Are You Practising the Right Things?

Walk past the range at any club on a Saturday morning and you will see the same scene: a row of golfers working through a bucket of balls, mostly with their driver, mostly striking reasonable shots at a target in the middle distance, and mostly not improving their handicaps at anything approaching the rate the practice time might suggest.

This is not because range practice is useless. It is because the practice most golfers choose to do bears only a loose relationship to the situations that actually cost them shots on the course.

Where handicaps are actually lost

Tracking your rounds honestly — writing down not just the score but where each dropped shot came from — tends to produce a consistent pattern. A typical 18-handicapper loses the majority of their shots in a cluster of situations: pitch shots from between 50 and 100 yards that end up well away from the flag, chip shots around the green that leave a difficult putt, bunker shots that require a second attempt, and three-putts that follow a perfectly good approach.

By contrast, the number of shots lost to genuinely poor drives — the kind of drive that creates an unplayable situation — is usually smaller than the driver's prominence on the range would imply. A crooked drive often leaves a difficult approach, but the difficult approach itself is frequently not the thing that goes wrong. It is the fifty-yard pitch from the rough on the left, hit off balance and into the front bunker, that takes a five into a seven.

The range vs. the course gap

There is a second problem beyond what golfers practise, which is how they practise it. On the range, you hit the same club from the same perfect lie, without consequence, until the muscle memory of that specific shot in those specific conditions becomes relatively reliable. On the course, you hit a different club from a different lie with a different wind and a score depending on the outcome, and you do this once before moving on.

These are not the same activity. The cognitive demands of course golf — reading the lie, making a decision under uncertainty, committing to a shot you cannot repeat — are almost entirely absent from a standard range session. Practising in blocks of identical shots builds technique; it does not build the ability to deploy that technique in variable conditions, which is the thing that actually determines how you score.

Block practice vs. random practice

Research on practice methodology consistently finds that random practice — varying the club, the target, and the scenario from shot to shot — produces worse performance during the practice session itself but significantly better transfer to on-course performance. The brain is forced to solve each shot as a new problem rather than repeat a solution it has already found. That effort is the mechanism of real learning.

A useful session structure

If you have an hour to practise, consider dividing it as follows: spend roughly forty minutes on shots from inside 50 yards, mixing chips, pitches, and bunker practice in rotation. Then spend fifteen minutes on approaches between 100 and 150 yards, using random target selection and varying the club rather than finding the club that works best and repeating it. Use the final five minutes to hit three or four drives — not as technique work, but as a reminder of your shape and feel before the next round.

This is a less satisfying session than a bucket of pure driver practice. The short game work in particular tends to produce frustrating results early, because the subtleties of touch and angle are harder to engrain than a full swing. But satisfying and effective are not the same thing, and the best guide to where to put your practice time is an honest look at where your shots are actually disappearing on the course.

Most of them are not disappearing off the tee.