It’s been really cool to meet so many people. Something I always ask the people I play with is whether they play in tournaments or not. It’s usually a good conversation starter regardless of the answer. I’ve been kind of surprised by how few have ever played in a disc golf tournament.

I always ask why this is. While the answers all seem to vary on the surface, they really boil down to one reason… People don’t think they are good enough.

First, this is a terrible reason to not do something. I can tell each of  you who think this that you are wrong. I played in a tournament this year with someone who had only been playing 3 weeks. If he can do it, so can you.

Luckily, there are lots of reasons to play in your first tournament other than being “good enough”. Here’s a short list, I hope it inspires some of you to check out a local tournament:

1. It’s not about winning. Only one person wins in each division. Does that mean that everyone else all went to their cars and cried? No! Pretty much everyone has a great time whether they win or not. Forget about the winning part for now and just get out and play!
2. Speaking of divisions, skill level is the whole reason they have them. You will be playing with and competing against other people of a similar skill level. You won’t be placed in a group with Avery Jenkins, Ken Climo, and Simon Lizotte and expected to compete. You’ll be put in a group with 3 other disc golfers who also miss 10 foot putts and hit trees just like you (and I) do.
3. Usually, those 3 other disc golfers turn out to be pretty cool people. One of my favorite things about playing in tournaments is getting to catch up with all of the folks I have come to know and love over the years I’ve been playing in tournaments.
4. Even though you will be playing with some fun people who play at or around your skill level, you’ll still get to see what it’s like to play under pressure. It’s a way to test yourself and see how you do. There just isn’t another way to do this. Leagues are kind of similar, but nothing holds a candle to the butterflies in your stomach on the first hole of a tournament round.
5. Because of this pressure, you’ll come away with a very clear picture of what it is you really need to work on. Nothing exposes your true opportunities like playing in competition under pressure.
6. Not only will you be playing under pressure, but you’ll be playing by the rules. Getting in to your first disc golf tournament is a great way to see our great sport played properly and by the book. No cheating your lie. No mulligans. No multiple throws on each shot. For many people who only play casually, playing by the actual rules can be a whole different experience.
7. While you are there, you’ll also get to see some of the local pros play. If you look around while you are there, you’re bound to see some amazing disc golf that you never get to see on your normal daily rounds.
8. Lastly, how will you ever know if you like it or not? You might find out that you absolutely love playing in tournaments. That would open up a whole new world within our sport for you. And if you find out that you don’t love it? No harm, no foul, at least you tried.

There are actually a lot more reasons than just those, but the bottom line is that if you play disc golf, you should play in at least one tournament.

What are you waiting for? There’s plenty of good weather left. Get out there and give it a shot! A great place to look for an event coming up near you is right here on the PDGA website. Then let us know how it was. We’d love to hear about your experiences!

You know what else you should try out? Subscribing to this blog! That way, when you are too busy out there competing in your first tournament, we’ll take care of sending you a weekly summary of what you might have missed! Just enter your email below.

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The post Why You Should Play in Your First Disc Golf Tournament appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.

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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Last week I summarized some of the highlights of my trip to Emporia for the Glass Blown Open.  After hitting publish on that post, I realized that I left out a hundred other cool things that happened.  It’s just not an experience that can be described with my mediocre writing skills and have that description do the event any justice.  You really do need to go there for yourself.

I also realized that with the event over, most of you are probably tired of hearing about it.  Like the annoying relative who just got back from their trip to Europe and won’t shut up about it, I’ve certainly done my fair blathering on.  With that said, I have one more loose end to tie up.  And really, it’s not even completely GBO specific.

When I first wrote about going to the Glass Blown Open, I talked about what my goals were.  Primarily, I wanted to roll out of Emporia knowing in my heart that I had done all I could to prepare.  That I left all of myself out on the courses.  That I had held nothing back.  No second thoughts, no regrets.  It is only in hindsight that I realize that I didn’t succeed at that.

If you had asked me about that as I was driving away, I would have answered differently.  It’s funny how time gives you perspective in a way that nothing else can.  After much time, posting of pictures on Instagram, and reflection, I now see that I missed a huge opportunity in my preparation.  Who knows how much better I would have played if I hadn’t missed it, but I did.

