Trackman

Winters where I live are usually cold, often snowy, and so whenever I do get to swing a club (doesn’t happen as often as I’d like!) it’s at an indoor facility with a Trackman simulator.

It’s incredibly fun seeing the ocean of data it provides on every shot. And while my belief (and personal experience) is that golf is played best as a reactive game where I don’t get needlessly bogged down in minutiae, the data Trackman provides can be incredibly helpful.

Whenever I do get indoors on a Trackman, there’s two things I’ll do.

1. I love the practice setting where you can set a distance range and it’ll give you a random distance, green complex, and pin position to play to. (Indeed, this is a similar approach to practice that we aim to offer with RangeRandomizer, minus the 5-figure hardware investment…). On each shot, it shows your strokes gained (and usually strokes lost 😂) against a tour pro.
2. I love doing the Trackman combine, and tracking my scores over time.

I take all “results” with a grain of salt, to be sure. But what is most helpful to me is the patterns it reveals. Where am I losing the most strokes, what are my dispersion patterns across each distance, etc.?

Broadly this data is something I can take outside and incorporate into my practice.

Recently I did a combine after a 4-month layoff of touching my clubs. (Life and winter have gotten in the way.) And I was pleasantly surprised to perform on par with last season, when I was playing much more frequently. By far my biggest weakness, on that day at least, was in shots under 80 yards. My distance control was way, way off.

If you get a chance to practice on a Trackman or have access to a simulator locally, I highly recommend it.