.  We can tell ourselves to be confident all we want.  Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.  It’s not something that we can put on a mental checklist.  We can’t roll up to our Saturday afternoon leagues, sit in the parking lot, and then simply say, “Bag of discs, check.  Gatorade, check.  Confidence, check.”

The reason for this is that confidence is a result.  We can’t control results directly.  I wrote a post about that a while back as it applies to lowering your scores.  You can’t control whether or not you have confidence, but you can control the things that get you confidence.

In my post last week about the confidence/oh crap circle I referenced that feeling in your gut that you get right as you step up to a putt.  Regardless of what you are trying to tell yourself inside, your gut usually has only one of two reactions… “I got this!!!” or “oh crap I don’t got this!”.  No matter how hard you try, you can’t override that gut feeling.  All you can do is try to impact when it happens.

What is confidence?

To understand this, we have to understand what confidence is.  Confidence is nothing more than demonstrated performance.  In other words, if you step up to a task (long putt or otherwise) and you’ve done it successfully a ton of times before, your monkey brain assumes that you can do it again.  If you step up to that same task and you have either never done it, or have failed at it, your monkey brain assumes the worst.  Enter the “Oh crap!!!” feeling in your gut.

First, there is nothing wrong with you for thinking this way.  We have genetically evolved to think the worst.  It’s what has ensured the survival of our species over time.  Always assuming the worst keeps us out of harms way, or at least ready to deal with it.  The best example I’ve heard is the one about the cave man walking past a stick…

If a cave man looks down at a stick and assumes it’s a snake (the worst case scenario), he’s always careful and therefore avoids getting bitten when it really is a snake.  If he looks down and always assumes it’s a stick (the best case scenario), every once in a while he is wrong, gets bitten, and dies.  Natural selection therefore demands that the optimistic caveman is removed from the gene pool by a series of unfortunate cases of stick/snake mistaken identity.

It’s not until those cavemen have picked up thousands of sticks without getting bitten that they develop confidence when picking up a stick.  Until then, every time they look at one, their gut screams out, “Oh crap! Og was killed by one of those!”.

The second component to understanding where your confidence comes from is understanding what is called “critics math”.  Critics math is something that we all suffer from.  It’s the mind’s screwed up way of only remembering the bad things that have happened instead of the good.  The term comes from authors, actors, directors, musicians, etc…

Let’s say a band puts out a brilliant album.  It can win a ton of awards.  It can get thousands of positive reviews on ITunes.  But what do they focus on?  The negative reviews.  They become fixated on the handful of haters in the world.  They only focus on the bad at the expense of all the good.

Then, they change their style and start writing to please the critics. What they should do is stay true to themselves, but they don’t.  Many a good author, band, director, etc. have gone from great to crap by doing this.  Their math is 1 criticism is > 1000’s of pieces of positive feedback.  That’s “critics math”.  Here’s a disc golf example…

You’ve made thousands of 15 foot putts.  When you are out practicing, you couldn’t miss one if you tried.  Then, in a freak accident, you miss one during a tournament.  Critics math kicks in.  You can now only remember that one missed 15 foot putt.  From that point forward, you step up to every 15 foot putt with that “Oh crap!!!” feeling in your gut.  Your confidence is gone.  Every stick now looks like a snake.

If you could only bring back the memories of the several thousand times you’ve made that exact same putt.  Like we mentioned earlier, your monkey brain just won’t listen.  All it can think of is that one miss.  Eliminating this “critics math” is huge for boosting your confidence.

The third component of confidence is being unattached to the outcome.  If you were to walk past a disc on the ground that was about 15 feet from the basket, and you wanted it in the basket, you’d pick it up and throw it in 99.9999% of the time.

If I were to give you a disc 15 feet from the basket, and then tell you that you would be tied down and forced to listen to Justin Bieber songs over and over if you missed, your make % would drop significantly.  You would be far too attached to the outcome to have the same confidence you would have if nothing was on the line.  Your fear of the Biebster would cause you to miss more than if you didn’t care about the outcome at all.

How to gain confidence.

So, what is a disc golfer to do?  We know that confidence is critical to great performance.  We know that we need it to win.  No one ever interviewed Paul McBeth and heard him say, “Yeah, I didn’t think I could win at all.  I’m actually shocked any of my discs went into the basket in the first place.”  It’s quite the opposite, in fact.  Confidence is crucial.

The answer lies in practice.  Practice can address all three of the above components of confidence.

[tweetthis]Practice gives you confidence when playing #discgolf[/tweetthis]

If you practice a lot, you will have performed hundreds, even thousands of reps.  There is no other way to get quality reps in as effectively as dedicated practice.  Ask Paul McBeth how he spends his days.  The answer is practicing for hours and hours and hours.

Lot of reps gives you demonstrated performance.  Your monkey brain has seen you successfully do something over and over again.  Your body knows you can do it, your mind knows you can do it.  Why?  Because you’ve done it so many times before.

