Why always trying to correct your last miss can wreck your round

When you hit a bad shot, don’t automatically try a quick swing fix — it could lead to wrecking your whole round.Getty Images

One of the biggest problems I see with the average golfer is a hyper-focus on ball flight and the instinct to immediately “fix” what went wrong on the very next swing. When you do that, you can quickly ruin your round.

Anytime you make an adjustment to compensate for a previous miss, you’re walking down a dangerous path, because one shot — or even one hole — is not a trend. It takes time to identify and understand your miss pattern for the day, and once you do, the goal is to work with it rather than fight it.

Typically, this is how it goes off the 1st tee. A player blocks one into the right trees, and on the very next shot — punching out, no less — they try to negate that block by closing the face or releasing the club more aggressively through impact. The result? The next shot goes too far left, and then the cycle repeats. Right, left, right, left. Army golf. Never fun.

I tell my students to gather data during their warm-up, paying attention to the consistency and patterns of their misses, and then see how that shows up on the course over the first few holes. If your shots are doing X on the range and continue doing X on the course, you’ve likely established your pattern for the day. At that point, embrace it and play to it for the remainder of the round. Fighting your trend only makes controlling ball flight nearly impossible.

The problem is that most amateurs either don’t warm up or fail to notice a trend because they aren’t practicing with a target. So when they see a ball flight on the first hole that doesn’t match the shot they want to hit, they panic and immediately adjust on the next swing. But how do you know that shot wasn’t just a one-off or an outlier? You don’t.

If you adjust on every swing, things only get worse. One shot, two shots, or even one hole is not a trend — it could be as simple as timing, nerves, or a tricky lie on the opening hole.

Give yourself time to understand your misses. Once a trend becomes clear, you can aim accordingly for the rest of the round.

If you want to go deeper into understanding shot patterns and miss tendencies, spend some time with Scott Fawcett’s DECADE Golf system. It’s built around knowing your tendencies, aiming away from trouble, and managing misses.

Control your misses, and you’ll control your score.