English Major Golfer

Entering into the 2025 Season, I decided on four main goals:

• Play healthy
• Make more birdies
• Putt better
• Better inside 150 yards

Based on the results of 2025, there is strong evidence that I completed AND exceeded these goals.

The health and conditioning journey that began in the middle of 2024, has yielded a consistent habit of working out, eating right AND resting.

Play Health – Here’s my empirical evidence:

Totaling my workout hours tracked on my Apple Watch:

• Jun 2023 to May 2024 (prior to the reset): 35 hours of Functional Strength workouts
• Jul 2024 to Jun 2025 (with June 2024 being the reset month): 71 hours

I doubled my workout hours after my reset! I found that I was able to consistently workout within a day of playing a tournament. I created a routine of doing my balance routine and then splitting up my Functional Strength into a Lower Body and Upper Body workout on separate days. I didn’t miss any tournaments due to injury and I consistently recognized that I just “felt better” after tournaments than I did in the beginning of 2024.

Learning to Rest

Learning how to rest may be one of the most important hidden lessons of 2025. After each round (tournament or practice round), I would ice my back and leg muscles for 20 minutes. I would then take the next day as a complete rest day – and I mean COMPLETE. I would generally take long rests during the day on my couch. I would not swing a club or do anything strenuous. I would ice or use heat and the tens machine in any places that were tight. My recovery time between tournaments was greatly enhanced by this immediate and focused rest period. 

One area of focus for 2026 is heart rate and resting heart rate. We’ll explore this in future blogs.

Make More Birdies:

One of my observations comparing my scores to those who scored better than me was the number of birdies better players made in a round. Seems obvious and yet I recognized it as an elevation of my aspirations for my game.

Standing on the tee box of every hole, every golfer wants to make a birdie — yet do we really PLAY like we want that birdie (definitely space to explore here in another blog). I realized I had to make a mental shift this year to make “birdies” not some kind of magical-coveted-hidden-gem that only happens every so often — birdies and pars have to become the comfortable “normal”. 

Arccos cites that a 6.0 HI averages 1.3 birdies per round.

Up until 2025, I was nowhere near that average. In my 2024 Season, I had only 31 total birdies over 56 rounds which equates to a 0.6 avg birdies per round. 🫣In my tournament rounds on both Golfweek and Senior tours, I had a total of just 19 birdies combined over 33 events (0.57 avg). 

Making more birdies is heavily connected to the other two goals: putt ‘better’ and better within 150 yards. By focusing my practice on making more putts (specifically outside 3-5 feet) and getting more GIR from 150 yards and in, I would give myself more chances to actually MAKE birdies. Sounds simple – right? Actually committing to this practice (rather than say practicing my tee shots or short game) is another thing AND this is something I am proud of – I did stick with it.

2025 Birdie Results: 

Total birdies in tournament rounds (both Golfweek and Senior): 60!! 🤯

• 60 birdies over 37 events: 1.6 per round (+0.3 over a 6.0 HI)
• I led the Golfweek A Flight with 27
• My overall Arccos Putt/Round came in at 1.7 from over my last 50 rounds of 2025 – meaning that as I play practice rounds and tournament rounds, I am comfortable making almost 2 birdies per round. 

Putting Results:

As anticipated by doubling the number of birdies year-over-year, my putting stats reflect a marked improvement. 

• My average putts per round in 2024 was 33.3 vs in 2025: 32.2 (-1.1).
• Compared to a 6.0, I make more 1-putts (4.8) per round.
• 42% of the time I will make a 6-9 footer (over 50 rounds); over my last 10 rounds of the season this increased to 47%.
• 78% of the time I will make a 3-5 footer.

Giving myself a chance by hitting my approach shots to within 9 feet gave me nearly a 50% chance of making the birdie. 

Approach Shots within 150 Yards:

While I do believe the overall value in the Arccos system is worthwhile, there’s much to be desired in their reporting and the level of depth you can go. Getting a real fine look at your Approach game is one area where Arccos could drastically improve. 

At a high level, my overall GIR for 2024 was 7.4 per round (41%). Over my last 50 rounds of 2025, Arccos shows I increased that to 8.5 per round or 47%. Already, I have bettered my 6.0 HI comparison by 0.3% (or 44%) and I gained over a stroke in GIR. Looking at my last 10 rounds my GIR edged up to 8.7/rd.

Here’s where things get a little more murky with the stats; while I can see my performance through Arccos — it’s very difficult to discern “improvement.” Comparing my last 50 rounds vs 10 rounds, it would seem I actually declined in my approach shots within 150 yards (averaging 50 rounds:60% vs 10 rounds:52%) – yet these are only based on the number of times I hit from those distances. 

It would be helpful to know “Average Distance OF MY Approach Shots” – meaning if 80% of my approach shots are between 100-124 yards, I am GREAT! 

And while I can’t zero in on exactly what’s working on my approach game, we can equate the improvement of GIR to putts to birdies in my overall goals.

This all leads to what?

It doesn’t escape me that my musing on my golf game is somewhat vanity and it is equal part self-validation that the ultimate goal of qualifying for the US Senior Amateur Open in 2028 is something attainable.

With this look back I can see the progress. I can feel the strength both not only physically in my body – I feel it mentally. When I began this journey, I was an angry-rage golfer that felt that even the wind had a mind to torture me. Even this year, in the moment, there were significant times out doubt.

Yet now, looking back with this perspective, more than ever, I feel like a golfer in command (most of the time, ok well some of the time) of his swing AND emotions (definitely some of the time 😉😂). Godwilling, the building blocks to take my HI from a Low 5 to a 1 or 0 over the next few years, SEEMS reasonable, if not likely, if I continue to progress. 

And I am mature enough to understand that as I attempt to go from a 5 to a 3, I will be playing new shots, new distances, from different tees. I will yet again tear down things to build new things and my HI will balloon to a 7 or 8. And that’s just part of the process. That’s this 4-letter game called GOLF.