Phil Mickelson arrives as you’d expected, coffee mug in hand and sunglasses on face, dressed head-to-toe in HyFlyers black. He drives his golf cart onto the back of the range. He hooks a band to the side of his cart. And he begins a series of exercises, shouting out his shoulders, his back, his knees.
It’s activation time.
“Look, I feel stupid that this is my warmup,” he says a few minutes later, leaning over into a deep split. “But I’ve gotta get my hamstrings and low back stretched out.”
We’re at the Biltmore in Miami, an upscale hotel-slash-golf course and host of this year’s LIV content shoot. On the one hand, it’s a glitzy setup: if you walk past the enormous pool and into the Biltmore’s lobby you’ll smell gingerbread, enormous holiday decorations still in place for the megamillionaire golfers in town. On the other hand, the day is also rather everyman; despite LIV’s presence, the course is still open for public play, meaning Joe Golfer is taking divots on the range as a LIV pro captures team content beside him. (Even the below video with Mickelson, shot on the back of the range, attracts a small crowd by the end.)
Mickelson has joined us on-site for the filming of our latest episode of Warming Up, an in-depth interview series where pros take us through — you guessed it — some version of their warmup routine. And while Mickelson isn’t interested in deep-diving the geopolitics of the professional game, he’s more than happy to do what he does best: talk a little golf.
Over the course of the next half-hour, here’s what happens. And below that are a few snippets, in writing, of what I learned from a half-hour of Phil.
10 things I learned from Phil Mickelson
1. Mickelson’s warmup used to look a lot different.
Did Mickelson always warm up like this? He chuckles at the question.
“No,” he says. After a series of splits, squats and pliability exercises, I wonder — what did a warmup look like 25 years ago, then?
“I would just walk up and hit,” he says. He’d grab a sand wedge and go. Now there’s no just-grabbing anything. Even when he grabs a club he’ll grab a heavy one (“to build muscle strength”) and a lighter one (“to get your nervous system firing a little faster”) and then get to the in-betweeners.
2. Don’t worry about range distance.
We have a couple of game balls for Mickelson to hit, but mostly we’re just using Biltmore beaters. That’s all good, he says. He always discounts distance on the range.
(Maybe we should, too!)
“The range balls are colder,” he says. “They’re sitting out overnight. And they’ve been hit a bunch. They’re not going to be as long as the balls we use. So when I’m on the range and I’m using distances and I’m using my monitor, I’m not overly concerned with how far my irons are going, because they’re always going to be about four to six yards shorter than the ball I’m actually using, because it’s newer and fresher and so forth.”
3. How to learn short yardages? Hit ’em!
Hopefully this isn’t too contradictory to that last point, but within say, 60 yards, a distance that strikes fear in many amateurs, Mickelson is an all-time legend. His secret? It’s not really a secret at all. The best way to dial in half-swings, he says, is by hitting half-swings.
“I hit 1000-1500 balls every month to those numbers and I just build a reference. So I just know that that’s 30 yards,” he says.
4. Mickelson was never a big tennis player.
He’s describing hitting a draw and he’s using table tennis as his vehicle. When you’re hitting a ping-pong ball with topspin, he explains, “I’ll take my rear arm and I’ll just let it rotate over.”
It’s a terrific visual, particularly given Mickelson’s rich history of Ryder Cup ping-pong. Was he a racket-sports guy as a kid?
“You had to run a lot in tennis,” he says. “Not my thing.”
5. A longer backswing means more speed — and more height.
Mickelson’s “Pelz” shot is some variation of 10 yards off his stock shot. He makes that adjustment in part by shortening his backswing. The result? A shot that comes in lower and with less spin than his full-speed approaches; those jump off the face higher but spinnier. Different situations, he says, demand different shots.
“If I go 20 off Pelz, now we’re talking a really low shot,” Mickelson says, taking a short backswing and sending a low-spin flyer cruising through the wind, unbothered. Understanding speed and spin, he says, helped him adjust to soft conditions (at Pebble Beach in the winter) and firm conditions (at the Open Championship in the summer) and become a champion in both settings.
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