How stats WILL improve your golf game

The right stats and strategy can save you shots on the golf course

Many of us dream of a better swing or short game to lower our scores. But Lou Stagner knows you can score better right now, with the game you have, just by picking the right stats, strategy, and mental approach.

As data insights lead for Arccos, Lou Stagner crunches the numbers to help us understand where we are losing shots… and how we can gain them.

But in his wider role as a performance coach, his job is to help all golfers play as well as possible… and this has led him to the field of neuroscience.

Here, he explains how the field can fuse with shot tracking to deliver a whole new category of performance insights… one he believes will come to rival Strokes Gained in its ability to affect and improve the scores of every golfer.

As a performance coach, the mind game naturally falls within your remit. But what was the attraction of neuroscience, as opposed to more general psychology?

I was never a huge fan of traditional sports psychology. I read so many books on it, but I was always left with more questions than answers. All these phrases… ‘be patient’, ‘detach yourself from emotion’, ‘stay in the moment’… I didn’t really understand them. And there were no clear instructions on how to execute them.

When I discovered Neuroscience – and in particular the groundbreaking work of Dr. Izzy Justice – I felt I was hearing an explanation of the mental game for the first time. When you hear the science behind what’s going on in your brain and how it affects performance, it’s genuinely eye-opening. And for the club golfer looking to improve, it is extremely low-hanging fruit. There is so much we can do to put ourselves in a better mental state to optimize our scoring.

Click here to read our interview with Lou Stagner in full.