My biggest mistake, and one that I’m trying very hard to learn from, is that I went at it alone.  I placed the full burden of training and preparing squarely on my own shoulders.  While I enlisted all of your help as passive providers of accountability, I did not get help in any other way.  That’s just dumb.

I think I started to realize this during the JohnE McCray clinic.  As I stood at the feet of a master, trying to learn everything I could, I saw that all of the lessons he was sharing were things I’d have a hell of a time getting on my own.  I was so appreciative of learning from someone else.  Especially someone that had so much to share and was so willing to share it.

My realization fully sank in over this past week as I read Zen and the Art of Disc Golf for a third time.  In that book, Patrick McCormick talks about the 3 groups of people you should play with.  One of those groups is a mentor group, people who are better than you and can teach.  It was then that I realized I didn’t have that in my disc golf life.

I have a very good friend who is a much better disc golfer than I.  He practices daily.  He breaks down the sport meticulously and is a very good teacher.  He also lives an hour and half away and works different hours than I do.  Outside of him, I’ve never made a concerted effort to find someone to practice with.  I’ve never put forth the time and energy to go play with others who could help me.  I also have to admit that this is not solely a disc golf problem.

You can ask my parents, ex girlfriends, boss, friends, and most other people that know me.  I try to do everything on my own.  I’m guessing more than a few of you can relate.  It’s hard to admit that we can’t stand on our own two feet.  It’s difficult to cop to the fact that others know more than we do.  It’s seemingly embarrassing to tell another person that you need help.  It’s also one of the biggest mistakes any of us make when trying to learn or get better at just about anything.

As I sit here and write this, I can’t help but mentally compile the huge list of skills I’d be better at if I’d just ask for help.  Disc golf, photography, relationships, my job.  The list is big and full of big, important things.

So as I think back on my trip to Kansas, filled with fond memories of extremely good times, I can’t help but think, what if…  What if I’d sought help?  What if I’d actively asked for coaching?  What if I’d set aside my determination to do everything in life on my own and worked with someone else?

Someone asked me on Twitter what I was going to do next now that the “Road to the GBO” is over.  I believe I have my answer.  I need to find that mentor group to play with.  I need to make a conscious effort to find someone better than me (that’s the easy part!) who is willing to play with me and give me feedback.  I want to see just how much faster I can improve with help.

So, I’ll start this process by asking you…  Who out there has that solid mentor group?  Where did you find them?  How did they end up in that role?  I want to hear your success stories.  I can’t be the only one in this situation.  I’ll bet there are lots of folks out there in the same boat.  Out there plugging away by themselves on solo rounds, solo trips to their local football field, and solo putting sessions.  It’s time to stop going it alone.  It’s time to see if next year’s GBO can be even better with help.

[tweetthis]I’m going to the 2016 GBO, how about you?[/tweetthis]

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Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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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.

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In one week, just 7 days, I’ll be packing the car and heading to Emporia, Kansas for the 13th annual Glass Blown Open.

If you’ve been following along on Facebook, you’ve noticed that I’ve been struggling with my performance lately.  Not only have I not been improving as of late, I’ve actually gone backwards in several areas.  I’m guessing most of you can relate.  You work your butt off for something.  You do everything you can think of to be successful.  You think you are making progress.  Then, BAM!  Your results are the same as if you had actually done nothing at all.

Maybe it was blanking on a test you crammed for.  Maybe it was forgetting your lines in a play.  Maybe it was striking out in the bottom of the 9th when your team really needed you.  No matter what it was, most of us have been there.

It’s bad enough that it happens in the first place, but our sometimes uncontrollable monkey brains can’t leave it alone.  We then have to go through the aftermath.  We get down on ourselves.  We doubt ourselves.  We second guess why we were even trying to begin with.  Many people have quit all together after a game day choke.

Why does this happen?  I don’t claim to know all of the reasons, but I can certainly point out a big one.  Pressure.  The interesting thing about pressure is that most of it is self induced.  In my case, that is especially true.

