How to avoid penalty strokes and disaster holes has surprisingly little to do with discovering a magnificent new golf swing on the 12th tee.

According to British PGA professional and YouTube instructor Danny Maude, much of the damage begins earlier — with the club a golfer chooses, the target they select and the rather optimistic little conversation taking place between their ears.

That matters because golfers appear to be gaining distance without becoming appreciably better at avoiding trouble.

Shot Scope, which has accumulated millions of tracked shots through its GPS watches, rangefinders and app, compared five years of player data and found improvements in several areas.

Average handicap moved from 14.6 to 13.9, while driver distance increased from 207.6 yards to 214.6 yards. Average 7-iron distance rose from 125.9 to 130.1 yards.

Yet its “Tee Shots in Trouble” figure barely changed, moving from 8.45 shots per round to 8.39.

Modern golfers, in other words, have become better equipped to reach the scenery more quickly.

Why avoiding penalty strokes starts before the swing

Maude’s central argument is pleasingly inconvenient: many penalties are not really swing mistakes at all. They are planning mistakes with a backswing attached.

His first piece of advice is wonderfully unfashionable.

“You don’t have to hit driver on every hole”

For recreational golfers, the driver can acquire diplomatic immunity. It lives in the bag, therefore it must be used. A narrow landing area, bunker, out-of-bounds fence or inconvenient lake occasionally enters the discussion, but rarely wins it.

Maude’s alternative is simple: choose the club most likely to put the ball in play and leave a manageable second shot.

That is not timid golf. It is score-conscious golf.

A 3-wood, hybrid or other suitable club may leave more distance into the green, but the arithmetic changes rather quickly if the alternative is reloading from the tee.

Play your normal golf shot, not your imaginary one

The second principle is “play to your pattern, not to perfection”.

This is where plenty of golfers sabotage themselves with admirable efficiency.

A player who normally fades the ball may aim down the centre of a tight fairway and hope that, on this particular swing, the familiar shape will politely disappear.

The better calculation is to accept the pattern and choose a starting line that allows the ball to move towards the fairway rather than away from it.

Course management works best when based on the golfer you actually brought to the course.

Maude also advises players to “visualise the safe side”. If serious trouble sits on one side of the hole, the target can be shifted towards the other.

The objective is not necessarily to hit every fairway. It is to make the inevitable miss less expensive.

That distinction tends to become clearer somewhere around the moment a provisional ball leaves your hand.

How to stop one mistake from becoming a disaster hole

The more valuable lesson may arrive after the tee shot has already gone wrong.

Golfers rarely need encouragement to attempt a recovery shot. Give an amateur a narrow gap between two trees and within seconds they are conducting a feasibility study usually associated with civil engineering.

Maude’s warning sign is the phrase “if I can just…”

Once those words appear, the proposed shot probably requires several favourable events to occur simultaneously: perfect contact, exactly the right launch, sufficient curvature and perhaps the temporary suspension of one or two branches.

The smarter response is damage limitation.

Maude suggests asking: “Where can I hit this next shot so that my worst score is bogey?”

That reframes the hole immediately.

Instead of trying to recover the lost shot in one spectacular blow, the golfer gets back into position and tries to prevent another one from disappearing with it.

Why bogey is sometimes a very good score

Golfers tend to dislike accepting a bogey while they are still playing the hole.

Five minutes later, after the adventurous recovery clips a tree, finds another miserable lie and produces a penalty, that same bogey begins to resemble a minor financial windfall.

Maude’s philosophy is that strong players contain mistakes rather than eliminating them.

There is an emotional component here. A poor swing creates an understandable urge to repair the damage immediately. The next shot therefore becomes an attempt to compensate for the previous one rather than simply execute the best available option.

That is how one mistake recruits friends.

Taking a sideways chip, pitching back into the fairway or accepting that par has probably departed is not surrender. It keeps double, triple and quadruple bogeys from receiving an unnecessarily warm invitation.

Practise the golf shots your scorecard keeps asking for

Maude’s final point extends beyond strategy and into preparation.

Rather than spending every practice session hitting full drivers and 7-irons, he recommends working on the shots that repeatedly appear during actual rounds.

For his senior students, he identifies the 20-to-50-yard pitch as particularly important because players who cannot comfortably reach greens in regulation frequently face that distance.

It is a useful principle regardless of age.

Practice should reflect the golf being played rather than the golf that looks nicest on the range.

If penalties are the problem, practise a reliable tee shot. If recovery shots repeatedly cost strokes, practise low escape shots and short pitches. If a particular miss follows the driver around like an unpaid bill, develop a strategy that accommodates it.

Three questions before your next tee shot

Maude boils his tee strategy down to three considerations: identify the easiest club for putting the ball in play, recognise the natural shot shape and establish the intelligent side on which to miss.

None requires a swing rebuild.

That may be the most encouraging part of Shot Scope’s figures. Golfers have already found extra yards, and the broader data indicate modest performance improvements. Yet the persistence of tee-shot trouble suggests there are strokes still available without finding another five miles per hour of clubhead speed.

The next improvement may simply require knowing where not to hit it.

And golf, for all its elaborate equipment and microscopic swing analysis, occasionally rewards the player sensible enough to realise that a boring bogey is considerably more entertaining than an adventurous eight.