Practice your golf top 5 priority list (Video) - by Pete Styles
Practice your golf top 5 priority list (Video) - by Pete Styles

Next time you go out for a practice session I’d like you to really approach that practice session with a sense of purpose and here are the five key areas that I want you to go and approach it with in mind because these are the five areas I think will pay off dividends next time you’re playing on the golf course. And what I’ve done here to stop me getting side tracked and getting the drive route and hitting all hundred golf balls with my driver, is I’ve laid out the clubs or the tools that I’m going to use to practice with first. So my first thing is my putter and specifically hauling short putts; so take you put to the practice screen, place the ball inside three feet from the hole and try and hole as many as you possibly can. So you start with a relatively straight maybe uphill putt, good solid technique, tick tock tick tock knock as many as you can in. And once you’ve missed from that side, move around to the next side of the compass point same again, down the hill and the same again from this side. You want to spend a good 10-15 minutes of your hour long practice session, tick tock tick tock knocking putts in from short range. Next time you go on the golf course you have great confidence with those short putts and hopefully your score will then improve.

Once I finish with my putting session, I then take out one of my wedgies and I work on the field shots, now this could be described as any shot that is not hit full power. So you take one of your wedgies, and you give it a good hit and if it goes 80 yards for a gap wedge, you then dial it back in and start doing maybe your 50 yards and ins. So anything that isn’t hit full power and I’ll pick different yardages, different distances and ship and pitch the ball around there. Trying and get some variety in my technique and a bit of feel in my technique so feel what happens if I swing to here or here or here or here and just dial in all those different distances. So I’m not going to stand and hit 30 balls at the same flag ‘cause guess what? I’ll get really good at that flag but that’s not appropriate for how I have to plan the course. So at different distances, building the distances up and down and getting a good feel for shots around the green.

I then start to go into my full swing but I start with my short irons, it’s easier to start with your short irons on your full swing because you don’t have the intention of trying to hit the ball too hard. So you keep your swing a little bit smoother, a little bit more rhythmical and it stops you from gripping it too tightly and big swinging and trying to leather it as hard as you can. And again in maybe another 10 or 15 minutes of short irons shots, short irons are going to be full swings with wedgies, nines, eight possibly even a seven iron.

I then I work up a little bit farther in my practice session to my tee shots, now just when we say tee shots it doesn’t automatically mean driver. I’m going to actually take a series of hybrid shots here and work on hitting then off a small tee peg into a landing area. So I’ll give myself a landing area out on the practice ground here, that’s going to be the width of an average fairway. So I’m not specifically aiming at one flag all the time, I always feel if I’m hitting tee shots at a flag, I get an idea that I’m never very successful because the flag is incredibly small and it’s very difficult to get a shot that lands really close to it. But if I give myself a wider target area, the width of an average fairway, I feel that my success rate is a little higher therefore my practice session is a lot more rewarding. So I practice with my hybrid club into a fairway. Ithen might go to my 3-wood aiming at the same fairway and ultimately my driver aiming at the same fairway and just work out my percentages; if I’m hitting it 80% of the time with my hybrid club and only 10% of the time with my driver, guess what the driver’s staying in the bag for the next round of golf; so working on your tee shots but not always with your driver.

And the last part of the practice session is going to be checking fundamentals. So fundamentals would include most of the basic things that your address position. So the first one might just be your alignment, I’ll take some time aiming at specific areas on the golf course or the practice range then laying a club down or an alignment stick to make sure that I’m pointing at it. Simply golf is a lot more difficult when you’re not aiming at your target. I then might use another stick to go across this first stick down here and check for my ball position, my body position. So I’d see whether my ball position is appropriate for the certain clubs that I’ve got. So that’s a great way of checking alignment and ball position with a couple of these alignment canes or golf clubs. The other is that I might be checking for on my, with my fundamentals, will be trying to get myself in front of a mirror or a glass window that I can actually see myself and so maybe just check that I’ve got good posture and then I can look face on and see that I’ve got good body weight distribution. So body weight distribution with a wedge is a little bit more forwards, body weight distribution with a driver is a little more backwards. So just making sure that I’ve ticked off my list of all the different clubs that I wanted to practice with on all the different fundamentals that I wanted to check and that’s five great ways to improve your golf.

