Total Golf Offers The Total Practice Package
- Details
- Category: Inside Golf
- Published: 2021-12-09
By GORD MONTGOMERY, Inside Golf
There are, says Garett Jenkinson, two kinds of ranges in this world, a gun range and a (golf) driving range. In the latter, he continues, you go and shoot your weapon at specific targets and selected distances. So why go to a driving range and blast away with no real purpose?
Following that thought pattern, Jenkinson has opened a brand-new golf training facility in Calgary, based on game assessment and not a “swing adjustment.” In fact, he’s so certain of the results he has a guarantee for students (more on that later).
He recently moved his facility from the Arts Hotel, where he used a large ballroom through the toughest times of COVID-19, to a new 11,000 sq. ft. space solely dedicated to game improvement.
“It’s super exciting. It’s kind of been a lifelong dream of mine,” he said of his new state-of-the-art home. “It’s a place that’s actually built around golf and people getting better, improving their golf.”
At Total Golf the use of launch monitors, as opposed to simulators, adds the necessary exactness to ball flight desired for improving one’s game. “The accuracy of the data is literally within one percent of your ball flight. What makes these things amazing, it’s literally like playing golf, except there’s no bad weather and no bad lies,” where deep in an Alberta winter, chinooks aside, outdoor golf can be next to impossible.
Now set up, yet still in a somewhat soft opening, the idea behind Total Golf is what’s called the Purposeful Practice Path (PPP system). “It basically focuses on short and long putts, chipping for shots inside 30 yards, and then wedges, approach shots, and drivers. We’ve built a chipping range with targets on it,” which becomes, in a sense, like the theory behind a gun range.
“What we do is an assessment on someone’s game, not their golf swing. What we find typically is everybody wants to hit it 300 yards. But we see they can’t putt, they can’t chip, they can’t wedge it. What we do is actually talk about the game.
“Where do you want to be? Do you want to lower your handicap by five? Be 10 shots better? Do you want to break 90 for the first time? Do you want to break par? Then we write a plan for them and it’s a combination of lessons,” and a personalized practice plan using the PPP system.
“We benchmark every station so you can see if you’re getting better or not. We built this one-of-a-kind thing that’s a whole circuit for training.”
Besides simulators, where students can go practice on a virtual course, Total Golf offers the best available technology for helping students improve, including Putt View, one of the first in Canada, that is a projector-based putting green that shows both the putting line and the break line.
“You can literally learn how to putt using this technology,” that provides data showing where and why you’re missing the hole on every kind of putt, explained Jenkinson. “The objective is to get it in the hole and here’s why it’s not going in the hole.
“We’ve got this building based around (the concept that) we want a great hangout, great quality products you can buy, the best technology, the best lessons. We’re just shooting to be a brand-new hybrid. If you want to shoot the best golf of your life, we can do that if you put the work in (that) we tell you to do.”
Which brings us to the guarantee offered. “We give you a strategy of how to play on the golf course. After your evaluation we write a plan for you and our guarantee is this; If you sign up for the plan and you do the work in a specific amount of time, we guarantee you’ll break 80 (or whatever your goal is) otherwise you can come and see me for free until you do that. That’s a good deal!”
Jenkinson agreed that fixing your game isn’t a quick thing. It takes time and effort. But if you put in the work at Total Golf, it will pay off and more people are finding that out all the time.
“I’ve been waitlisted for three years,” he said about his instruction’s popularity. “You can see me in a couple of months. I still get phone calls every day, some guy saying, ‘I need a tune-up.’ My reply to that is, ‘If you go to the gym once, does that really do anything.? Literally, no. We know golfers aren’t getting better. I want people that are committed. I’d love to take a pill and not go to the gym. It’s a discussion on where you want to be and we’ll get you where you want to be in three or four months.”
So why use this idea? Well, let’s go back to the beginning of this article.
“Driving ranges and putting greens are really poorly used all the time. When you go to a gun range you use numerous targets and numerous distances. And when you hit the bullseye, you put the gun away or you change targets. You don’t keep doing it.
People don’t go to the gym, bump into a piece of machinery and decide to use that one. They go with a plan,” and using the Purposeful Practice Path will pay off in the long run, Jenkinson ended, before adding, “I’ve never given a free lesson yet!”
For more on Total Golf, located at 7005B 6th St. SE in Calgary, go to their website at golfperformancecanada.com or call them at 403-453-4653.