If you practice enough, you start to make critic’s math almost meaningless.  You have to repeat something so many times that you don’t even remember the last time you did it wrong.  You’ve now done something so many times that doing it wrong isn’t even a possibility any more.

When you have practiced this much, and find yourself in a high pressure situation, you will easily be able to mentally picture what you did in practice.  The top pros in the world are not thinking, “I really need to make this putt.  It’s really important.  I better not miss.”  They are thinking, “This is just like practice, I’ve done this a million times before.”  That visualization blocks your attachment to the outcome.  It’s just another practice putt, no big deal.

In the end, whether or not you have confidence is totally in your hands.  It’s just not something you can turn on like a light switch.  It’s something that takes work and time.  It’s something that takes a lot of practice.  It’s something that’s a result of a lot of other things.  No matter how hard it is, though, it’s something that is worth investing in.  Get out there and get those practice reps in.  It will build your skills and it will do great things for your confidence.

There is nothing quite like stepping up to a shot and knowing in the deepest recesses of your soul that you are about to execute.  That level of confidence feels amazing.  We’ve all been there at one time or another.  The goal is to ever increase the number of times your gut screams out “I got this!!!!”.

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As you know from any of my social media accounts, I’m here!!!  After months of anticipation and 9 hours of driving, I rolled into Emporia late Saturday night.  The place isn’t exactly hopping yet, but I am here a lot earlier than most plan to be here.  I have a good reason, though.  I hate playing courses blind.

Over the next week, I’ll play in 3 tournaments.  All on courses I’ve only seen on video.  I got 2 solid rounds of practice in yesterday and that’s what I have planned for today.  One of the many nice things about being here this early is that I’ll get to practice with the locals.

I’ll intentionally be heading to the courses and asking to tag along with folks who live here and play here regularly.  No one knows a course like someone who plays it all the time.  This isn’t the first time I’ve done this.  This is how I practice for a lot of tournaments.  I’m always hopeful I’ll run into some folks who call whatever course I’m on their home course.

The next time you are at a course that is new to you, see if you can find someone local to play with.  Even if it means just hanging out at the first tee and asking if you can join a group.  The things you can learn for the course regulars are often things it would take you many, many rounds to figure out.  Why make it harder on yourself than you have to?

One more benefit is that you will meet some very cool people.  Disc golf is unique in how easy it is to just walk up to people on the course and ask them if you can play with them.  I’ve rarely been turned down.  More often than not, you’ll make new friends too.  Add this to the list of things that makes disc golf awesome.

You know what else is awesome?  This blog (if I do say so myself!).  It’s so awesome that you should enter your email below and subscribe!  That way you won’t miss one article or tip.  You never know when we’ll post the one thing that raises your game to the next level.

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When interviewers ask Simon Lizotte how he learned to throw as far as he does, his answer is daily field work.  When Paul McBeth makes a video on how he practices, he shows you his field work.  When people write in to the Disc Golf Answer Man podcast and ask how to get better, you can bet that Eric McCabe will recommend field work.  There’s only one problem with those recommendations…

Field work is stunningly boring.

That’s right, I said it.  Most of you were thinking it, don’t lie.  Look, if field work were as fun as playing rounds, we would all do a lot more of it.  Bottom line is that when faced with spending our free time playing rounds or chasing our discs around a football or soccer field, most of us choose to hit the course every time.

So what is a disc golfer in need of improvement (and isn’t that all of us?) to do?  Just playing rounds leads to minimal, if any, improvement.  The improvement that does come comes at a snails pace compared to the improvement to be had from solid field work.  For example, in a round you may only throw a tunnel shot that fades right at the end once in a round.  You could throw that same shot 100 times in a field in the time it takes you to play a round.

But this isn’t a post about why field work is more effective.  For a million different reasons it just is.  This is a post about how to make field work less boring than watching paint dry and hopefully more effective.

First, I realize that there is a group of people out there who religiously do field work and actually enjoy it.  Those people are weird and this post probably isn’t for them.  For the rest of us, we need a way to get the benefit of doing field work while still getting the enjoyment of being out on the course.

The answer is actually pretty simple.  Do your field work out on the course.

I play a ton of solo rounds.  A metric ton, actually.  That’s because the times I am able to play are when no one else is available.  6-7am on a weekday is a time that sees very little action out there on the course.  You pretty much have the place to yourself no matter where you live or how much traffic your local course gets.  This means that if you want to play at this time, it’s generally by yourself.  This also means that you don’t have to worry about playing each hole quickly.

