When you go to the driving range, concentrate only on hitting the ball straight and to a target you have picked out. Pay no attention to how far the ball goes.

Range balls, especially ones that you can tell are old, won’t go as far as the ones you play golf with. If you try to get the distance from a range ball that you think you should get, you wind up changing your swing to put more oomph into it, and ruin everything you came to the range to accomplish.

Remember, straight and accurate. That’s all.

When we practice a skill, there are two ways to practice it. One is called block practice. That refers to doing the same skill over and over until you get it right. Another way is called random practice. That means to practice one skill a little while, switch to another one for bit, switch to maybe a third, and keep going back and forth.

Researchers have found that when a person uses block practice exclusively, their progress is slow and day-to-day gains are small. Random practice on the other hand leads to quicker, larger gains, on each skill.

So the next time you go to the range, try this. Warm up with a few wedges, short ones, long ones, then a few 7-irons, a driver or two. Then go back and forth among these three clubs in no particular order.

The reason this works better is because when you work on one skill over and over, after a while your mind becomes disengaged. You lose focus and stop learning anything. You might even go backwards.

Switching to a different skill at frequent intervals gives your brain a new problem to solve, keeping it alive, alert, focused, and active.

Read this article for a fuller explanation.

Most of us around the country aren’t playing much right now, because it is either too wet or too cold. So now is a good time concentrate on improving.

This is what to improve on:

Your swing.

If it takes you more than 40 strokes in 18 holes to get the ball on the green or green-high, it is your swing, not short game and putting, that you need to work on.

Your swing doesn’t need to be fixed or modified. You need a new one.

Start over. Get lessons, not just one, to find out from start to finish what you are supposed to do, and what it feels like when you do it, and then spend the winter practicing THAT.

Don’t be afraid to get a refresher lesson after a month to make sure you’re still on the right track. Tour pros do, who are you not to?

Percy Boomer said, in his book, On Learning Golf, “It is true that if you cannot putt you cannot win, for no hole is won until the ball is down—but good scores are only made possible by good play up to the green.”

And Ben Hogan said in his book, Five Lessons, and this is my favorite quote from it, “The average golfer’s problem is not so much a lack of ability as it is a lack of knowing what he should do.”

So this winter, find out what to do, practice it, stop experimenting on your own, and see what you get by the start of the 2025 season.

Driver

24* hybrid

7-iron

56* wedge

Putter

That’s your game, right there.

“Well, I think I’ll go out to the range and hit some balls.”

How often do you do that and by the end of the bucket are hitting balls better than when you began?

I thought so. Let’s try something different.

What you really mean is that you are going to the range to work on your swing, but you change the focus to hitting golf balls. Stick with your swing.

Put a ball on the ground, or on a tee, but before you hit it, step away from it and do this.

Set up, swing. Set up, swing. Set up, swing. Etc. Not rushing, but with no hesitation between on swing and setting up for the next one. When you finish one swing, put the clubhead on the ground and swing again. Right away.

Pay attention to how a swing feels. Ask yourself, as you go, would this swing given me a good shot?

If no, try to figure out, on the fly, where it needs smoothing out, and fix it on the next swing. If yes, then repeat the feeling of that swing with the next swing.

When you have made a series of satisfying swings in a row, step to the ball and hit it without hesitation.

It might take six or seven swings before you feel that you have one worthy of hitting a ball with.

Getting back to your bucket, say all you did was hit a sixty-ball bucket. Sixty swings. Maybe a practice swing or two in between. 150 swings? And how many were purposeful?

If you practice this new way, you get over 400 swings, each one having a purpose.

Improvement is not about how many balls you hit, but how many good swings you make.

Sometimes on the practice range you’re swinging one of your clubs and you get into a serious groove. One shot after another, just like you want it. When this happens, there are two things you should do.

One is to be quite aware of what is you are doing that is making the difference. Otherwise you’ll never able to repeat it later on.

The second thing is to put the club down and sit down. Sit there for about two or three minutes, and I mean two or three honest minutes, not just thirty seconds. Then go pick up your club and hit another ball, just one.

How did you do? If you got another good shot just like the others, then you might have learned something. Otherwise, it was just a groove, which doesn’t really mean that much.

All this practicing I’m doing with my wedges has me thinkng about practice itself. It got me to remember something I read about practice a while ago, which I will adapt for this post.

You can practice something until you get it right.

Then you can keep practicing until you cannot get it wrong.

This is a post from my first web site, before WordPress. I had to program it entirely by myself in html. Those were the days.

This advice is still good.
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In January and February, shun the regulation course and find an executive layout. Make sure you go out as a single, because you are going to be hitting a lot of mulligans. What you are going to do is par every hole before you move on to the next one.

Here’s why. When you play a game of golf by the rules, if you hit a bad shot, or the wrong shot, you never get a chance to practice it until you get it right, or hit a different shot that might be better. You have to move on to your next shot without getting to correct what you did wrong.

First off, this method is for 100 yards and in. You don’t get do-overs for tee shots and approach shots. Fix those mistakes those on the range.

After you have gotten the ball within 100 yards of the hole, take a mulligan if (a) your pitch doesn’t land on the green and stop, or (b) your chip doesn’t end up within 3 feet of the hole, (c) your bunker shot doesn’t get out, (d) your approach putt doesn’t finish within 3 feet of the hole, or (e) your second putt doesn’t go in. If you make all those corrections, you should end up scoring a par on every hole.

What you accomplished: You will have learned how to make pars and how to save pars, and learned it under playing conditions which I should not have to explain the benefits of.

When you take you game to the big courses starting in March, you will have the skill and confidence it takes to play well around the greens and shoot the scores you deserve.

Note: Sorry I found this old post in mid-February. It’s still not too late to give it a try.

We all want to hit the ball straight. We want to stop slicing or hooking. That’s important, but neither of these faults are hard to cure. Once you can hit the ball straight most of the time, then what?

Following your tee shot, getting the distance right is everything. If you’re in the fairway 143 yards from the pin, can you hit the ball 143 yards?

Further, if you’re 72 yards from the pin, can you pitch the ball 72 yards? If you’re putting from 27 feet can you make the ball go 27 feet?

THAT is how you score, and once you have basic tee-to-hole shot-making figured out, make those skills work for you by learning how to hit ANY kind of shot to a specific distance.

I’ll leave you to figure out how to do that, and close this short post by saying when you have acquired that ability, you’ll be playing a different game.