Practice will never make perfect in golf because perfection is unattainable. But smarter practice can lower your scores faster than simply blasting striped balls downwind with a driver. Here are some tips to help you get more out of your time on the range.
Most people spend their time on the practice range trying to find a better swing. I suggest you devote more of your practice time to learning ways to score.
Whether you’re a once-in-awhile golfer or a serious tournament player, a well-rounded practice plan can prepare you for many of the situations you’ll encounter on the course. Rarely will those situations include rolling the ball up on a nice tuft of grass and hitting it anywhere on a 100-yard-wide fairway with no sand, water, or trees.
FOR THE CASUAL PLAYER – PRACTICE YOUR ROUTINE
If you only play the game once a month or perhaps once a week, you probably go to the range … well, almost never. Don’t have the time, right? But do you think you could fit one hour a week into your schedule – maybe one day after work, or a couple half-hours at lunchtime, or an hour before your Saturday round with the guys?
If you consistently put in 60 focused practice minutes a week, I guarantee your scores and handicap will improve over the next few months. Use half the time for hitting full shots, the other 30 minutes for your short game. If you do it at lunch, hit shots one day, chip and putt the next.
On the range, do NOT spend your time trying to adjust your swing to the latest chapter you read in a golf instruction book. You will only end up more confused, frustrated and inconsistent. To correct your swing faults, take a lesson or series of lessons from a PGA professional. And plan to put in enough practice time to ingrain what they teach you.
If 30 minutes is all you can spare for practice, go with the swing you’ve got. If your natural shot is a fade or slice, plan for the banana shot shape in your course strategy. Just try to hit the most solid fade/slice you can with every shot. And to do that, the focus of your range time should be on practicing your pre-shot routine.
Don’t have a pre-shot routine? That could be a big reason for your erratic play.
A simple pre-shot routine will do three things for you:
Set up over each shot more consistently,
Minimize mental distractions and build your confidence for each shot, and
Help embed muscle memory for repetitive swings.
Every golfer’s pre-shot routine differs, and the routine may change depending on the specific swing thoughts you’re focusing on at the moment. Regardless of your mechanics, the routine should incorporate a visualization component – “see” the shot you plan to hit in your mind, visualize the swing you expect to make, and then simply focus on making solid contact with the ball, trusting the result will be close to your plan.
Same for chipping and putting – use the half-hour to practice your routine rather than a dozen different grips, stances, and breathing techniques. If you simply cannot get to a practice green, at least buy a mat and chipping net and work on your routine and short-game feel in the backyard.
Then when you go to the course, use the routine you’ve practiced on every single shot. Play with the game you have, make solid contact, and you will invariably hit more shots more crisply, straighter, and longer.
FOR THE SERIOUS PLAYER - EXPERIMENT
If you’ve got the time and inclination to play frequently, perhaps even on one of the many regional tours for amateurs and professionals, you may find a couple hours on the range more beneficial than always playing 18 holes (which is about 70 minutes of actual shotmaking). I probably go to the range or practice green 3-4 times for every round I play.
Between rounds, work on three major areas:
Swing technique and swing changes
Experimenting with a wide variety of shots
Repeating my pre-shot routine every time
For swing technique, I prefer to use one club (a 5- or 6-iron) if I’m incorporating changes. If my focus is on repeating a swing I’m currently comfortable with, I’ll progressively work through a short iron, a mid or long iron, and a wood to make sure the swing is repeating through the bag.
To avoid lapsing into mindless ball-beating, I dump the bucket of range balls far enough away that I must move my feet to grab the next ball. I want them far enough away so I have to take a couple of steps, roll the ball into whatever type of lie I’m working on, then start my pre-shot routine of sighting the target, visualizing the shot, etc. (Using your routine on every practice shot also saves money – you hit fewer balls, so buy smaller buckets.)
Experimenting on the range may be some of the most productive practice you’ll ever put in. This is the place to try, perhaps across a sequence of sessions, every conceivable shot you may be faced with on a golf course.
If you have a tournament coming up, devote at least one of your practice sessions to “simulating” a round on the course you’ll compete on. Visualize the tee shot on the first hole – say it’s a dogleg right, medium length, par 4. Your strategy is to hit a 3-wood (since you may be too nervous to pull the driver) with a slight fade starting at the left center of the fairway and ending in the middle or right center, avoiding a bunker at the corner. So on the practice range, take your 3-wood, tee up the first ball, and try to hit that opening shot down the imaginary fairway. Okay, you came over the top a bit and pulled it into the light rough on the left. Now you need a low 5-iron to keep it under some tree branches, and with a slight draw to work around a small pond fronting the green on the left. So put the next range ball in a rough lie, pull your 5-iron, visualize the shot, go through your routine, and fire away. You push this one short right, so now you take out your pitching wedge and practice a 20-yard uphill chip.
