It was recently reported in Golfweek that PGA Tour player, Adam Scott, just got his new Gulfstream G450 jet that he has been waiting for it for, for the past 2 ½ years. The price tag? $40 million – that’s US dollars. How much money do these guys make? Think about it how much your home is worth and what you need to make a year and pay for it. This guy has a means of transportation that set him back $40 million. Now I don’t begrudge these guys for the monies they make. They clearly earn it in prize money, endorsements, and for those with big names and that are willing to travel around the world, large appearance fees. And why shouldn’t they make a lot of money?
And this is another reason why I love golf – if you’re good enough, you’ll make money. There’s not a lot of politics in golf (at least for the players), if you’re good, you play, and if you play well, you make money. If you don’t play well, you lose your card and find something else to do for a living. Unlike other sports, if you don’t perform you don’t get paid. No big, multi-deal contracts, no drama with other teammates, managers, or owners. Just play golf, play well, and you can make a very nice living.
Just look at the type of unlikely talents that show up on the tour – guys like Boo Weekley, who comes from a really small town in Florida – a place where you might be more likely to learn how to wrestle alligators, than to develop into a world-class golfer. This past weekend at the Sony Open in Hawaii, galleries witnessed the young Tadd Fujikura, who is 18 years old and only 5’2” tall, fire a 62. He looks to be a potential upcoming star and is already a fan favorite.
You could go on and one about the talents that are out there, but the bottom line is this: if you want to play golf for a living, the thing you need is ability to play great golf. If you possess it, there is little in the way of preventing you from playing the game for a living.

Since I’ve started working out daily in the gym for the past couple of months, naturally I’ve become curious of how I can more effectively use my time in the gym, as well as improving my diet to get better results. So I’ve picked up a few exercise magazines while I’ve been traveling. There are some similarities to golf magazines – they promise great results, many times, but not always, in a short period of time. But most of the articles in exercise magazines require that you work hard, diet, and make sacrifices to achieve your goals, which is different from golf magazines, where an article is more like “do this one thing and you’ll gain 30 more yards!” Of course, by now, if you read golf magazines, you’ve come to realize that the “secrets” that are shared with the readers, are usually, at best, temporary positive results. That’s either do to luck, or possibly because your mind believes it will help you. Either way, the positive results are usually fleeting and rarely lead to lasting improvement.
Golf magazine articles remind me more of the ads in exercise magazines that read “take this pill (supplement) and gain 20 lbs of muscle and lose 30 pounds of fat – without exercising!” Usually these claims have, in very small print at the bottom of the ad, “along with a diet and exercise program”. But people don’t read that part – they just want the quick fix and to believe that a pill can do it. And many golfers do the same when they read golf magazines – they’re search for the magic pill or fix.
The big difference, when reading these magazines, lies in the reader’s understanding of the diagnosis of the problem or area they want to improve. If a person is overweight, well they can figure out that that’s their problem, and look for, and try, different solutions. If a person feels their arms are small and they want bigger arms, they can look for exercise programs that can lead to bigger gains. But with golf magazines it’s a little more complicated…and misleading. An article might be talking about players that sway on the backswing and how to stop it, but most players don’t know if they do or don’t do that on the backswing. I’ve had many students who feel like they do, but in reality don’t. So they work on this anti-sway move, which can only make things more complicated because the player is not swaying to begin with. Needless to say, this is a complete waste of time. This is just one example. I could go on for pages writing about this stuff.
But what is fundamentally the problem is golfer’s lack of understanding of some of the non-negotiable versus negotiable things in the golf swing. Once this understanding is in place, a golfer has a much better chance of improving and even in utilizing some of the ideas in the golf magazine articles, because with that understanding they can determine whether the article applies to them or not.
Now there are several things that golfers need to know, but here’s one way to find out if you have the basic knowledge needed to improve. On the homepage of my website, joelaurentino.com, at the bottom of the page you’ll see a link “TEST YOUR SWING I.Q. If you click on it, it will take you to a 10-question quiz with multiple-choice answers that I’ve created. If you get even ONE of these questions wrong, your understanding needs to be improved, and without it lasting improvement with your golf game will be much more difficult, and in some cases, nearly impossible. Golfers need to improve their understanding before they can improve their game. Test yourself, and feel free to email me with any questions.