At this point in my preparation for the Glass Blown Open, the only day I do field work in a field is on Saturday.  When the courses are full, that’s when I head to the local football field.  Other than that, all of my field work is done out on the course itself.  Here are the top 10 reasons why:

1. On a course, you can simulate any shot you would actually face when playing.  In an open field, you can’t do this.  Sure, you can pull a Mr. Rogers and imagine it all, but that just isn’t the same.  Practicing tunnel shots is a lot more fun and a lot more effective when you are actually in a tunnel.
2. On a course, you have a real tee pad.  Everyone always says, “practice how you play”.  Well, I don’t know about you, but when I’m driving in rounds, I drive off of tee pads 95% of the time.
3. There is elevation on a course, not on a soccer field.  Unless your park district designed the worst soccer field in the entire world, it’s flat.  You can’t practice throwing up or downhill when you are on flat ground.
4. On a course, you have actual baskets to throw at.  Sure you can bring cones or other targets with you to the field, but there’s nothing quite like throwing at a basket.  This strongly contributes to the “fun and not boring” part of doing field work on the course.
5. On a course, you can alternate between driving, upshots, putting, and lots of other stuff.  This is how a real round goes.  When playing, you don’t get to throw 9 drivers before you throw the one that counts.  Mixing up the shots you are practicing is a much closer approximation to how you actually play.
6. There are obstacle on a course.  Again, you can pretend to throw your disc around an imaginary tree in an empty field.  Or, you can throw your disc around an actual tree.  The latter is just more effective.

   

7. You can get in putting and throwing practice out on the course.  Typically, when out in a field, there is no putting.  A day without putting practice is a day of practice at least partially wasted.
8. On the course, there are many different types of grass, dirt, and other ground cover.  You can practice getting your disc to land the right way in each.  You can practice skip shots right along with shots that stop dead in longer grass.
9. You get regular changes in scenery as you move around the course.  The boring sports field will always be the boring sports field.  The changing environments around the course serve to keep things interesting.  The more interesting things are, the longer you tend to practice.
10. It’s more fun out on the course.  When your practice is more fun, you will do it more often.  The field work that you used to do just once in a while becomes the field work you do weekly or even daily.

Now, there is one big drawback.  You will be tempted to just play a round instead of practicing.  And that’s a big temptation.  In order for this to work, you have to be committed to just practicing.  If you can do that, though, you are bound for much more beneficial practice sessions.

So how do you go about this?  Honestly it doesn’t really matter.  You could go out and throw a bunch of shots from each spot as you play around the course.  You could go out to select holes and play them over and over with multiple discs.  You could go out and pick certain spots and throw a stack of discs from each one.  You could go to one hole that’s just out of your reach and work on your distance by driving it over and over again.  Just take a stack of discs, and probably your video camera, and get out there and practice.

Those are just a few of the many ways you can get in field work out on the course.  And that in and of itself highlights one of the benefits.  The possibilities are endless.  The opportunity to improve virtually every aspect of your game is limited only by your imagination.

I honestly believe that people don’t practice because playing is more fun.  For me, field work on the course is almost the only way I practice.  If you follow me on Facebook, you’ve seen my daily practice updates.  Unless the weather is bad, almost all of them are made up field work drills done out on the course.  This one mind set shift has done more for my practice regimen than just about anything else.  I encourage you to try it for yourself.

[tweetthis]The most effective #discgolf practice drills are the ones that you actually do.[/tweetthis]

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The post Road to the GBO – Taking the Field Out of Field Work appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.

In a previous tip, we talked about seeing the line.  Actually looking, in your mind’s eye, for the flight line you want your disc to take.  While that works well, there’s an additional aiming aid that, when combined with seeing your line, will have you shooting lights out in tight quarters before you know it.

The first thing to remember is that you aim down your line, but that line is almost never straight.  The problem with this is that the easily distracted monkey brain that lives inside all of our skulls wants desperately for us to aim at the final resting place.  It sees the basket, all shiny and inviting, sitting out there waiting for our shot to crash into it.  It sees that and then often takes over and makes our body throw right at the basket.  Unless you’re throwing a disc that goes straight, we all know this leads to trouble.

Because the line your disc will fly on is usually not straight, you aren’t actually going to end up throwing the disc at the intended resting spot.  As a basic example, if you are a RHBH player and you are throwing an approach shot with an over stable disc, you will aim to the right of your target.  Throw the disc out to the right and it’s flight path will carry it left of where you actually threw it and toward the place you want it to end up.

We have to remember that we only control the initial direction of the throw.  We have to trust our disc to do the rest after that.  So while we are visualizing an entire line (often with one or more turns in it), we are only responsible for starting the disc down the first part of that line.  How do we do that?

We pick a spot in the distance.  One that allows us to start the disc in the right direction.  Something like a tree or bush or house in the distance.  We then tell our brains that no matter what it thinks, that’s not where the disc will end up.  We step up.  We throw at that spot.  We trust that the disc we picked is the right one and that it will do the rest.

In the end, it’s often best to just forget there is even a basket out there.  Once you use the basket to determine what line the disc should fly on, forget the basket.  Once you use the needed line to determine to point in the distance you want to throw at, forge the line.  All you are concerned with now is that one point in the distance.  Throw the disc at that point and if you’ve selected the right disc, the rest will fall into place on it’s own.

