How To Be The Best Golf Player You Can Be

Golf, as with any other game,  is not just about having an average score of below 80, makingyou a good golf player, there are other things which are considered.  Skill at playing golf is obviously good, to play the best golf you can you are going to have to take into account;

- fitness,
- practice,
- and etiquette.

Fitness
- To keep your mind and body in good shape is a key element to becoming a good, or even a great golf player.  If you look after your body, and make sure it is in as good a shape as possible you will not only find that you can perform better on the golf course, but it will also help you to enjoy golf well into old age.  There are people playing golf on my local course that are in the eighties and nineties - ok, they may take a bit more time, but they can still play a good round of golf with the rest of us.

- To help achieve the correct fitness level you will need to try and eat the correct foods and exercise regularly.  Maintaining a good level of cardiovascular fitness and muscle tone is what suits the game of golf. Some ways to see how your body fitness shapes up are to check your blood pressure and your body mass inde (BMI) Check with your doctor or medical advisor what levels you should be aiming for at your age and with your body type. 

- Although your body fitness is very important, with golf mental fitness also needs to be as good as possible. A stressed player will not play as well, so find ways to relieve yourself of stress. What about developing a regular meditation time alone or with your family and/or friends. Reading and completing puzzles like crosswords and Suduko also help to keep your mind tuned and sharp.

Practice
- You can never have too much practice.  Try and develop a regular time for practising and follow the same practice routine.  You may well find that you want to play golf more and more and practice less and less - this just does not work.  You need to take the opposite view, practice more and more and then some more.  You will soon find that you will get better results this way.   The more you practice the better your techniques will become, and this will carry through into your game. 

- Some say that a good ratio to use is a 1-2.  So you would do two hours of practice for every hour of golf that you play.   You do not need to do this all in one go, and it is advisable to alternate your practice and play days so that you are not working too hard on one particular day. A good play to practice ratio is 1:2, that is, for every hour of golf you play, you will do 2 hours of practice.

- Always try and learn and increase your knowledge of the game.  With golf, learning the rules of play does not mean that you know everything there is to know.  There will always be something new for you to learn, so how about enroling in a class or take up some private lessons.  Most golf clubs have a professional golf player, or even just a more advanced player, who is only too happy to give lessons on any particular point you want help on.    If you keep on learning this way, then you will become a better player year on year.

Etiquette
- If you can play golf well, and you practice regularly, you still need to be a good person to play with, so that others want to play a round with you.  Golf can be considered a solitary sport, but it does have it's own rules of etiquette which needs to be followed.  For instance some golf courses have a particular dress code, andother rules apply, so check out the rules for your particular course before you tee off.