Podcast Transcript
Josh Nichols
I want to talk through how I’m preparing for our state amateur qualifier, and just in general, how I prepare for any kind of golf tournament. It comes in three different parts: my body, my strategy, and my golf game. Those are the three main buckets of ways that I always prepare, and most people always prepare. But if you’re going about it haphazardly, you probably don’t have this overarching structure. You might just kind of hit a bunch of balls and hope that you’re ready. This is how I specifically get ready for golf tournaments in these three ways — when I’m being intentional and thinking ahead and planning.
My Body
I’ve been working with my personal fitness trainer, Matt Myers of Nerd Fitness. He and I have really narrowed in on some issues I’ve been having with my back specifically. Every time I swing, from start to finish, as I play, it gets worse and worse. My lower back — I just experience a lot of pain. It feels like no matter what I do, it hurts. No matter how good my warm-up is, no matter how much stretching I do, I think we were just going about it the wrong way.
Matt said, okay, Josh, let’s just lay it out there. Give me every single little detail, tell me every single possible thing about what’s going on with your back, and we’re going to nail this and actually get it right. That’s what’s so cool about Matt specifically, but also just having a personal trainer. You can talk through these things and they will hear you and do something about it based on their own expertise. They can relate to you, empathize, and help you work through it in a way that just Googling stuff or using ChatGPT can’t do.
Matt gave me a daily stretching protocol, and I can already tell how much that’s helping. Along with that, he designed a general golf warm-up for me — going from general to specific. You start with really general, big muscle exercises that anyone doing any sort of activity could do, and then you work towards being more specific to golf. It’s a lot of rotational stuff, shoulder range of motion mobility, two different exercises for hip mobility, and then the one called the world’s greatest stretch.
Something I never would have thought I needed is getting my heart rate going as a pre-golf warm-up. He’s got me doing walking, side shuffles, jumping jacks, and something called karaoke walks — where you’re crossing your legs as you’re walking sideways. It opens up the hips, gets them moving, and gets the thoracic spine kind of separated from the hips. By the time I’m hitting golf balls, it’s fully five to ten minutes of movement first. My heart rate is going, I’m breathing hard, I’ve got a little sweat on my forehead. Things are moving — instead of sitting in a car for 30 to 60 minutes and then immediately rapid-firing golf balls because I only have 20 minutes to warm up. That’s a really good way to hurt myself, as I have experienced many times.
In general, I’m also doing more regular and more intense hitting sessions throughout the week, so I’m not spiking my intensity once a week when I play. I need to keep the relative level of intensity high all the time in order to be ready for those spikes. The one thing I haven’t been able to address as well is stamina — leg fatigue, cardio, that sort of thing. But I’ve already played eight to ten rounds this year, and it’s the end of May. Normally I might not get that many in the entire year. Playing regular rounds is a huge difference, and I already feel better by the end of rounds than I did earlier this year.
Strategy
My favorite strategy app is Shot Pattern, and what I do specifically is plot out the golf course before the tournament round. I’ll go hole by hole, bring my cursor out to around 280, find where it gives me the most margin for error with my dispersion pattern, and write that in my pocket notebook so I’m not messing with my phone while playing. On the tee of every hole I can pull it out and say — simple: driver at the left edge of the bunker, mini at the right edge of the green.
Another thing I’ve been doing that I don’t normally make a concerted effort on: I’ve been playing through the golf course using Shot Pattern while on the range. I’ll pull up hole one, it’s a driver, so I’ll hit driver on the range going through my full process. Then I’ll put the head cover back on and check — okay, it’s 160 if I hit a good drive. So I’ll get out my eight iron and hit it as if I’m hitting to that target.
Shot Pattern also has an amazing wind feature. There’s a button on the right as you’re previewing the course that shows you wind conditions for your tee time. You can put in your predicted tee time and it gives you predicted wind conditions — direction and miles per hour — on a rough 15-minute-per-hole basis. So at 9:45 on Thursday, the wind is going to be pointing this way at this speed. How cool is that. It was saying nine miles per hour with around 20 mph gusts. Shot Pattern also has elevation data, so I can factor in all of it — firm conditions, uphill, into the wind — and dial in exactly what I want to land and where.