Another thing that’s easy to forget is to come back here several times a week to check for new posts.  What you can do instead is to just subscribe.  I’ll send you all the new posts once a week, directly to your inbox, so you don’t have to do any work at all!

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It’s here, it’s here, it’s here, it’s here!!!!  It’s finally here!  Happy spring everyone!!!

OK, so we still have some cold and crappy days to deal with (a couple came this week), but we are finally putting winter in our rear view mirrors.  One week ago today was the official first day of spring.  I can’t wait for indoor putting practice to become a fall back for rainy days only.  I sorely miss getting up every morning and heading to the course for my daily practice sessions.

For the folks in warmer climates, spring doesn’t hold near the significance for you that it does for my cold weather brethren out there.  And it means even more for some of our European disc golf brothers and sisters.  The sun is finally coming back out and actually staying out long enough to go play.

In addition to the meteorological signs that it’s spring, there are lots of other signs too.  If you like college basketball, March madness is here and bracketology is in full effect.  The clocks have been changed and the Sun isn’t going down until after 7pm!  For me, one of my favorite markers of spring is the soreness I get the day after my first good, solid day of playing disc golf at my home course for the year.

We’ve all been there.  We have the day off of work or school.  The weather is nice.  The ground has dried out.  It’s that perfect first real day of spring goodness outside.  We grab our bag of discs, dust them off, and head out to the local course with our buddies intent on playing until our arms fall off.  Oh what a glorious and wonderful day that is!

The next day, though.  Oh that next day.  For the disc golfer who hibernated for the winter, it’s a painful day.  Muscles ache.  It’s hard to walk.  It’s tough getting out of bed.  It’s on this day that we pay the price for being sedentary and not throwing a disc all winter.  If you’re really unlucky, you are now starting off your season injured.

I have to admit, I know this pain from experience.  More than once I’ve come back from a disc golf hiatus of some type and just plain done too much the first day back.  I’ve pulled my lat, strained my shoulder, blistered my hand, and strained a ligament in my elbow.  Not all at the same time, of course, but each of those things has happened because I over did it on that first day back on the course after a break.

It’s because of these injuries that many years ago I started using a gradual process of easing back into things.  A sort of spring training for disc golf if you will.  Even if you’ve been playing during the winter (I usually do and this year was no different), this is still a good idea.  Fair weather golf is just a different animal than snow golf.

Even with my continuing preparation for the the GBO, I started this spring ritual 2 weeks ago and it ends today.  Tomorrow I have my first tournament of the year.  I’ve found that starting 2 weeks prior to really playing seriously is enough time to safely get back into the swing of things in a healthy and injury free manner.

First, before we address the daily plan I follow, I want to stress the importance of staying limber and stretched out.  A while back, I wrote a post about the stretching routine I follow daily.  Whether you use that one or another, daily stretching should be a big part of a disc golfer’s life.  As I learned the hard way, jumping out of the car and heading straight to the first tee is not the best idea.

Once you have that general baseline nailed down, it’s best to ease back into things.  The following is what I do every year.  It’s not the only way to approach this, but it’s worked for me for quite a few years and it might work for you too!

Days 1-3:
I take my practice basket to an open field.  The goal is to just get into the swing of throwing again.  I’ll start with 20-30 practice putts.  Then I’ll start throwing approaches.  I start close (50-100 feet).  On these days, I’m not looking to throw very hard at all, just knock the rust off.  Each day I move progressively further back until I’m about 200 feet out.  I’ll never throw more than 60%-70% power during these first 3 days.  I putt out every approach.  The goal is right around 100 approaches thrown each day.

Day 4:
Rest.  Yep, rest.  I’ll typically do a bunch of mobility work this day.  I might practice putting, I might not.  This is strictly a forced “ease back into it” type day.  This is the first of a few days I give my body to recover and build strength.  This is probably the hardest of all the days.  I stay in a field the first three days so I’m not tempted to just go throw a round.  By day 4 I’m itching to play on the course pretty badly.

Days 5-7:
More field work.  Here I take my basket to a football field.  I’ll repeat what I did on day 3 as a warm up (200 foot putter approaches).  Then I’ll break out my mids.  The goal is to stretch back to 300 feet with my mids, but never throw full power.  I don’t have a set number of throws in mind.  I’m just trying to groove in a nice smooth throw and get my mechanics back.  I’m also putting out from every throw on these days too.

Day 8:
Rest again.  On day 7, I’ve worked up to throwing 75-80% power.  I can usually start to feel some soreness again by now.  Another day of mobility work is really useful here.  I definitely practice putting this day.

Day 9:
Time to reward myself with some actual play on an actual course.  Here I take three neutral mids and 3 putters to my local 9 hole practice course.  It’s a great place to practice and never has many people on it.  I play 18 holes of 3 disc  golf.  I play each mid individually and I putt out 3 times from each one.  This is one of my favorite practice drills overall and this is a really fun day for me.

