David. I have been ripped on here for saying that. I have had the great fortune of playing with several major champions. I do mean playing rounds of golf with them. Unless you actually play golf with them, you don’t understand. Contrary to Adam Young. They are that good. Really good. One of the boys I played with threw a 58 on the board. That’s how good they are just messing around no pressure on your 6200 yd avg track and that was in 1984. My take on real improvement starts with the putter and moving on out. Develop consistency with those scoring clubs, then move to mid and long irons and finally to woods and tee balls. The swing change I actually made was major/minor. I needed to increase my launch angle. I went from like 9-10 degrees to 13-14 degrees. But there was alot involved only working on that for 6 months and 50-100 balls a day. The biggest thing you should chase is fun with your partners, a little walking exercise. Scoring is a result of managing your misses somewhere between 75 to 90 times. Technically, if you hole everything out you only have 18 makes. LOL Here is just a tour caddy, just fooling around.https://www.golfdigest.com/story/jhared-hack-shoots-57-mini-tour-caddie
I won’t re-litigate the sources of golf improvement here… well-trodden ground around here 
The rest of Coyne’s ladder is amusing:
- The Best Players You Know
- Club Pros
- Stud Amateurs
- Attached Club Pro (like a club pro without the responsibility, there so members can hang with them)
- Mini-Tour Philanthropists (because they donate their entry fee)
- Mini-Tour Grinder
-
NationwideWeb.comKorn Ferry Earners - Six Figure Survivors (the first of the PGA Tour players)
- The Players
- The Superstars
He goes on to say:
They should amend those ads on TV - These guys are good. How good? You’ve got no f-ing idea
As impenetrable and unscalable as the pyramid might seem, the reality is that the difference between the apex and the bottom masses is about six, maybe seven, golf shots a round. As vast as the talent gulf may seem, a scorecard doesn’t know anything about the talent pyramid.
I think it’s worth taking a moment to explore this space… I turned 40 today… I’m well past my physical prime. Distance is directly tied to scoring, and I’ve been keeping the same distance, if not improving…
That’s progress against the treadmill of time.
Other areas are more in doubt… my focus is still abysmal and there are areas of golf I can improve on if I can figure out how to practice them… they all
Take time and energy…
I think there is something to be said for treading water in golf, especially with limited time!
That said, I think we can always improve. Pick something tangible and work on it… I’ve seen improvement in my putting, even if it’s only I don’t hate putting anymore.
My story is basically at 22 I took up the game, I sucked. I wanted to get good, I was hooked. Because of a work schedule to make money which was the 6p to 3a shift I volunteered at an African American owned golf club in exchange for lessons after my first 7 that I paid for or so and unlimited privileges. Inside of a about 15 months, I went from a 24hdcp to about a 2. I was like damn I could go pro. Uhhhh NO! I only know 1 guy who did that and that’s Larry Nelson. I was good, I was really good, I made a living hustling, I was making like $400 a week, hustling scat games, another note a week caddying at PVGC. But playing with some of the men I got to play with. No, when they wanted to play especially over the course of 4 or 5 days…it’s a whole different level, you wanna play with those guys, you better get good, you better drop wedges on a dime. I found out I could only drop them on a quarter. Still can, but at my age that’s only good enough to get you at a single digit. So I’m happy with that, I have fun, I play in senior events, and at once a week playing on a course my short game, 40yds on in, not good enough and I don’t have the time to invest yet. Maybe next year…this year was improve launch angle consistently. Same general swing, just slightly different release. Like I said. Biggest thing is have fun
Happy (belated) Birthday, Will!! 
Thanks for reminding me that 40 is well past our physical prime 
First off happy birthday, youngster!
Secondly, I think you are spot on in that progress is relative. If you enjoying playing more, than that is probably the most important progress you can make. Ever.
Thanks! Having fun is definitely the most important part…
I’ve just come to believe that progress is more than lowering your handicap… you have to find the small wins in golf and eventually they will add up to big wins.
Belated Happy Birthday!
I would love to go back to 40…well actually I had a super stressful job then so not that part of it, but I wouldn’t mind turning back the clock 15 years otherwise.
I actually did get down to about a 12 back then with more practice and play and felt like I could get to single digits, but I focused on other things (work; family) and the index kept climbing until I hit a 20 last Fall. Back down to 14 this year. Not much more time practicing, but better practice. Wish our season was longer here, but I’m working on a plan for Winter and steps to keep dropping.
Happy Birthday !!! Your gainin on me!
Happy birthday Will 
I’ve more than a decade on you and waaay past my prime but through club fitting, continual learning and focused practice I can sometimes hit 300yd drives. Average is 250 and gaining so you’ve a good way to go yet youngster.
Like @Kevomanc I’d love to be 40 again. And like @Kevomanc I also had a stressful job then. I will not go back to that for any amount of money. Life is too short to trade in your mental health for cash.
@BlackForestGuy - there have been some really good comments posted in here, and I trust you’ve read carefully through all of them … a lot of useful wisdom has been shared!
I’d recommend … if you have not yet … spending time reading through some of the articles on the Practical Golf website. The knowledge and insights in them will do a lot for your game!
Start with Expectations Management.
That said, as a fellow golf enthusiast who is also working hard to get “better” (whatever that means) I would strongly suggest…
#1. Patience.
