One of my favorite things to see when I am walking down the driving range and I am watching golfers practice is a golfer that's doing random practice. Now random practice means that they are changing a lot. They are not just standing there with the 7-iron and hitting the same shot over and over again; they are swapping and changing different clubs. And playing a full round of golf on the driving range is one of the best ways you can do that. It keeps you really engaged and really motivated. And rather than just hitting random shots to random flags, it actually makes a little bit more of a plan in your head of how you might tackle the golf course that you play at home.
So most people have a home course, maybe they are a member there or maybe they just play there more regularly. And you should be able to remember your way around each hole, each tee shot, each second shot. So what I am suggesting is you actually play that course, but from the driving range mat. So if it’s a par-4 to start with, you would use the appropriate club that you would normally tee off with to hit your first shot. Picture where that shot has gone. If it’s landed on the fairway, think what sort of distance you might have left into the green and go ahead and choose the appropriate iron.
Now if you hit your tee shot badly, punish yourself for that. Imagine you have knocked it sideways, it’s gone into the rough, okay, what shot would I have to hit from there? Maybe a longer iron if you haven't had a tee shot or maybe you are thinking well I hit it so far sideways I am going to have to chip that one out sideways and then go ahead and do the chip shot and then hit the next shot. If you have hit a shot and it doesn’t go quite towards the flag, it’s gone to the side think, okay that would have missed the green and then I need to take a pitching wedge and chip the ball back up. So your practice becomes very random, you are not doing the same club over and over again.
It’s probably worth pointing out here that if you are trying to change your golf swing, you are trying to actually work on a technical motion, that's where you would do blocked practice. You would just stay with the 7-iron and 50 balls checking in the mirror doing the same motions every time trying to produce the same swing every time. But if you feel like you have got a decent swing and it’s a swing that repeats fairly regularly, but doesn’t necessarily work that well in the golf course, that's when you change your practice to random practice and that's what this is.
So stand on the range mat, lay all the golf clubs out behind you and play the entire round of golf, nine if you can or even 18 holes if you got the time to do it at your local golf course from here. Pick a target, pick a green, pick a chip shot, work out your success rate. Some people can even have a score in their mind for how they would have played. Oh I hit every fairway, hit every green, if I putted okay, what shots I need to, or I hit every tee shot into the rough, how to chip out sideways, miss the green, make double bogeys, would it show 108. So have a go an
