Top 10 Golf Practice Tips – #7

Welcome to Number 7 in my series of top 10 Golf Practice Tips. If you want to re-vitalize your practice, performance and rate of improvement this week, try the following.

Mix it up

Golfers are very guilty of a simple practice cardinal sin – sticking SOLELY to blocked practice. Blocked practice is the repetitive action of hitting a bunch of shots from the same area, with the same club, to the same target.

Yet the science shows that adding variations and randomizing your practice can supercharge your learning and also improve your ability to play better on the course.

How many people say

I hit it great on the range, but it is all lost when I step on the first tee

Is this you? This is a symptom of blocking your practice – where we get great performance results but no retention.

Tell me what to do

Ok Mr/Mrs impatient. Add a bit more randomization to your practice by doing the following game.

• Pick a target roughly 30 yards wide
• Hit a wedge, followed by a driver, followed by a mid iron using your full routine for each shot- this is one set
• If you get them all in your target area, you complete the set
• See how many sets it takes you to make 5 completed sets
• Record this number down – try to beat it each week

Progressive difficulty

When you are taking less than 10 attempts to make 5 completed sets, make the game more difficult.

This can be done simply by adding another club to the mix (meaning you have to hit 4 successful shots in a row for a completed set) and/or making the target size progressively smaller.

Think of skill as being similar to muscle – we grow it through increased or progressive difficulty over time

Don’t be one of ‘them’

As I basically live on the driving range, I see hordes of golfers all doing the same thing and wondering why they are stuck in a rut. I would say comfortably that 99% of all golfers do 99% of their practice in blocked practice mode.

While blocked practice does have some benefits, Making it your only form of practice is a shame, as you are missing out on some of the great benefits of randomized, broken, differential, and variability modes of practice.

If you want to learn more about better ways of practicing to improve your game both long term and short term, click below to read more about my book “The Practice Manual”, available on amazon.