Day 10:
I always feel like this should be another rest day, but at this point the itch to throw plastic is undeniable.  So, it’s back to the field with my putters.  Here is when I start to try and push some distance out of them.  As a note, almost every throw up until this day has been a stand still throw.  Day 10 is when I add my xstep in.  Using putters really shows any issues I might have and allows me to work on correcting them.  Weather and time permitting, I’m throwing a couple hundred up shots with my putters and putting out all of them.

Day 11:
Time to break out the fairway drivers.  Typically I’ll pull out a straight (used to be Leopards, now it’s Visions) and a stable with fade (used to be Teebirds, now it’s Riots – also trying the Stag out this year).  Back to the practice field.  I like to eliminate putting on this day.  It’s my first day out with drivers for the year and I just want to get some reps in.  I start at about 50% standing still and gradually work my way up to about 80%-85% power with a run up.  This is more about regaining muscle memory and working on smoothness than anything else.  It’s also prep for Day 12….

Day 12:
Huzzah!!!!  It’s finally time for a real round on a big boy course.  Still no high speed distance drivers, but fairway and down is fair game.  Depending on how I’m feeling, I’ll play 36 holes on this day and book end it with putting practice inside the circle.  I play real rounds with no practice or second shots.  I try to simulate a tournament as closely as possible.  This is typically a few days before my first tournament of the year so if possible, this practice is done at the same course I’m playing that weekend.  This is the first test of the year as to whether or not I’m ready for competitive golf.  It’s also when I look back at the previous 11 days and thank myself for the self discipline.  I’ll typically be feeling really good about my game at this point.  More importantly, I know I won’t end up injured.

Day 13:
Rest.  I’ll typically beat myself up pretty good on day 12 and will be feeling it.  More mobility work and a lot of yoga on this day.   I will practice putting a lot on this day.  Probably 500+ putts.

Day 14:
This is usually my first tournament of the year.  A good night’s sleep, yoga in the morning, a couple hundred practice putts, and arriving early enough to practice the holes I think will be challenging that day.

So there it is.  My version of disc golf spring training.  I’m smart enough to know that most people won’t do any of that.  Once the weather is nice, most people will just hit the course and start playing.  I totally get that and completely understand wanting to just play until the ole arm falls off.

For what it’s worth, this has worked extremely well for me and I did it again this year (today is day 13).  I truly believe that if you work your way back into your season similarly to this you really set yourself up well for health and success.  There’s nothing worse than starting the year injured.  Hopefully you can take at least a couple of useful nuggets from this plan that will help you prevent that.

Regardless of how you get ready, I want to wish the best of luck to all of you in this year’s disc golf endeavors.  Whether you are a tournament player, a league player, a casual player, or once a week one disc wonder, may all your discs fly true and may your birdies outnumber your bogies.  I truly hope that this is your best disc golf year ever and I’m thankful that you allow me to be a part of it!

Here’s another thing that will help you play better this year, subscribe to the Mind Body Disc blog!  We’ll send you a weekly newsletter rounding up all of our posts for the week so you never miss a thing.

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The post Road to the GBO – Spring Tune Up appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.

3 months straight.  That’s how long I’ve been training daily in an effort to ready myself for the 2015 Glass Blown Open.  I’m slated to arrive in Emporia on April 26, which means I’ve got 6 weeks left to prepare.

It’s been 12 weeks of working out, meditating, practicing putting, studying up on the mental game, field work when possible, and a variety of other preparatory activities.  That’s the longest I’ve been that dedicated to anything that didn’t result in money or landing a girlfriend.  The crazy thing is that it’s been relatively easy.

So, I sit here now scratching my big bald head wondering how I’ve been able to stay dedicated to this when all of my previously well laid plans to get better at disc golf have mostly fizzled out in 3 weeks or less.  Sure I’ve always avidly played, but dedicated practice was sporadic at best.  Why now?  What’s different?

A big part, of course, is the public accountability.  I have intentionally made a big deal out of this here and on FaceBook strictly for that reason.  When you know people are watching, you are much less likely to quit.  That has definitely helped a lot, and I recommend using accountability for anyone trying to achieve any worthwhile goal.  But I don’t think that’s the biggest reason.

I really think that the biggest thing is that I finally have a concrete reason to practice.  I’m actually practicing for something.  For the first time, there is a specific event, on a specific date that I am preparing for.  I actually have a deadline.  No, it’s more than that, I actually have a deadline that I care about.

The GBO is more than just jumping in the car at sunrise on a Saturday morning to drive a couple hours to a tournament.  This is a week long event with 2 C tiers and an A tier (NT stop for the pros) that’s happening 8 hours from home.  This is a week of my vacation time.  This is an event that I want to get every last bit of enjoyment out of.  A huge part of that will be showing up and knowing that I’m well prepared.  I know myself well enough to know that if I show up ill prepared, I’ll just beat myself up the whole time.  That would make for a terrible vacation and would be no fun at all!

