British Open: Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and new techniques

Both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have cemented their legacies as legends in the game of golf, but they are both still trying to improve their training techniques to stay at the top with the young guns that now surround them.

The old adage is that you can not teach an old dog new tricks. However, two greats in the game of golf are defying that myth and trying to hold off father time while they are at it. Heading into golf’s oldest major championship, the British Open, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson seem to each be pulling a new club out of their bags for this year’s trip across the pond.

News spread a couple of weeks back, that Tiger was trying to use wake up calls to get his sleeping schedule to align with British Summer Time, assumingly to avoid jet lag once the British Open begins this Thursday. In typical 2019 fashion, Woods announced his plan to do this via Nike’s Instagram page, closing out the video by saying,

"“If you want to win, if you want to succeed, if you want to accomplish your goals, it starts by getting up early in the morning.”More from Pro Golf NowGolf Rumors: LIV set to sign Masters Champion in stunning dealFantasy Golf: Grant Thornton Invitational DFS Player SelectionsBrutal return leaves Will Zalatoris looking towards 2024Stars You Know at World Champions Cup Starts Thursday at ConcessionFantasy Golf: An Early Look at the 2024 Masters Tournament"

Tiger posted that video at 1 AM according to his time stamp on his post, and his reason for that was because it would be 6 AM where he is going to be playing this week. We will have to wait until tomorrow to see if Tiger’s sleeping patterns make him more awake and ready to take an early lead in the tournament.

Phil, also took to social media to announce that his preparation for the British Open has been paying off in terms of his body goals. He announced on his Twitter at the beginning of this week in a video that he had been doing some non-traditional techniques to train for this year’s British Open and lost some weight. He said,

"“I have not posted in anything because I have not felt good about myself and the way I have been playing, I have not done anything or wanted to be in public. The last ten days I have done what I call a hard reset, to change and to try to make things better. I have lost fifteen pounds, done a six day fast with water and a special coffee blend for wellness, that I have been working on with Dave Phillips, and went on a bit of a retreat.I’m here in Ireland now, a beautiful place to get ready for the British Open, I don’t know if it’s going to help me play better or not, but I am willing to do whatever it takes to try and get my best back.”"

It is truly inspiring to see guys that have had so much success in their careers still trying to find ways to get better and not just rest on their laurels and their same routines. Maybe they have been taking notes from an older legend in another sport, Tom Brady. He is the perfect example of how to extend the prime of a player’s career through training, he just won his sixth Super Bowl and is known for unusual and progressive training habits to keep in shape.

Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods are doing something very similar, they both are over the age of 40 and are in contention in pretty much every tournament they want to be in. Even at this point in their careers, they are still racking up victories and look like they are in great shape to continue to do that.

They have both won on tour this season to prove it, everyone remembers Tiger’s miraculous win at the Masters to start this season and to cap off his come back. However, as always, he is still overshadowing the greatness of Phil who won a Pro-Am at the beginning of the season and is still doing remarkable things at the age of 49.

Quietly Phil is still one of the top 30 golfers in the world, and he is has been in the top 50 for an astounding 1338 weeks, which is 25 years and counting. It is hard to find a person in any sport that has sustained that amount of greatness for such a long period of time.

Maybe the reason for all of Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods’s sustained success and their ability to keep churning out positive results is their openness to new and cutting edge techniques, and their will and motivation to keep improving. We can all learn a lesson from these two legends and how they never fail to prepare their hardest, and that is, even a master of their craft still has room for improvement.