I’ve been writing these updates here and on Facebook for months now.  It’s been really fun and it gave me something to write about every week.  It actually helped me progress in more ways than I can express.  Now, with only 7 days until I’m on the literal road to the GBO, the months of public updates have caught up with my psyche.  Self induced pressure has descended upon both my brain and my game.  Until two days ago.

As many of you know, I meditate a lot.  I do it for lots of reasons.  I’m recording a 3 part segment for the Disc Golf Answer Man on the topic.  A couple of days ago, I was meditating and one of my favorite things happened…  You see, sometimes while meditating the answers to some of life’s toughest problems just pop into my head.  This was one of those times.  It usually starts with me questioning my life in some way.  This time was no different.

I asked myself the question, “What if you go to Emporia and finish in last place?”.  I don’t expect that to happen, but I was trying to give myself an absolute worst case scenario.  One of the best ways to overcome your fears is to imagine them actually happening.  The only answer I could come up with was, “At least you will have had a week of fun that you won’t forget…  Ever.”

You see, I don’t play disc golf to win tournaments.  Don’t get me wrong, I would love to win some tournaments this year.  But that’s not why I play.  I play because I love this sport.  I love watching the disc ride the wind on a perfect line that matches the one I saw in my head before I threw the disc.  I love playing with friends, new and old.  I love playing by myself.  I love being outside.  I love a million things about disc golf.

In one week I’m going to a town that just about shuts down to welcome 900 other people who feel the same way!  It would be criminal if I let the week be completely about my performance on the course.  There are so many other things that this week will be about.  Meeting new friends, seeing new things, playing new courses.  At the heart of it, I’m going to the GBO for the same reason I play disc golf, to have fun.

[tweetthis]I play #discgolf to have fun.[/tweetthis]

With this in mind, two days ago, I hit the course with no thoughts of practice or working on my form or anything else related to doing well in the GBO.  I hit my home course purely with the intention of having fun…  And I shot the best golf I’ve shot in a long time.  Did I have fun?  You bet your ass I did.  And with every throw, the grin on my face grew bigger.

I hope I can remember that day vividly when I step up to my first tee at the GBO.  If I can, I’ll do really well.  If I can play to have fun first and let everything else sort itself out, nothing but good things can happen.  That’s a big if, but I’m going to try my best to do just that.  Just how fun that week in Emporia is is totally up to me.

That brings us to you.  Why do you play this great sport?  If you are out there on the course, putting a ton of pressure on yourself, do you remember why you play disc golf in the first place?  Do you remember the whole point of being out on the course?  Have you let something else creep in and ruin the fun?  As with many aspects of disc golf, this applies to any area of your life.  Remembering your “why” will bring you back around to sanity more often than not.  It will quiet that incessantly screaming monkey brain inside your head.  It will center you.  And best of all, it will allow you to have fun again.

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The post Road to the GBO – Why Are You on the Road? appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.

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.

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.

Pop quiz hot shot.

You are playing in a tournament.  Your last 4 putts have hit the front of the basket instead of going in.  That includes one 10′ “tap in gimme” putt.  What do you do?

You are playing in a doubles round on a wooded course.  Your last 3 tunnel shots have been shanked right and into the woods.  You are stepping up to tee off on yet another tunnel shot.  What do you do?  WHAT DO YOU DO?!?!?!?!?

These are situations that most of us have experienced at one time or another.  If you’ve been playing any length of time, it’s probably happened to you a lot.  You go out with the best of intentions to play a solid round only to find that one part of your game is unexplainably broken.  The worst part is you can’t seem to fix it.

As most of you know, I’ve been practicing every day for the last 2.5 months getting myself ready for the Glass Blown Open in May.  I have light bulb moments almost daily about some aspect of disc golf, self discipline, and the value of practice.  Every once in a while, I have one that is a game changer for me.  That happened this week.

There are a million benefits of regular, dedicated practice.  Putting practice, field work, throwing into a net, whatever your practice of choice is (aside from playing rounds, sorry that doesn’t count) is all great for your game.  I can’t say enough about all of this and more.  I kick myself every day for not starting a dedicated practice plan sooner than I have.  My disc golf skills would be at a much higher level than they are if I had.  But leveraging my skills hasn’t been the only benefit.  Little did I know, daily practice can also help you fix your game when it’s broken mid round.  Daily practice is the key to mid round course corrections.

