New Links

Over the weekend I spent a good bit of time resting to get over a pretty gnarly head cold I came down with Friday night. While resting, I had a chance to put up a new stats page on The Dan Plan landing page that I had been meaning to put up for some time. For the first time, I have stats coming in that any golfer can relate to as I am actually playing full rounds. I will update this page every couple of weeks with the most current statistics that come in. Please check it out by either going to http://thedanplan.com/stats.php or by clicking on the link on the home page.

Also, I put up a link to “what’s in the bag” as that seems to be a popular question. I will update this as new items come in, for now I have seven clubs and a few extras. Hopefully the driver will be added soon

Back to the head cold.. In some ways I think it came as a blessing. I’d been spending a LOT of time on the range lately to try and get a few new swing thoughts installed into my memory bank and my lower back has been worse for wear. It’s hard for me to take a day off, let alone two, but now that I had a couple of rest days my back is feeling about 90 percent better and in the long run it’s much more important to stay physically healthy than to push yourself on any one single day. So, thank you head cold for sidelining me for two days and allowing my back the rest that it needed.

Today, I’m heading to the course to do some super slow motion work with my swing. We’ve adjusted the lie angle of my irons and changed my posture over the ball (moved an inch further away and have more bend to the back) and in order to get a feel for this new swing plane and posture I will go over it very slowly a couple of times and then take a full swing at regular pace. By rotating through this way: slow slow fast slow slow fast, you get to know how the new swing “feels” to you and what inner muscle groups are firing and in what order. Building a internal swing model is crucial for being able to self-diagnose on the course when things don’t go as planned (and really, do they ever go as planned?).

After this it’s time to head back to putting drill land. My coach is presenting The Dan Plan to a group of instructors in Orlando this November and he wants some updated data on my 3-foot and 5-foot putting. I’d like to know this too, as I have not done those specific drills in a while (hitting 100 of each and counting the percent made) and when I last completed those drills I was in the 90 percentile for 3-footers and around 80 percent of 5 footers. It will be interesting to know if anything has changed in the past few months. I would wager that my percentages is about the same as I’ve been killing it from those distances on the course and have been fine tuning my putting swing over the past month. I feel more comfortable than ever over a short putt.

The two links (what’s in the bag and stats) were something that I’d been meaning to do but finally implemented due to the suggestion of a reader. If there is anything else that you would like to see please let me know. I do have limited resources, but will try and get whatever I can up and public.

Thank you all as always!

6 Responses to "New Links"

Martin says:

October 25, 2011 at 3:01 am

Dan,
Don’t underestimate the possibility of injury. I injured my ribs 4 weeks ago and still haven’t been able to hit a ball.

Love the new video, great 8 iron from 162!
Martin.
Micke says:

October 25, 2011 at 9:56 pm

Hi Dan,

thanks for another great webisode! Can’t wait until next week to see the rest of the round.
The 2stats and what’s in the bag links are a bit hard to find. I think the stats at least would deserve their own link in the top banner.

Keep up the good work,
Micke
Williamevanl says:

October 26, 2011 at 6:40 am

I see your most recent scores were 98 and 100. You might be hitting that getting worse phase I warned you about. Can you believe that after practicing almost every day for over a year and a half you can still shoot 100!

My favorite aspect of this project is that I can follow someone else realizing (as I did) just how RIDICULOUSLY and almost comically difficult golf is.

The most trying thing is when you actually get better, your best shots are better and your worst shots not as bad but you still shoot roughly the same score as when you were hacking it around with garbage. A low pull fade 220 yard driver and a fat 160 yard 6 iron (that rolls on) with two putts will get you the exact same score as a 270 yard drawing 3 wood that finds the middle, a low spinny gap wedge to 13 feet and two putts.

Even after you start hitting a ton of greens in regulation(and I think you will) two things will haunt you, not hitting it close enough with the approach to one putt and not putting you tee shot into play, this is all golf boils down to(well after you can get up and down from everywhere!)
dan says:

October 26, 2011 at 9:28 am

Hi Martin,

Definitely am seeing a physical therapist along the way to help with injury prevention. It hasn’t been too much of a concern up to this point, but now that I’m playing and doing full swings hundreds of times a day there’s a lot of danger of pushing those back muscles.. Will keep an eye on it. Thanks!

Dan
dan says:

October 26, 2011 at 9:31 am

Hi Micke,

Thanks for tuning in! I’ll look into making those links stand out more. i’m not a programmer, so wasn’t sure how to rearrange the main tabs up top, but if I can figure it out I think you are right, statistics deserve a tab of their own up there..

Thank you as always,

Dan
dan says:

October 26, 2011 at 9:39 am

Hi William,

Yep, golf has got to be the hardest game around. I would actually like to read a comparative study on the difficulty of sports, do you think something like that exists? Golf would have to be high on the list..

There’s a few reasons why my scores are up there once again (and in fact, I believe that was my first ever 100), but I don’t think making excuses will do anyone any good, so I’ll just say that I really learned a lot over the past two days about my own capabilities and what to do and what not to do in certain situations. The day to day scores don’t really have any meaning to me, but rather are used for fun to post for tracking purposes. The danger, too, with keeping score is that you can get too score oriented and perhaps care too much about what you are shooting instead of how each stroke performs. Long story short, sometimes you have to bring new ideas to the course when those ideas or swings are in “beta” form and they don’t always produce the results that you want at first.. Yes, golf is an extremely difficult game, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to become great in it. Many people have pushed the limits and gotten to the top tier of the game and I plan on being one of those. There will be speed bumps along the way, but the successes are so much more important.

Keep the comments coming!

Dan

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