“Random Practice” – Take the Golf Course to the Range (Video) - by Pete Styles
“Random Practice” – Take the Golf Course to the Range (Video) - by Pete Styles

There is often a complaint that I hear from golfers is that oh I can practice so well when I am on the practice ground, I can hit the ball brilliantly and I am really playing nicely with my new swing but then when I got out on the golf course it all just falls to pieces. And one of the issues I think is that they are not necessarily practicing the right things they are practicing hitting the ball really nicely and they are hitting 7 iron fine, but you don’t necessarily get that sort of 20 balls in a row with the 7 irons when you are playing on the golf course. It’s a little bit more random when you are out on the golf course.

So let’s try and bring that into your practice. Once you have developed good solid fundamentals and you are hitting the ball quite well, try and make your practice almost a bit more difficult, try and make it a bit more random. So one thing I encourage them to do is actually to play their home golf course, if they have a golf course they know well, play that home golf course on the driving range. So if your first hole is a 350 yard powerful, you take your driver off the Tee, you hit your driver shot down there. If you have hit the ball well and you have hit it 250 that then leaves you a 100 yards into the green. So find the next, sort of 100 yards flag out on the driving range then take your wedge and play your 100 yards shot and knock the ball up on to the green. If you have hit a bad wedge shot and you would think well, actually that’s not on the green, well then you got to play a chip shot, you have got to be honest with yourself and you would say, I haven’t hit the green, I have got to play little chip shot. If you have an area your driving range or your practice ground where you could do some putting, take the putting to the side, go and take a few putts as well. You can maybe just knock the putt along the back of the bay, you wouldn’t necessarily get the results of whether it’s going in the hole, but you would certainly get rhythmical feel that it’s not just driver swing, driver swing, driver swing, but it’s driver, wedge, chip, putt and then maybe back to the driver again.

The next hole might be a Power 5, so that would be a driver of the Tee and then the 3 wedge for my second shot and then 7 irons for my third shot, then the chip up and then the putts. So it’s replicating what you would do for real on the golf coast in your practice sessions. If you bring a brick to the golf coast to the practice ground with you then when you go back out on to the golf coast, hopefully you can take a bit of the practice ground game, the good stuff you have been doing on the practice ground, take that on the golf course with you, try and even up the two areas, so it’s not practice ground, golf course but there is a bit of a blur in the middle where you take your practice ground game out on to the golf course with you and improve your golf scores that way.

 2012-07-12

There is often a complaint that I hear from golfers is that oh I can practice so well when I am on the practice ground, I can hit the ball brilliantly and I am really playing nicely with my new swing but then when I got out on the golf course it all just falls to pieces. And one of the issues I think is that they are not necessarily practicing the right things they are practicing hitting the ball really nicely and they are hitting 7 iron fine, but you don’t necessarily get that sort of 20 balls in a row with the 7 irons when you are playing on the golf course. It’s a little bit more random when you are out on the golf course.

So let’s try and bring that into your practice. Once you have developed good solid fundamentals and you are hitting the ball quite well, try and make your practice almost a bit more difficult, try and make it a bit more random. So one thing I encourage them to do is actually to play their home golf course, if they have a golf course they know well, play that home golf course on the driving range. So if your first hole is a 350 yard powerful, you take your driver off the Tee, you hit your driver shot down there. If you have hit the ball well and you have hit it 250 that then leaves you a 100 yards into the green. So find the next, sort of 100 yards flag out on the driving range then take your wedge and play your 100 yards shot and knock the ball up on to the green. If you have hit a bad wedge shot and you would think well, actually that’s not on the green, well then you got to play a chip shot, you have got to be honest with yourself and you would say, I haven’t hit the green, I have got to play little chip shot. If you have an area your driving range or your practice ground where you could do some putting, take the putting to the side, go and take a few putts as well. You can maybe just knock the putt along the back of the bay, you wouldn’t necessarily get the results of whether it’s going in the hole, but you would certainly get rhythmical feel that it’s not just driver swing, driver swing, driver swing, but it’s driver, wedge, chip, putt and then maybe back to the driver again.

The next hole might be a Power 5, so that would be a driver of the Tee and then the 3 wedge for my second shot and then 7 irons for my third shot, then the chip up and then the putts. So it’s replicating what you would do for real on the golf coast in your practice sessions. If you bring a brick to the golf coast to the practice ground with you then when you go back out on to the golf coast, hopefully you can take a bit of the practice ground game, the good stuff you have been doing on the practice ground, take that on the golf course with you, try and even up the two areas, so it’s not practice ground, golf course but there is a bit of a blur in the middle where you take your practice ground game out on to the golf course with you and improve your golf scores that way.