Garcia wins by Putting with Swinging Gate, what's your style?

For years Sergio Garcia has promissed so much, but over the last couple of years he has struggled with his putting, especially under pressure. Last year he lost The Open because of it! So it was great to see him firing on ALL cylinders last week and win the Players Championship at Sawgrass.

Sergio has rebuilt his putting stroke with the aid of short game guru Stan Utley. Using a "Swinging Gate" putting style which obviously works well for him he now has confidence in his putting again.

Lets hope we see him on form for the upcoming Majors. He has all the skills, his temperament is better nowadays...and wouldn't it be great to have a regular challenger to Tiger?

If you want to learn more about the Swinging Gate putting style check out my article:
Golf Putting Styles: Swinging Gate or Straight Through - Which is Best?

Which Part of Your Golf Game Needs the Most Practice?

I go down to the driving range and watch a whole line of avid golfers working hard at their game. But what do I really see? 20 golfers in a row ALL hitting drivers. Now it is true that some of the ladies and gentlemen practicing do need to work on their drives, but is it the shot that they should be spending most time practicing? Is it time well spent with regards to making the best improvement to their games?

If you want to improve your golf scores quickly, what is the first part of the game you should work on?

Well, before you can answer this question you need to analyse a round of golf in a specific way. An interesting and very effective method to use is "The Pareto Principle".

The Pareto Principle, sometimes known as the 80-20 law, states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Or more specifically, a large percentage of the output result is generated by a small percentage of the input parameters. This could be 80/20 or 90/10 or 70/5 (it doesn't necessarily add up to 100 as it is a relationship between two different measurements).

Pareto Golf Analysis

Applying this to golf we would need to see which clubs were used in a round and how many shots were played with each club. We could then relate each club to the total score by a percentage of the score taken by that club.

If you want to see an example of how you can use The Pareto Principle to analyse your golf scores effectively, then have a look at this article

If you analyse your scores with respect to the type of shots you made, then you can easily see which part of your game is causing a problem, and therefore which part of the game you need to improve to have the greatest impact on your score.