 2013-03-28

Next time you go out for a practice session I’d like you to really approach that practice session with a sense of purpose and here are the five key areas that I want you to go and approach it with in mind because these are the five areas I think will pay off dividends next time you’re playing on the golf course. And what I’ve done here to stop me getting side tracked and getting the drive route and hitting all hundred golf balls with my driver, is I’ve laid out the clubs or the tools that I’m going to use to practice with first. So my first thing is my putter and specifically hauling short putts; so take you put to the practice screen, place the ball inside three feet from the hole and try and hole as many as you possibly can. So you start with a relatively straight maybe uphill putt, good solid technique, tick tock tick tock knock as many as you can in. And once you’ve missed from that side, move around to the next side of the compass point same again, down the hill and the same again from this side. You want to spend a good 10-15 minutes of your hour long practice session, tick tock tick tock knocking putts in from short range. Next time you go on the golf course you have great confidence with those short putts and hopefully your score will then improve.

Once I finish with my putting session, I then take out one of my wedgies and I work on the field shots, now this could be described as any shot that is not hit full power. So you take one of your wedgies, and you give it a good hit and if it goes 80 yards for a gap wedge, you then dial it back in and start doing maybe your 50 yards and ins. So anything that isn’t hit full power and I’ll pick different yardages, different distances and ship and pitch the ball around there. Trying and get some variety in my technique and a bit of feel in my technique so feel what happens if I swing to here or here or here or here and just dial in all those different distances. So I’m not going to stand and hit 30 balls at the same flag ‘cause guess what? I’ll get really good at that flag but that’s not appropriate for how I have to plan the course. So at different distances, building the distances up and down and getting a good feel for shots around the green.

I then start to go into my full swing but I start with my short irons, it’s easier to start with your short irons on your full swing because you don’t have the intention of trying to hit the ball too hard. So you keep your swing a little bit smoother, a little bit more rhythmical and it stops you from gripping it too tightly and big swinging and trying to leather it as hard as you can. And again in maybe another 10 or 15 minutes of short irons shots, short irons are going to be full swings with wedgies, nines, eight possibly even a seven iron.

I then I work up a little bit farther in my practice session to my tee shots, now just when we say tee shots it doesn’t automatically mean driver. I’m going to actually take a series of hybrid shots here and work on hitting then off a small tee peg into a landing area. So I’ll give myself a landing area out on the practice ground here, that’s going to be the width of an average fairway. So I’m not specifically aiming at one flag all the time, I always feel if I’m hitting tee shots at a flag, I get an idea that I’m never very successful because the flag is incredibly small and it’s very difficult to get a shot that lands really close to it. But if I give myself a wider target area, the width of an average fairway, I feel that my success rate is a little higher therefore my practice session is a lot more rewarding. So I practice with my hybrid club into a fairway. Ithen might go to my 3-wood aiming at the same fairway and ultimately my driver aiming at the same fairway and just work out my percentages; if I’m hitting it 80% of the time with my hybrid club and only 10% of the time with my driver, guess what the driver’s staying in the bag for the next round of golf; so working on your tee shots but not always with your driver.

And the last part of the practice session is going to be checking fundamentals. So fundamentals would include most of the basic things that your address position. So the first one might just be your alignment, I’ll take some time aiming at specific areas on the golf course or the practice range then laying a club down or an alignment stick to make sure that I’m pointing at it. Simply golf is a lot more difficult when you’re not aiming at your target. I then might use another stick to go across this first stick down here and check for my ball position, my body position. So I’d see whether my ball position is appropriate for the certain clubs that I’ve got. So that’s a great way of checking alignment and ball position with a couple of these alignment canes or golf clubs. The other is that I might be checking for on my, with my fundamentals, will be trying to get myself in front of a mirror or a glass window that I can actually see myself and so maybe just check that I’ve got good posture and then I can look face on and see that I’ve got good body weight distribution. So body weight distribution with a wedge is a little bit more forwards, body weight distribution with a driver is a little more backwards. So just making sure that I’ve ticked off my list of all the different clubs that I wanted to practice with on all the different fundamentals that I wanted to check and that’s five great ways to improve your golf.