And so on through an entire simulated round (without putts, of course).
Another approach to learning the various shots you may need is to work through the entire bag, hitting a sequence of four different shots with every club – a high fade, a low fade, a high draw, and a low draw.
Also try the “non-full” shots you’re sure to need somewhere during a round – punch shots, half shots, and Tiger-like three-quarter “stingers.” By trial and error, figure out how to hit different clubs multiple distances. For example, if I want to hit a wedge 100 yards I can knock it lower by taking a half-swing or I can loft it high and with more spin by gripping all the way down and swinging full. You probably know the typical distances you carry full shots with each club – do you know how far you carry and roll three-quarter and half-shots with each club (at least the short irons)?
Instead of looking for the best patch of grass on the range, find the worst. Hit shots from hardpan, sandy lies, divots, and even sand-filled divots if you can. Then when you’re faced with such a shot during a tournament you not only won’t be intimidated you’ll know how the ball will likely react from such a lie. And alternate practice sessions hitting into the wind as well as downwind.
Same philosophy for the short game – which you should practice at least as much as your long game. Find a practice area with an isolated green you can pitch to from 10, 20, even 50 yards out and which reacts much like a real green on the course (not a range pseudo-green which only gets mowed once a week). Hit uphill and downhill chips with various clubs from the edge of the green – including those dicey against-the-fringe “putts” with a 3-wood or the edge of a sand wedge. Then progressively move back to try pitches, lobs, flop shots, chunk shots from deep rough, and longer bunker carries if there’s room.
On the practice putting green, use one ball. Mark it, read the green, visualize the line or path, go through your pre-shot routine, visualize the stroke, and roll it. You may hit far fewer putts but you’ll get more transferable training out of each session.
When playing a practice round – which is any round that doesn’t include meaningful competition – experiment as much as you can there too. Play the ball as it lies, or give yourself a worse lie. Take risks you might not if the score counted for something. (You may even hit some memorable shots – like the cut 3-wood I nailed from a tight lie against a 20-mph wind, over water and sand, to about 15 feet on the replica 12th from Southern Hills at Tour 18. Under those conditions in a tournament, I would have laid up 98 times out of 100.)
If you’re practicing on a tournament course, try a few alternate shots – go for the par-5s in two with one ball and take the layup route with the other. Decide in advance the “go” point in the fairway where you’ll probably take the risk during the tournament; it will ease your mind in the heat of battle and lead to a more confident shot.
During pre-tournament rounds, try some bunker shots – both greenside and fairway – even if you don’t plunk anything in there during the practice round. You want to know the texture and reaction of the sand on the course before you encounter it during the tournament. Once in awhile, try some left-handed shots (for natural righties) – put a ball against a tree, turn an 8-iron over, and make a compact half-swing. I don’t advise trying left-handed shots on the range; you might injure someone. And practice long lag putts to sections of the greens where tournament pins may be placed.
The day before a tournament, I prefer to tune up at a par-3 or executive-length course such as Hank Haney’s Ranch in McKinney. You won’t get tired as you might with a full-length 18-hole practice round, and you’ll sharpen your feel for the important 150 yards and in scoring shots.
On tournament days, make sure you arrive in plenty of time to work through your pre-round practice routine – both full shots and short game. Build in time to deal with registration, getting out to the middle of the course if it’s a shotgun start, and other necessary details. Bring a bag of your own practice balls – just in case the course runs out of range balls (or, as happened at one event I played, the balls were so bad you didn’t want to use them lest they mess up your feel).
On the range, practice your pre-shot routine. Work with the swing you bring, not the one that still needs plenty of tinkering. Use the practice putting green to get a feel for speed (but don’t assume that the course’s greens will react the same) … and to reinforce your pre-shot putting and chipping routines. In fact, forget putting to a hole – putt to the fringe or a tee or a Fuzzy Zoeller peg – and only use a hole to sink a few final short putts to build confidence before you head for the first tee.
Many PGA pros head to the range after a tournament round as well. They work on particular shots they struggled with during the round or shots they expect to need for the next round. Or emergency swing changes with their coach if the round was a real disaster.
Few of us have the kind of time the touring pros devote to practice, practice rounds, pro-ams and tournament play. That’s part of the reason they’re out there and we’re not. But we can all improve by applying their practice techniques in the spare time we’ve got.
