Practice to Improve your Golf Motor Skills (Video) - by Pete Styles
Practice to Improve your Golf Motor Skills (Video) - by Pete Styles

Now, they say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Well, I disagree with that. I've taught plenty of old dogs how to play golf properly. And although they might feel like they learn slower than the youngsters who pick up their first golf club when they're 10 years old and they adapt very quickly, you can certainly keep improving your golf right the way through your golfing career. But it might feel like you need to change the way you practice to help and encourage you to improve quicker.

There are two types of practice I'd like you to consider: a blocked practice session and a random practice session. Let me explain those words for you. Blocked practice is doing one specific drill over and over again to really ingrain the motion. So if you're working with your golf coach or you're watching some of these videos and you decide that "That's the thing I need to work on to improve," get yourself down to the driving range. One golf club, 50 balls, do the same drill over and over again, not really worrying too much about the result, just worrying more about are you making the right motion in your swing to keep repeating the right thing to change you away from your old bad habits.

Now, a random practice session is slightly different. A random practice session is working through your entire bag of clubs, maybe feeling like you're practicing a little bit more like you would be on the golf course. You have to be a lot more results-focused, a lot more target-focused, and maybe changing the shots so you're hitting a little bit more, changing clubs, changing distances as well and changing quite regularly, so, blocked practice, random practice.

Now, you can put those together as well. So if you come down to the driving range, you got a half hour practice session, the first 50 minutes could be blocked practice, repeating the same drill over and over again to change your bad habit, let's say. Then the second half of the practice session could be random where you utilize the blocked practice and try and feed it into a random practice session and actually see how the change in your golf swing can now produce better results in real life on core situations. So, remember, blocked and random practice sessions, they're the key to helping you get better.

 2012-04-10

Now, they say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Well, I disagree with that. I've taught plenty of old dogs how to play golf properly. And although they might feel like they learn slower than the youngsters who pick up their first golf club when they're 10 years old and they adapt very quickly, you can certainly keep improving your golf right the way through your golfing career. But it might feel like you need to change the way you practice to help and encourage you to improve quicker.

There are two types of practice I'd like you to consider: a blocked practice session and a random practice session. Let me explain those words for you. Blocked practice is doing one specific drill over and over again to really ingrain the motion. So if you're working with your golf coach or you're watching some of these videos and you decide that “That's the thing I need to work on to improve,” get yourself down to the driving range. One golf club, 50 balls, do the same drill over and over again, not really worrying too much about the result, just worrying more about are you making the right motion in your swing to keep repeating the right thing to change you away from your old bad habits.

Now, a random practice session is slightly different. A random practice session is working through your entire bag of clubs, maybe feeling like you're practicing a little bit more like you would be on the golf course. You have to be a lot more results-focused, a lot more target-focused, and maybe changing the shots so you're hitting a little bit more, changing clubs, changing distances as well and changing quite regularly, so, blocked practice, random practice.

Now, you can put those together as well. So if you come down to the driving range, you got a half hour practice session, the first 50 minutes could be blocked practice, repeating the same drill over and over again to change your bad habit, let's say. Then the second half of the practice session could be random where you utilize the blocked practice and try and feed it into a random practice session and actually see how the change in your golf swing can now produce better results in real life on core situations. So, remember, blocked and random practice sessions, they're the key to helping you get better.