The Ideal Golf Practice

-Know what to do and actually get better-

Hi, me again, Michael, talking about golf performance. (What else is new?)

Today we’re covering what I think the ideal practice is, and how to go about getting the most out of the time you have.

For this practice session, we are assuming we have about three hours to get our work done. We’re also assuming playing the course isn’t really in the cards, although in the practices I write for folks, I like to do “on course” stuff if possible. (Some of that time is playing with a specific focus, some of that is actual games and drills on course)

Obviously, for my pro golfers, this feels significantly too little, and for my adult players with children, this feels like a mythical block of time out of Narnia.

That said, the principles and goals of the session would apply and be the same for a three hour, one hour, or ten hour practice.

Therefore, let’s pretend we’re now out of the car, spikes are on, clubs on our shoulder and we’re walking to the facility to begin. What’s first?

Mindset.

I start almost every practice with the Rice golf team with a question. The same question actually. “Why are we here?” Questions have varied over the sessions, but the answer we’re always striving to arrive at is, “We’re here to learn what we do, why we do it, and what it produces.”

This is the main goal of any practice. To understand what we do and what happens when we do it. If we walk away from a ten-minute session with a better understanding of ourselves and our golf game, it was a great session. If we walk away from a twelve-hour day on course and have zero more clue about our game, we’ve wasted an entire day (and tired ourself out in the process).

Every drill and every rep has a purpose. It also provides feedback. Carefully listening to the feedback gives us guidance as to which direction the next rep and drill should go. The better you listen, the better you direct, or correct, course, the better you get at golf, and the more you win.

One other thing to note about practice and a massive understanding we need: we only want to work on things that matter for shooting better scores. And not all things do.

Easy to say, difficult to implement. This requires an understanding of golf, probably having some statistics from recent rounds, and then having conviction that you are not going to make your practice look like the other twenty people standing around, just because they all beat balls and practice putting the same way.

Things that matter:

Lag putting

Iron play 150-200

Driver distance

Curving the ball one direction

Alignment & starting the ball where you want it to start

Things that don’t matter:

3-footers (Check out an article on this here.)

Flop shots

Curving golf balls both ways

Trajectory control Full swing wedges

Being the best 50 yard wedge player

Perfect fundamentals

Expect to be different and then relish the fact that your results are different.

One other thing—If we only have three hours, I am asking you to be hyper focused. No Instagram, no music, no chit-chat. You’ve got work to do.

Ok. Enough of philosophy. Now to X’s and O’s.

I almost always start at the PUTTING GREEN. Not because it’s the most important necessarily, but it is the easiest (in my opinion) to repeat the exact same as the day before. I also believe that putting is the part of the game where doing the same thing every day over-and-over-and-over produces the best putters.

At its core, putting is outrageously simple. Keep it that way.

Putting is simply three things:

1. Aim where you want to aim.

2. Start the ball online.

3. Roll it as far as you intend to.

Every day you should work on all three of those bullet points.

EVERY.

SINGLE.

DAY.

Through this repetition, you won’t ever get too far off with your performance. You’ll always be pretty darn close on face alignment, you’ll always have a decent idea of whether you’re starting your putts online, and you’ll regularly keep your feel at least mostly dialed in.

You do the same drills every day for a decade and I promise you’ll make some really big putts that really matter.

I usually try and do 15-20 minutes on alignment and start line, and another 15-20 on speed work.

Total time elapsed. 45 minutes. 2:15 remaining.

Next I usually head to SHORT GAME. This is, personally, my very favorite place to be, because it allows for the most freedom and expression. Putting was just three things right? 1.2.3. Very rigid.

Chipping, pitching, bunker play, and all short stuff is anything but.

Sure, there are certain guidelines, like how to contact the ball, or where you want your weight placement for certain shots, but, in reality, when you start exploring, you find that there aren’t many rules at all.

There’s just your own “language” on how to hit shots. For someone else, A might equal B. But for you, C might equal 7, and purple could be the same as a leaf. (Makes no sense? Good. Because that might be exactly what your short game is, yet, if it gets the ball in the hole, then the math is mathing.)

I would breakdown my short game into a couple different sections.

1. Hammer the staples. These would by my ball-back-low-skidding 60* shot, my open-face-mid-trajectory 56* pitch, my blast bunker shot, my bump-and-runs etc… You want to get so good at the shots you will hit 90% of the time that you can land the ball on a dime on command (not a bad drill actually). This is monotonous work, rep after rep, followed by ways to create some pressure. You want to be able to do the basics on call no matter what.

