How to Develop a Great Golf Practice Plan – That Actually Works

You don’t get better at golf by accident.

Sure, you’ll probably improve a little over time just by gaining experience, but experience alone isn’t going to allow you to reach your goals. To hit new milestones and continue to improve at this difficult game, you need a plan.

Simply committing yourself to practicing on a regular basis is a good start, and it’s more than most players will ever do. But it would be a shame to waste that practice time by going out to the range without a plan in mind.

In this article, we’d like to help you develop a customized plan that will allow you to gradually improve your play over the months and years to come. Let’s get started!

A Simple Golf Practice Formula

The ideal practice plan for your game is going to be customized to meet your specific needs. But we’ll get into more of that in a moment.

First, we need to talk about a basic formula that you can use to structure the outline of your practice sessions. From there, you’ll be able to tweak the details to address your game specifically.

For most golfers, a good formula for productive practice is to spend half of your practice time on the full swing and half on the short game. As it is, most golfers have this formula way out of whack.

The average player likely spends 75% of their practice time, or more, on the full swing. Things like putting and chipping are typically afterthoughts – something to do for a few minutes on the way back to the car, or when the tee line on the driving range is full.

So, as a starting point, make it a goal to split your practice time roughly evenly between your long and short games moving forward. Even if you take nothing else away from this article, a shift toward even time distribution will help you become a better player.

Making a List of Your Weaknesses

Good golfers practice their weaknesses. Bad golfers practice their strengths.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it is often true. If you go to the range and only practice things you are already good at, you have no room for growth. The only way to get better is to improve on your weak areas, and the only way to improve in those areas is to practice them.

To make sure you aren’t wasting your practice time, take a moment to make a list of the things in golf that give you the most trouble. This kind of list for an average golfer might look something like the following:

• Struggle controlling distance on long putts.
• Too much fade with the driver.
• Hitting short iron shots fat.
• Hitting chip shots thin.

Your list will be unique to you, of course, but the points listed above are the kinds of things you can identify as weaknesses to address.

Once you have your list, it’s just a matter of figuring out how you are going to work on improving in those areas, and then getting down to work.

Create a Golf Practice Schedule

Before your next practice session, try writing out a detailed schedule to make sure you are getting the most out of every minute you have available. You don’t necessarily need to go through this process every time you practice – although you could – but doing it a few times will help give you some direction and build good habits.

If you have an hour available to practice, and you are practicing at a facility with a driving range, putting green, and chipping area, here is a sample schedule:

• 10 minutes putting.
• 5 minutes chipping.
• 30 minutes on the range.
• 10 minutes chipping.
• 5 minutes putting.

Just like that, you’ve outlined a productive way to spend 60 minutes practicing golf. Now, with that outline in place, go into each of those sections and break down what you are going to work on during the time you have available.

For the range session, you might do the following:

• 5 minutes hitting wedges.
• 5 minutes hitting mid and long irons.
• 5 minutes hitting driver and other woods.
• 10 minutes working on a specific swing issue.
• 5 minutes hitting wedges.

In just 30 minutes, you could touch on all of the areas of your full swing. It’s important to remember when working on your swing that golf practice is always a matter of quality over quantity.

Don’t just fire off as many shots as you can in the time window – you’d rather slow down and make good swings, even if you hit fewer shots overall.

Warming-Up is Not the Same as Practicing

Many golfers confuse what they do on the range before a round of golf for being practice, when it is actually a warm-up session. And yes, there is a meaningful difference.

You should not be practicing when you are getting ready to play. Instead, you should just be getting your body warm and finding a rhythm for the day.

A practice session includes actual work on a technical change in your swing, and that is not something to be messing around with right before you tee off.

When you get ready to play a round of golf, do your best to keep technical thoughts away. Start on the putting green to get a feel for the speeds of the greens that day, then work your way over to the range to get your body ready.

If possible, give yourself enough time to work through your routine gradually without feeling rushed. Rushing is never a good way to play golf, so you don’t want to start out that way before the round even begins.

It will take some time to establish a practice routine that works well for your needs, but we hope the advice in this article is a good start. Remember to make a list of your weaknesses, work on those issues during each practice session, and divide your time between the short game and the long game. And don’t forget to have fun!