Up until now, I’ve always practiced for the nebulous goal of “getting better”.  That’s about as motivating as eating broccoli because it’s good for you (that stuff is awful, just awful).  Sure, I’ve always wanted to play disc golf at a higher level than I do.  But that want alone is too easily overpowered by a warm bed and a snooze button.

Having a concrete disc golf deadline has changed all of that.  It’s made that snooze button my enemy.  It’s made going to bed early easy.  It’s helped guide all of my decisions like a compass constantly pointing in the direction I want to go.  Committing to going to the GBO, getting the time off of work, and reserving the hotel for the week has given me the motivation that all of my previous disc golf improvement plans have lacked.

Now here’s the kicker that hopefully helps all of you…

Anyone can have their own personal GBO.  I don’t mean a disc golf tournament in Kansas.  I mean an event or day that you can make special and meaningful.  I mean an event or day that you can put on a calendar and count down to.  People do it for their weddings.  People do it for their vacations.  Why can’t you can do it for disc golf?

Here’s some possible things you could put on your calendar to give you a deadline that motivates you:

1. Register for a tournament that happens in a month or two, but register one division higher than you normally play.
2. Challenge a buddy who is better than you to a cash game and schedule it a month or two down the road.
3. Challenge some friends to play for something embarrassing (loser has to wear a dress next time you play on a busy weekend) and schedule that game down the road a bit.
4. Join a local league and put the last league day of the year on your calendar with a goal of how you want to play by then.
5. Book a disc golf vacation and plan to go play some well known, tough, challenging courses.

There’s a ton of ways you can give yourself a meaningful disc golf deadline.  These are just a few.  Spring starts in just 7 days!  Summer is right around the corner!  Just sit and think about it for a minute.  What are some important disc golf related events that you are looking forward to this year?  How will you make sure you are at your best for them?

Have you ever wanted to get better but found yourself not sticking to a practice plan?  Try giving yourself a disc golf deadline.  It wouldn’t hurt to tell a bunch of people about it too.  So far it’s been working great for me.  There’s no reason to think it wouldn’t work great for you too.

You know what else works great for helping you get better?  Subscribing to this blog!  You know I’d stop asking if everyone just did it already!  Do it.  You won’t be sorry!

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The second putt always goes in.

You know what I’m talking about.  You miss that first putt, pick up another putter and just fire it at the basket.  That second putt always goes in.  The same thing happens with lots of other shots.  You’re standing in the woods and you hit the first available tree.  You lean over, yank another disc out of your bag, fire down the fairway in semi anger or frustration, and of course the second shot threads the needle to nestle up gently under the basket.

“Why couldn’t that happen the first time!” is something all disc golfers have screamed at the disc golf gods on more than one occasion.  But why?  Why does this happen?  If we could only figure out how to throw that second shot on the first try!

I’m fairly sure there are a lot of components that go into why this happens.  I’d love to solve the whole of that problem for us right here in this post, but I seem to have left my psychology degree in my other pants.  Even without a degree, over the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to make a distinction that I think directly relates to the mystery of the obscenely accurate second shot.

Right now, at this moment, you have focus.  You are sitting there looking at a screen and reading this blog.  You didn’t have to try to do that, you just did it.  You didn’t have to get yourself prepared, put yourself into a particular position, psych yourself up, or anything else.  You simply opened the post and started reading.  You aren’t thinking about background noises, how you are holding your phone/tablet/computer, or what your left foot feels like.  You are simply reading.  You have focus.

[tweetthis]You weren’t thinking about your left foot, until just now.[/tweetthis]

That, it turns out, is vastly different from concentration.  Concentration is what you had to do when you first learned to read.  You had to sit up straight, get the right lighting, make everyone else in the room be quiet, and stare at the words and letters on the page until they made sense.  It was hard, and sometimes you screwed up.  The slightest thing took you away from doing it at all.

Focus just happens.  Without trying, it’s just there.  You have all experienced true focus quite often.  Here are some examples…

• Walking and checking your phone at the same time.
• Playing catch with your friend.
• Playing with your dog.
• Playing with your kids.
• Watching TV.
• Watching a movie.
• Skiing or snow boarding.
• Surfing

All of those things require your attention.  All of those things got your attention at a level that screened out the rest of the world.  All of those things found you in deep focus.  None of those things required you to think about having that focus in the first place.

When you are skiing down a mountain, you just do it.  You are in the moment.  You have extraordinary focus.  You are in a flow state.  The moment you try and think about what you are doing, though, is the same moment you find out exactly how much snow can fit in your face.

This is the difference between the first shot and the second in disc golf.  For the first shot you were trying.  You were concentrating.  You were consciously trying to exert your mental power over the task.  For the second shot, you simply relaxed, saw your target, and fired.  Concentrate = miss.  Allowed focus = make.

