Nobody is thinking about winning a league or a golf tournament in February. But plenty of people will lose one this summer by thinking they can do nothing at all for five months and then turn up at the course in April expecting their swing to have waited politely for them.
The off-season is the only stretch of the year when you can afford to be bad at something on purpose. In July you want to score. Right now you can take things apart and rebuild them. That is a gift, and most golfers waste it.
Here are seven habits worth building between now and spring.
1. Get lessons. Even the pros have a coach.
Every player you watch on television has somebody watching them swing. Not because they don't know how to play — but because nobody can see their own golf swing.
The off-season is exactly when to do this. A real change feels terrible for a few weeks. Your contact gets worse before it gets better and your misses go somewhere new. You do not want that happening the week before a tournament. You want it happening in January when nothing counts.
One more thing. Book a block of lessons, not a single lesson. One lesson is a diagnosis. Four or five is a change.
2. Practice. With intention.
Hitting a bucket of balls is not practice. It is a pleasant way to spend forty minutes, and I have spent a lot of my life doing exactly that, but it is not the thing that lowers scores.
Practice with intention means going to the range with one job. Today I am working on starting the ball left of the target. Today I am hitting nothing but the 7 iron. Today I am going to hit twenty shots and give myself a point for every one that finishes inside the flag's width.
Give yourself a target and a score. The moment there is a number attached, you are competing, and competing is what you are actually training for.
3. Keep track of your stats and have goals.
You don't know where to go if you don't know where you are.
You do not need software for this. A note on your phone and three numbers after every round will do it: fairways hit, GIRs, and total putts.
Do it for ten rounds and a pattern will appear, and I promise you it will not be the pattern you expected. Almost everybody thinks they need to hit it further. Almost nobody needs to hit it further.
Then you practise the thing the numbers point at, rather than the thing that is most fun to practise. Those are rarely the same thing.
Make practice sessions have a goal and track those numbers. I guarantee that over time with consistent practice, your numbers will move closer to your goals.
4. Learn the power of visualization.
Tiger did it. Jack Nicklaus described it best — he said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the picture of it in his head.
This is not a mystical thing. It is rehearsal. You are telling your body what the job is before you ask it to do the job.
It is also free, which makes it the only part of golf you can practise in the dark in the middle of January. Stand in your kitchen, pick a hole you know, and play it. See the shot shape, see where the ball lands, see it finish. Players who do this well arrive on the first tee having already been there.
5. Develop grit.
Competitors know when to grind.
Anybody can score when they are striking it well. That is not a skill, that is a good day. The skill is the round where nothing is working, and you make nine bogeys instead of nine doubles.
Grit is best developed in the off-season. Seems counter-intuitive, but if you can develop grit by making yourself stick to your practice schedule during the cold-dark days of winter, then when you need to call on that grit in the sunny days of summer during a tournament, it will be so much easier.
The women who do well over a season are almost never the ones with the best good days. They are the ones with the best bad days.
6. Build your body for golf.
This is the one that surprises people most.
You do not need a gym membership and you do not need to lift anything heavy. What golf asks for is rotation, balance and the ability to hold your posture for four hours. Most of us lose those slowly and never notice until the back nine.
Twenty minutes, three times a week, of stretching and rotation work through a winter will show up in April as more turn, better balance and far less soreness on day three of a five-day trip. There is no swing tip on earth that does that.
7. Create a pre-shot routine, and do it always.
Always. That is the whole habit. Not when it matters, not when you remember — always.
It does not matter what the routine is. Two practice swings, look at the target, step in, go. Pick yours and then do it on the range, do it on the practice green, do it on a Tuesday with nobody watching.
Because the point of a routine is not what it is, but why it is. And that why is for when you are standing over a shot that genuinely frightens you, with a tournament on the line, your hands know what comes next even though your head has gone somewhere else. Build it now, in the boring months, doing the same order of things over and over until they are not a thought any more.
The short version
Lessons. Practice with a purpose. Write your numbers down. See the shot before you hit it. Learn to grind. Look after your body. Same routine, every time.
None of it is complicated. Most of it can be boring. That is rather the point — use the boring off-season to create an exciting, competitive season.
Personally, my hardest one is consistent practice. I have great plans and intentions going into the off-season, but then too easily I let other life activities take priority over the practice and I end up regretting it every spring. I am committing this year to make practice my priority.
Come with me!
Wendy
The 2027 GIR Club Classic at Hammock Beach runs April 11–15, and the Fingerlakes Open at Turning Stone follows on July 18–22. Fields are capped, so join the waitlist and you will hear the day registration opens.