The below schedule is an example of one of my busier days while competing for the SFU Golf team:

6:00am – Wake Up 
7:00am – 7:30am – 5k Run 
7:30am – 8:00am – Workout Activation
8:00am – 9:00am – Team Workout
10:00am – 12:00pm – Short Game Practice
12:30pm – 4:30pm – Class / Study
5:00pm – 7:30pm – On Course Training
9:00pm – 10:00pm Study
10:00pm – Bed Time

 

My goal in sharing this schedule is to highlight the amount of time I was spending on tasks directly related to getting better at golf. On this particular day I spent over 6 hours doing some form of training. In a normal week, I would expect to spend between 25 and 35 hours on things such as working out, range practice, on-course training or mental skills development. This was a significant amount of time that gave me the freedom to focus on many different skills and apply them on the course.

 

Fast forward to today, I have graduated from SFU and work full-time helping to develop the One Iota Golf software platform to deliver on our mission of helping coaches and athletes consistently improve and reach their full potential. As a result of this work, I have significantly less time available to spend training for golf. Despite this, my primary goal in golf is to compete for and win a provincial championship, something I wasn’t able to do while I was playing on the SFU team. 

 

Now, before you call me delusional for having overly ambitious goals with only a small fraction of the time available for training, I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve: Deliberate Practice and the One Iota Golf App.

 

Deliberate practice is a fairly widely known topic in coaching circles and is officially defined by psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues as: “the individualized training activities specifically designed … to improve specific aspects of an individual’s performance through repetition and successive refinement”. While this clarifies what it is, how is this going to help me play the best golf of my life while practicing significantly less?

 

I think this can be best described by a training session I had over the holiday break a couple years ago. I was in the Toronto area visiting family and wanted to get a bit of practice in. Unfortunately, golf courses and driving ranges are closed at that time of year but there are indoor golf domes available. The one closest to me didn’t provide the ability to pay by bucket, like most driving ranges I had been to, but instead charged by time. 

 

Going into my range session, I wanted to get the most value out of the time so I did a bit of planning ahead. I set a clear intention for my range session prior to arriving at the golf dome to focus on my weight transfer through my swing. I broke up my total practice session into specific, timed blocks for warm up, skill development and applying the skill. I was in and out of the dome in 30 minutes and had one of my most time-effective range sessions ever. Despite the practice session being so short, I improved my weight transfer through my swing and was now a little better and a little closer to my goals. I had just engaged in deliberate practice.

 

This type of highly focused, deliberate practice is precisely how I am going to be able to reach my highest level of performance with less time.

 

While this sounds great in theory, there is a glaring gap that needs to be addressed… How am I supposed to identify what to focus my time on when training for golf? I no longer have access to the elite coaching staff at SFU who developed training plans for me to implement, I have to figure it out on my own. 

 

This is where the second trick up my sleeve comes in, the One Iota Golf App. 

 

The app does a lot of different things but I want to highlight a couple of the features that specifically help me make more efficient use of my time. 

 

The first is tracking my stats on the course. Tracking stats can be a tedious task and something that is easy to forget if left until after the round. Even as someone who is highly motivated by stats and data, I have found myself procrastinating on entering my stats post round. With the mobile app, I can enter them while on the course. It takes me less than 10 seconds at the end of each hole and by the time I get back to the clubhouse from the 18th green, my stats are entered, saved and analyzed. I no longer have an excuse to not track my stats. If you happen to be someone who is distracted by tracking stats while on course, you can still make great use of the One Iota app post round by entering your stats after your last hole in less than 5 minutes!

 

The second feature that helps me make the best use of my time is the analysis capability. I can analyze my stats with dozens of different filters to help me figure out the differences between me at my best vs me at my worst. But the best part is that as soon as I perform an analysis, I get a group of recommendations highlighting  what skills I should work on to improve based on my goals along with  specific drills I can complete to get better at those skills. 

 

The last feature I want to highlight is the drill library built into the app. It has nearly 100 drills across dozens of different skills that I can incorporate into my training sessions with more getting added every week by the One Iota team and other elite coaches from all over. Now it’s as easy as ever to set up a plan for my training so I can engage in deliberate practice every time I have an opportunity to train. 

 

Many of us wish we had more time for practice and on-course training but in reality we have to make the most effective use of the limited time we have available. I am going to do that with deliberate practice and the One Iota Golf App because I am confident it will work, but you don’t have to take my word for it, simply look up my results at the upcoming 2025 British Columbia amateur and see for yourself. 

 

Time to get to work!

 

Better Today, 

Ryan