2. Exploration mode. This is where short game comes alive, and it begins by asking the question, “I wonder what happens when…?” In this section, you take a couple balls, move around a green or two, and try everything: moving the ball forward, moving the ball back, aiming right and hooding the face, aiming left and slicing it, aiming left and pushing it, leaning on lead side, leaning on trail side and OH MY THERE ARE SO MANY POSSIBILITIES.

   
   

It’s here that you learn yourself, what’s comfortable, what works, and how YOU are going to do things.

When I practiced every day, sometimes I would get heavier into wedge distance work (think 50, 60, 70, 80yrd work), sometimes it was all inside forty yards. Every day wasn’t the exact same here because we have so much that we can do and it’s worth doing a lot of different things. Just look to hit at least a little of everything by the end of a week, other than the staples, which you should probably do every day you practice.

I’m usually looking (out of a three hour practice) to spend the bulk of my time here, unless I have very specific other things that I MUST get to.

Time in chipping part 1- 30-40 minutes. Time in chipping part 2: 30-40 minutes. Total time elapsed 1:45-2:00.

Most golfers get to BALL STRIKING and go, “finally”. I feel the same, but I also recognize that most of this session isn’t about to be looking at swing videos, chasing perfect P6 positions, and hammering different moves.

Work on how YOU swing the club, not how someone else does.

It should have some of that, particularly if you are working on a specific swing change that you and your coach have discussed and determined is worth the effort and significant uncomfortably. But it definitely shouldn’t be an hour straight of that. You have too many 10-15 minute windows throughout the day, or at home in the evening, where you can work on those moves without a club, which is the foundation for where swing changes really happen anyways.

This hour will be, again, broken into a few sections.

1. Skill mode. Need to get the club shallower? Work on it. Slowly. Painfully. Monotonously. You should not be hitting many balls in this section, but be spending most of your time in slow motion and at half-speeds to try and understand the change you’re trying to make.

2. Stock-shots mode. Akin to our chipping category, this is the same “hammering the basics”. Work on your bread-and-butter shot shape and trajectory. Don’t spend a ton of time here, but work on getting it down so well, via working on it practice, that you feel like you’ll never miss big.

   
   

3. Exploration mode. What produces what? Ball forward, aim left? Does the ball curve left? Does it curve right? Youv’e gotta know what changes affect you in a positive way. ONE THING to note here, make sure and practice in this section with good alignment rods and ball position measurements etc. You don’t want to think your aiming left, when you’re actually aiming right, or have the ball actually dead center when you’re think it’s significantly back. That’s a recipe for trouble. Remember the word feedback—these little details help us a lot in the feedback category.

   
   

4. Simulation mode. You go through your routine, you pick targets, you invent trouble, and you try and hit very specific shots for specific reasons. In this section you should work to develop an understanding of “how” you get the ball to move towards the target, and particularly, how you get it to avoid the trouble, ideally at the same time (LOL).

   
   

5. Speed mode. Spend the end of every session (or if you practice every day, maybe every other session) trying to hit five or ten drivers or so as hard as you possibly can. You aren’t worried about where it goes, but more so how fast you can swing it. Developing speed is an absolutely vital part of your future competitiveness, so spending a few minutes developing it is worth the effort in spades.

Since you can do math, you’ve probably gathered that we have about an hour to knock all this out. While, depending on where you are at with your swing, some parts might garner more attention than others, I would particularly try and focus most of my hour on sections 1, 2 and 4. These are the bulk of where you’ll see improvement, no matter how much time you actually have to practice.

Just a reminder, it’s not about hitting a ton of golf balls, it’s about making each rep count. If you hit three balls in part 1, ten balls in part 2, and five balls in part 4, but walk away with a deeper understanding of your swing and your tendencies, it was a phenomenal practice.

FINAL

One thing to do at the end of of every practice is to assess it. What went well? What didn’t? Taking just a couple moments and investigating how you felt about it is foundational for moving into the next practice, no matter how long between sessions you have. I can’t recommend any more highly the practice taking some time and being intentional.

I hope you try this breakdown and I am positive, that if you do, it will help take you further down the road towards lifting trophies, whether at Augusta National or your local country club. I’ve seen it work, no matter what level of player has used these philosophies.

Know thyself.

Achieve mastery.

Lift trophies.

-Michael