One of the best rounds I ever shot happened last summer at the course in Marengo, IL.  I was by myself.  It was getting dark.  There were horror movie swarms of mosquitos out who thought that Off was just seasoning.  I wanted to get another round in.

I knew I needed to move fast because of the failing light.  I needed to move faster because I only have so much blood and the mosquitos were determined to get all of it.  I pretty much ran the whole round.  No time to set up.  No time to concentrate.  No time to overtly think about anything.  I was simply focused on my goal of playing a fast round.

Marengo is a mostly wooded and tight course.  Any missed fairways would have put me in an even deeper mess of mosquitos and would have cost daylight that I didn’t have.  My focus was simply to play fast, stay in the fairway, make my putts.  That round every shot was a “second shot”.  Every drive was center fairway.  Every upshot was next to the pole.  Every putt went in.  It was amazing.  Without a single ounce of concentration, I played a round that would have taken the Open win in any tournament by several throws.

While I relished that round, I never stopped to try to figure out why it happened.  I have memories of dodging mosquitos and racing through the woods, but I never tried to repeat that.  Any desire I had to figure out how to do it again faded along with the hundred or so welts left by the voracious mosquitos.  I never gave it too much thought until now.

As I prepare for the GBO, I’ve been mostly relegated to indoor putting practice.  In the last two months, I’m well over 10,000 practice putts.  Some days I’m on, some days not so much.  It wasn’t until this week that I realized a major difference between the on and off days.  The on days were full of focus.  The off days saw a lot of broken concentration.

The on days I just putt.  As Ty Webb would have said, “be the disc, Danny”.  The off days I think about every little thing.  Where’s my foot, what’s my wrist doing, where’s my release point, remember to follow through, remember to move the disc last, blah, blah, blah.

Realizing the difference was focus is great, but how do we get to a place of focus intentionally?  How do we use this to our advantage?  First, we have to understand where focus comes from.  In simplest terms, confidence.  The more you practice, the more confidence you have.  The more confidence you have, the less you find yourself having to think about things.  Especially minute details that just distract you, break your concentration, and cause you to miss repeatedly.

With confidence, focus becomes an innate quality of the mind.  It’s not something that is “created”.  It’s something that occurs as a by product of confidence.  You throw that second putt in from a place of confidence.  You are frustrated the first one didn’t go in because you “know” you can make it.  You “know” you can execute that shot.  So you pick up a second disc and throw it from a place of “knowing”.  That “knowing” imparts focus without you having to think about it.  The only thing in your mind at that moment is making that second shot.  You don’t have to actively think about anything.

Since focus is an innate quality of your mind stemming from confidence, it also can’t be broken.  Concentration, on the other hand, is just another form of hope.  It’s something you are actively trying to do.  It’s something that can be broken.  And it often is.  It’s broken by external distractions.  It’s broken by fear.  It’s broken by your racing mind.  It’s broken by the squirrel farting in the tree behind you.  It’s broken by the littlest of things.

Deep focus is something that doesn’t leave us.  It can’t.  It’s something that moves with us through a round.  On my Marengo mosquito nightmare round, I didn’t lose focus the whole round.  The mosquitos couldn’t take it away.  The setting sun couldn’t diminish it.  I knew inside that I could execute the needed shots for a fast round, I’d done it before, I could do it again.  No matter what was going on around me, focus was not lost.  It was just there.

Back in the real world, we need a way to do that all the time.  When you step up to a clutch putt in a round, how do you allow focus to happen instead of concentrating on the million things you need to do to make a putt?  How do you get from your racing mind telling you to do sixteen different movements at once to a calm, focused mind that just allows you to put the disc in the basket?  You have to practice two things.

First, you have to practice putting.  If you don’t practice putting, you have a very slim chance of having confidence.  If you have no confidence, you simply can’t have focus.  Your monkey brain is trained to think about all the bad possibilities unless it’s 100% sure that you can actually perform the task at hand.

Second, you have to practice having focus.  You do that with meditation.  Look, you already know how to focus.  It simply happens when you do certain things.  The key is taking time each day to figure out how to do it intentionally.  10-20 minutes of meditation each day are the perfect tool to learn this.

[tweetthis]Mr. Miagi could probably kick serious butt at #discgolf.[/tweetthis]

It just so happens that on the road to the GBO, I’ve been doing both.  It’s taken two months, but I’m finally putting the two together.  It’s not an easy process.  I have by no means reached Mr. Miagi status.  I’m just barely knocking on the door of the general idea.  It’s worth knocking, though.  It’s worth taking a battering ram to that door if needed.

We’ve all had times spent in the zone, where every shot did what we wanted.  We’ve all experienced that flow state or sense of effortless focus.  We’ve all made those second shots look easy.  We’ve all been there.  It’s figuring out how to get back that’s the challenge.  It’s getting our minds to stop concentrating and just focus.  Be the disc, Danny.