I’m back home from the seminar. Boy that’s a long way to travel for a weekend! Anyway, the seminar was very informative, and the guys at TPI really did a good job with their presentations. I really learned a lot about how a golfer’s physical limitations impacts there golf swing, how to test for it, what it potentially causes as far as swing movements and physical injuries, as well as learning some exercises to help the golfer improve the limitation. There’s a lot more I learned, but that’s basically the jest of it.
Now back to balance. I realize that, in my last blog, the example of swinging a golf club, while being drunk, was not really a fair analogy, as if you were drunk, all of your coordination, not just your balance, would be affected. But I think you knew what I meant – you need to possess a certain degree of balance to be stable while making a golf swing. So here’s a simple test you can take to see how good your balance really is. MAKE SURE WHEN YOU DO THIS TEST YOU ARE IN A CLEAR AREA IN THE EVENT THAT YOU FALL!
Stand straight up, with your arms relaxed and hanging down. Lift your right leg up so that your thigh is parallel to the ground and get your balance, if you can’t this part – you failed the test – and it hasn’t even started! Now comes the test. Close both of your eyes, and keep your arms relaxed and straight down (you can’t lift them up to help you balance), see how many seconds you can stay balanced. You must keep that right leg up, and parallel to the ground. Then do it again and test the other leg. A passing score is 11-15 seconds on each leg. The average PGA Tour players scores 16 seconds on each leg.
Obviously, if your balance is inadequate, a wide array of things could happen when you swing a golf club, many of them not being good. To swing the golf club effectively, a golfer needs to have good balance. I may give some simple exercises on my blog or website in the future, but in the meantime, for those of you interested, visit www.TPI.com for some exercises.

Tomorrow I leave for Seattle for the weekend (from NY). It’s a long way to travel to for a weekend. The purpose of my trip is to start my Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) certification. This is one of three seminars I will have to attend, along with taking a test after each one. You may have seen the founders of TPI, Phillips and Rose, on the Golf Channel, where they have a their own segment, Golf Fitness Academy.
The purpose of these courses is to train golf professionals to identify students’ physical limitations, to help the professional either work around/with the limitation, or prescribe some exercises to help improve the area of limitation. For example, I find balance to be especially important in the golf swing. Let’s say, and we have all done this, maybe only in our younger days, that you drank so much alcohol that it impeded your balance. How well do you think you could swing the golf club? Now of course this is an extreme example, but my point is that each golfer needs to have a certain degree of balance to effectively swing the golf club. The question is, how much is enough? Well, when I first started my physical fitness program, so to speak, two months ago, I took the balance test and although my balance was above average, it really was not that good. And mine was better than most. I should have the definitive answer to this question very soon.
So as I embark on this journey to further my understanding, my intention, along with helping my students and being a more effective instructor, is to share some simple tests/exercises on this blog that you may find helpful in understanding your own body and how it impacts your golf swing. I realize that not everyone is going to start a full-blown golf exercise program, but I hope that I can share some simple, practical things that you can do that don’t require a lot of time – that’s of course if they exist (I know balance ones do). And if you are already taking part in a regular fitness routine, and you are serious about improving your game, you should definitely be incorporating some golf exercise into your regular program. I hope to be able to give all of you some guidance on these exercises/programs as well.
(BTW, I’m very proud to say, thanks to my fitness program, that I’m also down about 25 lbs. since that “fat me” picture appeared in the article Newsday did on me back in May!)

Happy New Year! Is this the year that you finally take your game to another level? For most golfers, at least those that want to improve, a new year always seems to bring with it hope and inspiration for our golf games. But will this year really be different than years past?
The answer is, it depends. To improve at anything, whether it is business or a physical skill, it basically takes a few things: a plan, time, and money. Well, many of us are limited in the areas of time and resources so we need to try make and budget our time. It’s like working out; one of the easiest excuses to not working out is lack of time. But the reality is if we really want something, we find ways to make it happen. And improving your golf game is no different.
So here is one foolproof way that you can improve your game, without money and practicing – improve your understanding of the ball flight laws – the laws that govern the flight of the golf ball as the club moves through impact. These laws are non-negotiable and a necessary part of learning through feedback. When you fully understand what the club did to produce the ball flight, you can work to change what the club does to produce a different ball flight if it was undesirable, or change it to produce something more desirable. You’ll hear me repeat the importance of this over and over again. And until human beings start to learn in a different way other than feedback, I won’t stop pounding this message out to anyone that’s willing to listen! Let’s put it this way, if you took the ball-flight chapter out of my book, you might as well throw it in the fireplace – it would serve a better purpose than to read the rest of it without the ball-flight chapter.
I’ll be sharing some other things here on my blog that I hope will help you in your pursuit of better golf, but in the meantime — here’s to you having the best golfing year ever!