Daily practice makes you intimately familiar with how to be successful at a certain skill.  This much we know.  What I didn’t know is that it also makes you intimately familiar with all the things you do that don’t lead to success.  You start to know exactly why the shot you wanted is not the shot you got.  You start to really learn the reasons why things go wrong.  Let’s use the above pop quiz as an example.

For quiz #1, in the past, I would simply have started to throw the putts harder.  Hitting the front of the basket meant the putt was short, right?  The solution to a short putt is to throw harder, right?  Maybe more follow through?  Nope.  All those things do for me is make me fire the putts into the front of the basket harder.  It turns out that for me, when my putts are short it’s because I’m aiming short, not because I don’t have enough zip on the putt.

After 2.5 months of putting practice, I now know that when I start hitting the front of the basket, it’s because I’m leaning too far forward.  When I start to get tired, I start to hunch over forward.  That aims the putts down, at the front of the basket.  For me to hit a lot of putts, I have to stand upright, head held high, chest out, shoulders back.  Only when I use that upright stance does following through help.

This highlights a key thing when you are practicing.  You should definitely be trying to figure out what to do right.  But you should be paying almost as much attention to the causes behind the things that go wrong.  What you’ll find is that your most common misses each have their own unique trigger or cause.  If you figure these out, then on the course you can often limit yourself to only one bad shot of any particular type.  Once you know why you are missing in any particular way, you can address it.

[tweetthis]Making a mid round course corrections is a skill that separates pros from ams in #discgolf[/tweetthis]

Bearing all this in mind, I have homework for you.  Go out this week and practice putting every day for 20-30 minutes.  When you miss or screw up, really try to take note of what causes each type of miss.  What makes you miss low?  How about missing high?  Same with missing left or right.  Take the time to spot the reason for each of those.  Once you have that identified, find the correct behavior to replace each cause.  This not only works with putting, but it works with any other disc golf skill you want to get better at.

Honestly, this isn’t always super easy.  The true cause of your flaws doesn’t always reveal itself right away.  Put some time into this.  One of the most commonly asked questions by players is how do you save a round that is going sideways?  What do you do when nothing seems to be going right?  How do I course correct before the round is a lost cause?

While a lot of this is mental, at least some of it is physical too.  The discs don’t have a mind of their own.  They do what our body tells them to do.  Figure out your errors.  Make recognizing them an automatic thing.  That way, the next time you keep missing the same type of shot in the same way repeatedly, you can stop the bleeding and course correct your round sooner than later.  Once you are able to do that, you are one step further on the road to playing great disc golf.

Pop quiz hot shot.  Are you subscribed to this blog?  No?  It’s time to make a correction to that behavior right now and enter your email below.  Subscribe to this blog and I’ll email you a sweet disc golf newsletter every week that will have you playing better in no time!

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The post Road to the GBO – Course Correction appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.

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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The post Road to the 2015 GBO – Focus appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.

I mentioned in one of my Facebook updates this week that I am restricting my reading to sports psychology for the duration of my preparation for the GBO.  I’m really enjoying that decision and I highly recommend that if you play competitively at all you check out at least one book on the subject.  I just so happen to have a whole list of possibilities already put together for you as part of my disc golf reading list.

The one exception to that is a book called Kettlebell – Simple & Sinister by Pavel Tsatsouline.  Pavel is the guy who introduced the kettlebell to North America and is the primary reason you see these cannonballs with handles being swung around so much at your local gym or Crossfit box.

I’ve written a whole series of posts about building a disc golf home gym and disc golf fitness, but I haven’t gotten around to talking about the kettlebells yet.  A big part of that is I don’t have a ton of experience with them yet.  They are a new implement to me and I never really knew what to do with them.  I own a set (you can see them against the wall in the pic below).  I’ve used them here and there.  But that’s pretty much it.