2. Practice only what you were shown in your Lessons.
… And,
3. Learn the game “backwards” (as someone else mentioned above) - because…
…becoming a really good putter takes pressure off your approach shots … you can hit anywhere onto the green; become really good with your wedges because you will miss greens … so gain confidence that you can get the ball up onto the green when you do miss trying to pull off the perfect approach; become really good with your irons and “club up” on approach shots; learn to hit all of your clubs from all sorts of uneven lies and types of rough; always pick a specific target for every shot; always be careful with your setup at address and aim & alignment; etc etc etc etc.
Driving it far off the tee is great, but driving the ball into a good spot in the fairway is much better.
Only change to the list … I heard one time from a 3 handicapper. He asked his pro for a putting lesson and he took him to the short game area. Said if he could get the ball closer to the hole from around the green, he would take fewer putts and shoot lower scores.
Yes!! But… that’s a 3 hcp! IMHO the rest of us regular mid-/hi- cappers would do well to first get the ball almost anywhere onto the green, from anywhere / any lie around the green … then as the basic skills develop sharpen up your shot making skills.
One thing that most golfers, regardless of their mid-/hi-cap, can do and do as effectively as a scratch golfer, is learn to hit a wedge properly. In fact, if you’re having problems swinging a wedge, there’s a good chance that
- you haven’t been instructed in its use properly or at all
- you have something in your fundamentals that if you managed to fix with a wedge, would seep back into your regular (fairway/tee) swing and make you a better golfer
You don’t need strength to swing a 60 degree wedge. But you do need
- instruction
- practice
- confidence
My contention here is that if you can swing a wedge, you can swing it well outside of your regular game, and end up closer to the hole every time. You may even find yourself holing out more than once in a season. So what I’m saying is that a “regular golfer” can end up well closer to those guys on TV from 40 yards on in. My own approach to the game is to treat putting and wedgework as essentially the same set of skills. I’ve stopped practicing one without the other. And it’s made a bigger difference in my abilities as a golfer than anything I have managed to do in other aspects of my game. An added benefit is that my sand game got much better too, well beyond the amount of practice that I put in.
I’m guessing the pro really knows his student’s game, which is why the pro gave that specific advice. PGA Scrambling stats as a whole last year show that the Tour average was a hair under 58% Cantlay led everyone with a little over 2/3. If this student has a much lower scramble percentage, like the 5-10 percent I vaguely recall reading is true for the average golfer, then yes, that’s a lot of strokes being left out there. Not to mention that scrambling is often not a matter of the difference between par and bogey, but if you really botch it, it can be the difference between par and “other.”
For most -3s though, I’m not thrilled with the logic behind it. As I see it, to be a 3 handicap, a player is already hitting a ton of greens in regulation. Likely over 50 percent. (Comparing again with the Tour GIR, average is a hair under 2/3 and Cameron Percy leads with nearly 73%) Unless they’re much worse than expected around the greens, and are constantly taking three or more to get down, this player’s issue likely isn’t chipping/pitching, for the 6-9 greens they miss.
It’s that most of their first putts are outside of their reasonable-make range. The solutions to that—especially if the guy is complaining about bad putting—is to either improve putting fundamentals (establishing the line and speed, address, stroke) such that the reasonable-make distance increases, or honing their approaches so that they can be closer to the hole.
Our host had a chart in his “Breaking 90” piece that showed putting distances and make percentages for Tour guys, scratch players, and 18 handicaps. The difference between Tour and 18HDCP for making 2/3 of their first putts, was going from 6 feet out to 4 feet out. Two feet. That’s it.
Great feedback. I should have been clearer. He got the pros advice well before he got down to a 3 hdcp.
@BlackForestGuy: If I were you, I would take lessons from that guy that fitted you for your irons. He seems extremely knowledgeable and concise. It would be money well spent IMO.
I just had an on-line lesson with my usual guy in Florida this week. Those two different mishit problems I’m having are really just one swing fault. Fix that and some of my big numbers will disappear. I would have never thought they were connected. Life is too short to “dig it out of the dirt”. It’s more fun playing well.
Mike
Great point, and I agree - along with putting, I’ve spent way waaaay more time hitting wedges into the net in garage vs any other swing practice.
I guess what I’m suggesting to the original poster … who has only played parts of two seasons so far … is…
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
In other words, make a “good” shot onto the green that’s within your current capabilities … and not try for that “perfect” shot at the pin (excepting maybe the occasional “green light” shot).
I guess… but my own approach to the shot (and every shot for that matter) is to visualize what I want to accomplish first, before setting up for the execution. To me, that pretty much includes the ball rolling right into the hole unless there’s a reason to lag it or tactically place it somewhere other than the pin. Once I’ve got the visualization concrete enough to translate into execution, I’ll proceed from there.
It never occurred to me, in all my various stages of visualization, to just get it onto the green. Not from 40 yards out. Now, 300 yards out on the fairway… that’s a completely different story! But my whole schtick here is that once you cross the 40 yard line, you pull back a magic curtain, and everything you do from here on in, is New Jerusalem as far as your chances of up-and-down in two. I firmly believe that every golfer, regardless of his/her game, can “reset the clock” from 40 yards in and become a completely different golfer if they are so inclined. This may or may not be true at other distances, but everybody has it within themselves to invent a “40 yard monster” if they’re inclined to do so.
Yeah, I take a lesson once every while with my local pro, but the guy who fitted me takes EUR 95 per hour (or 50 EUR for 30 mins) and that’s just outside my price range…