How To Play Your Best Golf: Strategies From A Tour Pro
By Nick O’Hern
How to Play Your Best Golf is the essential golf handbook to help any golfer understand and improve their game.In this guide, highly respected pro golfer Nick O’Hern takes you through the strategies to golfing success. He reveals the key secrets of professional golfers, discusses how playing to your strengths can yield a better result, and describes all the tactics you can use to score, from course strategy and club selection to pre-game preparation and harnessing the power of mindset.How to Play Your Best Golf is the perfect gift not only for the golfer of old but for the new generation of golfers. Packaged in a handsome hardback format with beautiful photography, this book is both practical and revealing in helping golfers reach their true potential.
Summary from Goodreads.
I was over in Australia when I spotted this book in a bookstore and decided to pick this up to add to my collection. Boy am I glad that I did. I believe that this is the best golf book I have read.
For those of you you have not heard of Nick O’Hern, he is an Australian professional golfer who has played on the PGA of Australasia Tour, the European Tour, and the PGA Tour during his touring days, reaching 16th in the world at his best. What this book is about is not how to change your swing, although he does provide some basic swing tips in here. This book is aimed at how to improve your golf game with what you already have, by missing smart, and accepting your own ability level.
This book is split into 5 seperate sections: Strategy, Preparation, Mental, The Scoring Clubs, and A Game Like No Other. As you can tell by these sections, a lot of what goes through a top golfer’s mind is what they need to do with the shot in front of them and O’Hern makes it very easy for you to make simple changes to yourself without spending hours on the range. I personally believe that the most beneficial section of this book is the first one, Strategy. I see it regularly with the golfers that I play with, they obsess over getting the ball as far down as they can. This often is the wrong shot, especially when the green is protected but they still take dead aim at the flag. Learning when to not go for it and leaving yourself further away is a skill in-of itself.
Personally, I found this book reinforced ideas and things that I do without realising it as being smart. Things like letting the shot dictate the club, not the yardage is something I have always done not that actually realised it until I read and was like ‘well duh, of course the shot that you intend on doing is more important than how far away the target is. Why would you obsess over how far away you are when there are so many other factors that influence where the ball ends up’. Not gonna lie, it made me feel quite proud of myself having the same thought process behind choosing my shots as a PGA Tour pro.
I also liked the drills that were included in here. I personally have struggle to come up with new drill and always get stuck doing the same ones without seeing the improvement that I want. The drills the O’Hern talks about in here vary but the premise of all of them are about preparing yourself for being on the course and knowing that even though you many not have encountered the exact shot you may be facing. All the drill are around getting comfortable being uncomfortable, which is something that everyone on the course can improve on.
I plan on this being a yearly reread.
5/5
Have you read How To Play Your Best Golf? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.
Check it out on Goodreads here.
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