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Human beings are creatures of habit.  The things that we’ve always done tend to be the things that we continue to do.  We eat the same meals, usually at the same times.  We get up the same time each day and lay our heads on our pillows at the same time each night.  We hang out at the same places, with the same people, doing the same stuff on a regular basis.  We are human beings and we are creatures of habit.  How we approach disc golf is no different.

We all have bad disc golf habits.  Some of us don’t follow through.  Others don’t practice putting.  Some don’t stretch out before rounds.  Some have weird quirks that have worked their way into their throws over time.  This could be a really long list.

We could also make an equally long list of good disc golf habits.  Some have a solid preshot routine.  Others visualize every shot.  Some of us have a regular practice regimen.  You get the idea.

In the end, what is evident is that most of what we do in life, and most of what we do in disc golf, is the result of habit.  It’s just what we do automatically.  It’s the pattern we fall into when we move through our days.  Habit is the autopilot of our lives.  Where do these habits come from?  In general, they come from two places.

One is laziness.  Many of our habits, if we are being honest with ourselves, come from just doing what is easiest without thinking about it.  These are our unintentional habits.  The ones that we’ve built without even realizing it.  These are typically our bad habits.  We all have a bunch of these.

The other place habits come from is a place of intentionality.  When you live your life intentionally, you tend to build habits that are actually positive and good for you.  When you take the time to determine exactly how you want to act and move through life both on and off the disc golf course, you will typically make a very strong effort to make sure you do it positively and effectively.  This is usually where our good habits come from.

[tweetthis]It’s rare that good #discgolf habits develop by accident.[/tweetthis]

At this point, I’ve been preparing for the 2015 GBO for two months.  That’s 60 days of dedicated, intentional preparation.  That’s long enough to have built some new, positive habits.  It’s also long enough for me to somewhat regret how I’ve approached the sport that I love over the last 11 years.

The last 60 days has really shown me that almost all of my disc golf habits have been developed accidentally.  Unfortunately, most of my disc golf habits are not good ones.  For example, my 10 year fight with putting is finally coming to an end.  All it took was 60 days of dedicated, intentional putting practice every day to overcome the previous 4,000 days of frustration and embarrassment.

I’ve had more disc golf related anguish in my life related to poor putting than all of my other disc golf struggles combined.  I’m sure many of you can relate.  How have I hopefully fixed this problem?  By building some new disc golf habits.  By intentionally approaching putting and not allowing it to continue to be a constantly changing, never practiced, luck driven process.

It used to be that on any given day I’d be trying a new grip, new stance, new putter, new style, or a million other new things in an effort to improve my putting.  When each one didn’t work in a week or less, on to the next.  No thought was put into each of these changes.  No true effort.  No time practicing.  Just jumping from one thing to another to another hoping to find the golden ticket.  Little did I know that the golden ticket was in front of me all along.

That ticket turned out to be developing good putting habits.  Find a good grip and stick with it.  Find a solid athletic stance and use it every time.  Follow through on every putt.  PRACTICE EVERY DAY.  There’s just no way around that last one.  I just heard Sarah Hokum describe putting as a glass of water with a hole in the bottom.  If you don’t take time to put more water in the glass every day, it will be empty very quickly.  Wise words, Sarah, wise words.

I can’t believe it’s taken me over 10 years to finally commit to doing what it really takes to get better at this sport.  I often sit and wish I’d found this sport before I was in my early 30’s.  I realize now that I’ve compounded that issue by not really taking it seriously for the first 10+ years I’ve played it.  How much better could I be if I’d just taken the time to develop some positive disc golf habits early in my time in the sport?  How much better could we all be if we’d taken things a little more seriously?

As the GBO approaches, I’m realizing just how important this habit thing is.  When I’m in Emporia on the first day of the tournament, and the two minute warning sounds, it will be time to execute.  The pressure will be on and the nerves will set in.  When that happens, we fall back into whatever our habits are.  We do what comes automatically.  The autopilot light on our life’s dashboard lights up and habit takes over.

I’ve realized that the key to winning, or at least the key to performing to my fullest potential, is to build as many positive habits as I can between now and then.  How many things can be set on auto pilot between now and then?  If it can be done with putting, I’m half way home.  What else can it be done with?  With 10 weeks left, what other good disc golf habits can be instilled?

[tweetthis]What new #discgolf habit do you need to build?[/tweetthis]

And what about you, dear reader?  What are your disc golf habits?  Are they good or are they bad?  Which ones have just kind of happened over time and which have you intentionally developed?  What good habit would help your game the most?  These are the questions you should be asking as you seek to improve.  What parts of your game can you put on autopilot?  You are human.  You are a creature of habit.  What will you do to make sure they are good ones?

You know something else you could put on autopilot?  This blog!  Yep, just enter your email below and every week I’ll make sure you get all the disc golf goodness that is the Mind Body Disc blog.

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