All that has changed.  I’ve been furiously looking for a workout that will get me ready for the GBO.  I went back into the gym for a while as I really enjoy the 4 basic barbell lifts (bench press, military press, squat, deadlift).  At 44, however, I’m just not recovering from that type of workout like I used to.

Also, while I absolutely believe that strength (NOT size) is paramount to peak disc golf performance, I really didn’t feel that my old barbell workouts were paying any disc golf specific dividends.  I’ve been using my sandbag, my rings, some body weight training, and other stuff in my home gym to try to address that, but I just haven’t been totally thrilled with any of it as of late.  Enter Tim Ferriss.

I have an hour drive to and from work each day.  That means I listen to a ton of podcasts.  I wish there were more, but there are only a handful of disc golf podcasts, so I listen to a lot of other types.  (If you like disc golf podcasts, I highly recommend the Smashboxx TV podcast, The Disc Golf Show, Final Round Radio, and of course The Disc Golf Answer Man where you can hear me occasionally)

Outside of disc golf, one of my favorites is the Tim Ferris show.  You’ve probably heard of Tim as he’s the author of 3 NY Times best selling books (The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef), all worth reading.  I find his podcast eminently entertaining and educational.  Recently he had Pavel Tsatsouline on as a guest (check out the episode here), and I was hooked at first listen.

First of all, Pavel has this awesome don’t be a whiny wimp attitude that I love.  Excuses are for losers and he is unapologetic about that.  More people in this world need to be as honest and transparent as he is.  You can really tell that he used to train the Russian special forces just by his attitude.

So, what does training the Russian special forces have to do with training for the GBO and for disc golf?  A lot.  First and foremost, it’s training for functional strength, not mirror muscles.  It’s training your body to move forcefully and effectively and with power.  It translates directly to athletic performance in any sport.

Second, it’s minimalist.  It’s literally 3 stretches, 2 exercises, and 2 kettle bells.  That’s it.  One of my challenges in training for the GBO is finding time for everything I want to do.  I need things that are effective, yet don’t take up any more time than necessary.  This program fits that to a tee.

Third, I can already feel the benefits to my game.  The level of stability I have, the core strength, the increase in explosiveness, and the surprising increase in flexibility are all effects that are manifesting much sooner than I thought they would.

Fourth, it’s fun.  I can truly say that I genuinely enjoy this training and look forward to doing it every morning.  I cannot say that about my trips to the gym.  While I enjoyed lifting, it was never something I looked forward to and it was often something I had to drag myself into the gym to do.

It’s kind of weird to think that I’ve stopped using all the stuff I have in my disc golf home gym (except the jump rope, I still love it and do it regularly!) for now.  I’m sure I’ll still use it all occasionally (I was just doing some pull ups on my rings yesterday, for example), but I don’t see myself deviating from this kettle bell workout any time soon.

If you are looking for something simple and effective to get you in great overall shape, get you extremely strong, and directly benefit your disc golf game, try out Pavel’s book and try out some kettlebells.  If you don’t have kettlebells, you can get them pretty cheap at your local Play it Again Sports.  All you need is two for Pavel’s program.  If you want something more badass than that, you can get the primal bells shown in the picture from Onnit.  I’ve got a pair of those on the way to the house and I can’t wait to start swinging around some monkeys!

This training program is 6 days a week, so that means that over the next 83 days, I’ll get in roughly 66 days of kettlebell training.  I am really looking forward to what that will do for my overall strength as well as my overall game.  After the GBO is over, and I am writing the wrap up posts I have planned, I’ll be sure to touch on just how effective I think it was and if I’ll be going back to other types of training at that time.

Regardless of whether you try this program out or not, I’m still an ardent supporter of strength (again, NOT size) being beneficial in disc golf.  It’s beneficial in ALL other sports, there is no reason disc golf should be treated differently.  Everyone can benefit from a strength training program.  If you don’t already have one, you should definitely consider trying it out!

You know what else you should try out?  Subscribing to the blog!  It couldn’t be easier, just enter your email below and I’ll send disc golf goodness straight to you via email every week!  I promise I’ll never sell or spam your email, I’m just not that type of guy!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

The post Road to the 2015 GBO – 83 Days to Go appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.