If you’re looking for a great, free way to improve your game, you might consider signing up for Golf Digest’s Make Me Better 2009, formerly known as the Golf Digest Challenge. Honestly, I don’t know why they changed the name, but personally, I don’t like it. 🙂

It takes no time at all to sign up and it’s pretty dang awesome. I signed up for it last year(see Golf Digest Challenge 2008) but did not  do anything with it and like most things, you get out of it what you put into it.

Once your account is created, you can choose one of these areas to focus on.

• Power
• Consistency
• Short Game
• Scoring
• GD Woman (woo, golf and dating tips……..ha……ha…..)

Each focus has a PGA Tour Professional as a role model. My focus presently is consistency and the role model assigned is the great Jim Furyk. Also under each focus there’s featured lessons that apply specifically to your focus. The lessons are taught by a whole range of industry professionals and they cover a variety of topics pertaining to that focus.

Aside from the featured lessons, there’s a progress tracker where you keep track of your rounds and various stats pertaining to the round. You set a target score and then you spend ages trying to reach it.  Click here to view the scorecard. You track things like putts, chips & pitches, GIR, etc..

As you log your rounds, GD keeps track of them and show you trends in your game, see the graph below.

The more accurately you log your rounds, the better advice they’re able to give you. When you access the progress tracker, it’ll say something to the effect of, “based on the data you’ve provided, we’ve determined that you need to work on XXXX.”

There’s also a full lesson library that can be searched by topic or by instructor.

And probably the greatest part of the whole program is a free swing analysis by some of the top instructors in the country. I went to the range on Monday, May 11th and using my digital camera, I took some video of my swing with three different clubs. I uploaded them and today I received the first analysis which was completed by Mike Richards out of Heron Bay Golf Club, Coral Springs, FL.

I was extremely impressed with the detail he put into analyzing my swing and I am very excited to try out the changes he recommended.  See below for the swing analysis of my driver and 3w.

Awesome right?

This month is a great month to get started on this because you can use this in conjunction with the 12th Annual PGA Free Lesson Month going on throughout the month of May.

Oh and please, no jokes about my swing, yes I know, it’s pretty embarrassing.. 🙂

Hope you guys find this useful! Consider this my Orlando Golf Lesson of the week! 🙂

-Dave

If you’re already using the Golf Digest Make Me Better 2009, I’d love to hear from you and see the swing analysis that was done, leave a comment with a link. Also, I’m looking to get more golf instruction posts going, so if you’d like me to research something and write about it, also, leave a comment.