Personal trainer and fitness columnist Shawn O’Neil asks: Is Strokes Gained worth worrying about?
Strokes Gained is one of those things TV commentators bring up a lot, but what does it mean, and can it help club golfers improve their scores?
In as short an explanation as I can offer here (feel free to head off down the rabbit hole of understanding this in great detail if you wish) Strokes Gained uses a database of averages to compare the ability of golfers against a specific benchmark. Using your data against the benchmark, you can produce a positive or negative score for every area of your game and understand where you are gaining strokes on the average, and where you are losing them.
It’s a great tool to really get into the detail of a round and break down performance in greater detail than you’ll get from the four or five in the little box on the scorecard.
There are lots of tools to help you track this and a search through Google and the App Store will give you lots of options based on how much detail you’d like to get into.
What can be really useful is comparing your own data against the benchmark for your own handicap level, and to the level you would like to get to.
As you add more data points and submit more scores, you will generate values for your performance off the tee, approaching the greens, around the green, and putting – so you can see where your game stacks up in those categories and where you can get the most bang for your buck from practising, training or a combination of both.
The real gold for a lot of players is in showing you where to focus your time. For example, a 10-handicapper may work hard on their short game to get down to five, but the data tells us the difference between those two handicap levels in that category is 0.36 shots. Meanwhile, the difference in approach play for those two levels is 1.82 shots. Over 20 rounds, that’s a difference of 36.4 shots!
Getting back to fitness, the great thing these stats give us from a personal training perspective is quantifiable data. Rather than a client saying: “I hit it shorter than everyone I play against” we can build a picture of what’s really going on in their game, then create a programme to improve.
What that programme looks like will be different for every player, and will undoubtedly combine elements of on- and off-course work. I have no doubt gaining distance off the tee will be a priority for many people reading these columns, but some analysis of your whole game will lead to greater improvement in less time – which makes tracking your Stokes Gained a powerful tool in every golfer’s bag.
