By Mike Kay, oobgolf guest contributer

The Premise- Are You A Struggling Golfer?
A lot of you are like me. Exactly like me. You picked up golf only recently and are intimidated by the mountain of improvement you are facing. When you are a beginner, you feel intimidated or frustrated close to 99% of the time. But there are also times when a light bulb goes off and you have an epiphany on which part of your game is costing you strokes, and that takes you up the mountain of improvement.

One of my first barriers is the dreaded 100 mark. I've been close a few times, but never managed to do it. It's just a number. It means different things on different courses. It's as subjective as the course record at Putt-Putt golf, and as arbitrary as the 100-RBI mark in baseball. But I felt GREAT when I recently broke the 100 mark for the first time, on a legit 72 par course. And here's how.

Let me step back and discuss the light bulb. In all sports there are aggressive and conservative ways to play. Better players favor the former. Beginners do better by mastering the latter. I would contend that most par numbers on each hole are way too aggressive to play for beginners. Consider a world famous 400+ yard par-4 on the picture (on right). You have to drive off the tee for 200-250 yards, while avoiding the fairway bunkers. Then find the green from 150+ yards out, while avoiding green side bunkers. Not to mention that you need to be good enough to 2-putt the green. Surely you can do it, but such perfect swings are not consistent for a beginner.

Big Idea- Change Your Approach
Let me ask you this, would your approach change if you had to break 100 in this round for all the marbles in the world? If you had to make a double bogey or better on this par-4, is this the way you would play it? What if instead of 2 shots to the green, you intentionally took 3? Forget about the driver that you may slice or the approach shot with a long iron from the rough.

These types of shots carry way too much risk of costing your strokes. You could hit the ball out of bounds, in a hazard, or just plain mis-hit it!

What if you took three nice short reliable 7,8,9-iron shots that each took you 130-150 yards closer? If you are on the green, then 2-putt for bogey. If you are just off the green, chip to the hole, give yourself a chance for a 1-putt bogey. In other words, LAY UP your approach shots!

When you are a beginner, laying up should be the name of the game. Sure, you may not hit your cool new driver in front of your friends, but you will record a better score than them! Is that not worth it? Now let's examine the numbers.

The Math
Consider the following par 72 setup. Four par 3's, ten par 4's, and four par 5's. If you play a bogey on each of these, so that's 72+18=90 shots, and you will have 10 shots to spare! If oobgolf stats are correct, players average 4.1 on par 3's, 5.3 on par 4's, and 6.1 on par 5's.

So, on average, par 72's courses have the following number of shots:

(4.1*4) + (5.3*10) + (6.1*4) = 16.4 + 53+ 24.4 = 93.8

That's 6 shots to spare! You could play six shots worse than an average golfer and still break the dreaded 100 mark!

The breakdown is the following. I will assume that you bogey all par 3's. That's 16 shots. I'll also assume that you will layup all the par 4's and finish half of them with a bogey and half with a double bogey. That's 71 total shots. You have 28 shots left for the four par 5 holes, a comfortable double-bogey on each one that you can lay up the entire way.

This will take some practice to dial in your short irons and becoming very consistent with them, but this approach breaks 100 a lot more often than the 'aggressive' way to play. Moreover, you can mix in some aggressive driver and hybrid shots along the way, if you are comfortable with them.

I hope this takes your scores to the next level. Good luck on the links!