A good day to start.

Today feels like the first day of The Dan Plan.

Out of curiosity, as I typed that last sentence I was wondering how many days I have been on The Dan Plan, so I added it up and today is exactly the 1,000th day.  What a funny coincidence that is.  And what an interesting milestone.

That’s great!  One thousand days in the right direction.  3,714 training hours over that time span, which averages to 3 hours 43 minutes per day working solely on golf specific improvement.  That doesn’t take anything else into account, just the time that I have put in specifically and deliberately working with a golf club/ball.  I’m pretty proud of that number.  Considering it’s averaged over 1,000 days I think 3.714 hours a day is pretty darn good.  Dr. K Anders Ericsson says you maximize the amount you can learn/absorb with about 4 hours of deliberate practice a day.  I’m going at a good pace.

And, everything still seems so fresh and new.  Just today I was thinking that right now is a huge transition in the project and that I honestly feel that it all starts (for real) today.  There was a massive learning curve obtaining a minimum level of skills necessary to make it to the next level and I think that phase has completed.  That’s not to say that I am a pro, by any means, but that my knowledge of the skill set that I am acquiring has morphed from non-existent to competent over the past 999 days.  It has taken a lot of time and plenty of trials, efforts and failures, but I am ready to enter the next stage of the learning process.  Now is the time to take the broad ideas that I have learned to date and focus them into fine tuning my swing and game.

Today is a birth; a new beginning; the next chapter in The Dan Plan.

Also, the team that I have been working with is starting to really come together.  Today I went for a full physical assessment screening with PT Shawn Dailey to get a new set of baseline physical data that we are then going to improve upon with a rigorous workout schedule over the next 8 weeks.  What we did was similar to the TPI (Titleist Performance Institute) screening and there will be more on that, including my numbers, as soon as he processes everything and fine tunes the workouts.  The winter is a great time to build strength and I’m excited to be on the brink of an 7-8 week program with Shawn.

On the swing side, I have been working with Michael Pinkey at TrackMan to learn how to best use the awesome machine and to know which stats need the most attention first.  Along with the help of Dr. K Anders Ericsson, we are going to take one data point at a time and systematically build a better swing that we can then demonstrate the on-course affect of making such changes.

To start, I am working on improving my attack angle to club path ratio.  Currently, I am all over the board with these numbers.  The best ball strikers have roughly a 3:1 ratio with the wedge, 2:1 with mid-irons and 1:1 with the driver.  That means that for a wedge, por ejemplo, your attack angle could be -4.5 and club path 1.5.  Once you get this ratio down the physics of the swing will all be in line and it will produce an easily repeatable swing.

I spent 1,000 days building a swing and learning about the game.  The next 1,000 days will be dedicated to fine tuning and learning to win and today is the first day of that next chapter.

Does that seem like a long time?  What else could you do in 1,000 days?

Also, I am curious as to what people want to know more about in these blogs.  More golf talk? More about finances? More off-course stuff including my life with Mary and the kids?  Less of anything?  Let me know and I’d love to write about it.  The best focus group is the audience