I can’t simulate the actual feeling of real turf, uneven lies, pressure, consequences, other players. But you can simulate as much as possible to ready yourself for as real of a test as you can get. I’ve done it twice now at the range, playing through the course on Shot Pattern, and it’s been awesome.
I’m also doing a practice round today, playing with one of my one-on-one coaching clients — a really good high school player who just graduated and is heading to play college golf. My purpose is testing what I’ve already plotted out on Shot Pattern against real life. I’ll step up on the first hole and see: okay, this is what I thought it was, but that tree is overhanging more than I realized, or this is way more downhill than the elevation data suggested. I’ll adjust my notebook accordingly.
I don’t do a whole lot of hitting chips from five spots around the green, or hitting 20 putts and four shots into every green. I like just playing a round. A practice round for me is shooting a score. The actual feeling of being one over, three over, one under, with only one shot at it — I’m not raking over another one. I might hit an extra chip or putt here and there, but generally I’m holing it out. That is as valuable a practice round to me as anything else.
My Golf Game
This year I’ve been hitting more golf balls — not just a higher quantity, but with a much better practice structure. I’m actually going so far as to follow my own practice planning, which has been cool.
I’ll say, okay, I really only have three 30-minute sessions this week to hit into my net with a launch monitor. So how should I spend this time? Fifteen minutes of block practice — five minutes of warm-up, ten minutes of working on my technique, swing feels, hitting repeated wedges, eight irons, four irons in a row. When that timer is done, I move into 15 minutes of random practice. I’ll pull up the range mode in the Awesome Golf simulator app on my iPad with my FlightScope Mevo Plus and go around to different yardages — every ball is a different club, different target.
The next day I might do 15 minutes of block and then 15 minutes of a challenge. I’ll hit 10 eight irons going through my full process to a target and I’ve got to get it within 15 feet seven out of ten. Or I’ll rotate through: T-shot, eight iron (that’s the one I’m tracking), wedge, driver, eight iron — and go through that whole rotation five times.
On a third session, I’ll also get on my putting mat for 15 minutes. Five minutes working on my stroke with a mirror, making sure I’m rolling it end over end. Then 10 minutes of a putting completion challenge — making 10 six-footers in a row. My mat only allows about six feet max. One direction is left to right, the other is right to left. I go back and forth. If I don’t make 10 in a row, I start over. That is genuinely hard. I feel actual pressure because I don’t want to be putting forever. It’s been really valuable.
The swing feels I’ve been working on have been especially helpful this year. My coach Robert caught some of my swings on video and identified the pattern: on uncomfortable shots, I’m dropping the club inside, moving my hips towards the ball in an early extension, and my left shoulder is rocking up towards my left ear instead of turning and rotating around my spine. The club ends up under the plane and I’m either presenting the heel or flipping it trying to square up — inconsistent heel shots or a quick pull-left. His suggestion was to keep that left shoulder moving through impact, keep the upper body rotating, covering the ball. It levels out the low point and stabilizes the face through impact. Really hard, but so helpful.
The other feel I’ve discovered goes hand in hand with that: staying tall. Normally I kind of squat down right before I pull the trigger, and my head drops toward my right foot. At impact I have to jump up and extend just to not hit six inches behind the ball. Instead, I’m trying to stay tall and left — so my torso can just rotate and I don’t have to stand up out of it. These feels have been so helpful to hitting the ball more consistently.
Putting It All Together
This has been the most prepared I’ve been going into a competitive golf season in a very long time. I’m addressing my body in ways I haven’t before. Strategy has always been pretty good, but playing through the course while on the range has been a new level. And golf game wise, I’m hitting more balls with attention to quality, putting more with quantity and quality, and my swing work comes from an actual coach — not self-diagnosis.
Will that directly translate to qualifying? I can’t know that. There are other players in this field. But I can control the prep, and I can control trusting myself and letting it come out. I can pre-accept the results because I know I’ve been working hard at the right things in the right ways. So let’s go find out.
