Smart Practice Sessions

Some days it feels great to just focus on one club and hit balls. Or those rare sessions where every club, and near every swing, feels just right. But if we really want the results of practice sessions to show up on the course, there are better approaches. We need to add variability and transference (transfer is what brings your driving range swing to the golf course).

If you are guilty of spending too much time repeating shots (chipping a full tube of balls to the same pin, half a dozen putts on the same line, half the bucket on one club), experiment with experimentation. As Rob Gray writes in How We Learn to Move, “variability, not repeatability or repetition, rules the day in skilled performance.” So break out of the comfortable mold of hitting to one target.

This is tough to gauge, but if it feels difficult or you feel you are not hitting well, you may be getting more out of your practice. Remember that session gains aren’t the goal. They can show that we’re progressing but retention is more important and transfer is even more important. We are not practicing to swing better, we are practicing to golf better. This takes time. Block practice for new skills, variable practice for building retention.

Guiding Principles

Turf trumps mats More transferable and inherently variable, hitting of turf is better. Embrace the mishits, learn from them. When you do get a straight line of thin divots you’ll know you earned it. Practice your misses This sounds weird, but if you are struggling with a hook, hit a bigger hook and then try to hit a slice. This is something Adam Young talks about in The Practice Manual (which should be required reading for all golfers (alright, probably too technical for most, but it is a great read)). We need to improve our clubhead awareness. Learning to feel your hits and misses will help you repeat them. Just like you can’t know happiness without sadness, you can’t know flush without flubbed. Change your target Don’t hit to the same target shot after shot. Even if you don’t change your target line, hone in on a different target. This will also help you target greens better, because we are not always aiming at the flag.

Block Practice

Repeating the same skill–such as 20 shots with your 7 iron aiming at the same target–is block practice. While block practice is effective for initial skill development, warming up, and calibration/diagnostic work it is not ideal for actually improving your swing.

Variable Practice

Practicing motor tasks in a random order results in slower skill acquisition but with much higher retention than practicing only in blocks. In the world of motor learning the supporting principle is called ‘contextual interference effect.’ So named because when our brains switch context constantly they encode patterns deeper. Blocked practice does not force this context switching–your brain already has an answer so it doesn’t have to ‘think’ about it, it just see your seven iron and a ball on the mat and says, “same as last time, nothing new for me to do.”

Variable practice — sometimes called random practice or interleaved practice — is the deliberate changing of skill variables. In golf, the two biggies are club and lie. But additional variables that we can change are: swing size, dynamic loft, ball position, grip, stance, alignment, club face address. All of the variables are factors in how well we contact the ball and how much distance we get. There are also mental variables. Experimenting with these can refine our pre-shot routines and are great ways to increase stress to promote transferability. For example, if you hate music on the course, practice with music.

Variable practice is important with all sports, but considering how many variables there are with each shot on the golf course (i.e., distance, lie, weather, hazards, target), it should be easy to add variety to your practice.

Transference

A transfer block is used to ensure that our practice shows up when we play. Many golfers will hit great shots at the range and are frustrated to see that their same old swing shows up on the course. The best way to stay in front of this is to practice your full shot routine with every single shot. In Jack Nicklaus’ Playing Lessons (Nicklaus, Bowden) he wrote, “I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head.” So not only was he practicing his swing, he was practicing visualization with every shot. That is much more similar to what you do on the course. This may be too much for a block, but going through your full shot routine is reinforcing that habit and can only help.

Part of the difference between practice and play is the perception of consequences with each shot. Practice, a mishit doesn’t cost us anything. A mishit on the course however can send us spiraling. So, let’s add consequences, and/or stressors, to our practice to replicate actual play.

Variable practice comes with inherent transferability–when we aren’t trying to replicate our previous shot, more thought is involved. Being able to repeat a skill with changes reinforces the skill, meaning it is more likely to be recalled on the course. So if you get nothing else from this, replace most of your block practice with variable practice. But we can do more to ensure that our practice shows up on the course.

Just recording your swing may add some stress. You can also try doing jumping jacks/push-ups/sprints to increase your heart rate before hitting. Try rushing yourself, or forcing yourself to wait five minutes between shots. Anything that will be closer to what you deal with on the course will help your practice swing become your actual golf swing.

Example Practice Session

A well designed range session includes multiple types of practice. Bear in mind that this is a ‘complete’ session. The warm-up and skill block can be merged if you do not have specific skill to work on. The performance block is for bonus points. Also, keep in mind that whether we feel it or not, the mind gets tired; you will get diminishing returns if you work on skill development for more than thirty minutes, with 15-20 being the ideal for most people.

Warm-up (3-10 min) Standard warm-up is fine here. Loosen up, hit a few half-wedges, get the body moving. This is the one part of the session where blocked is acceptable, because the goal is physical readiness, not skill encoding.

Skill Block (10-15 min) Pick one specific skill you’re working on — say, the half-wedge from 50 yards. Within that skill, vary everything else: distance (40, 50, 60 yards), lie (clean, sitting down, on an upslope), shot type (high spinner, low runner). Maybe twenty reps total. The skill stays constant; the surrounding context changes every shot.

Variable block (15-20 min) Now go fully random. Imagine you’re playing a course. Hit driver, then 9-iron from 140, then a 30-yard wedge, then a 5-iron from a tight lie, then a flop, then a knockdown into wind, then a driver again. No two consecutive shots are the same club or yardage. Use a pre-shot routine on every shot. This block feels strange the first time you do it and uncomfortable for the next several sessions. That’s the contextual interference doing its work.

Performance Block (10-15 min) Highest realism. Pick a course you know — even just visualize it — and “play” three holes in your head. Tee shot, second shot, wedge, putt sequence. One ball per shot, full routine, fully committed to a target. Score yourself honestly. This is the part of practice that most closely simulates actual play, and it’s the part almost no amateur ever does.

A few specific things to watch for. The transfer block will likely feel awkward and your metrics/scoring may look worse than your usual practice session. That’s not a problem; it’s the signal that the work is happening.

Since putting, chipping, and pitching have such a large ‘feel’ component to them, they will benefit the most from variable practice.

Remember, getting better takes time. When we are learning new skills some days feels like straight leveling up. But for these skills to really develop, it takes time. The better you get the more that this is true. Even though it takes time, don’t overdo it on practice sessions; just like cramming for an exam, your retention is going to be weak.

Sidebar: Muscles Don’t Think

Muscle memory is a misnomer; muscles don’t learn movements, our nervous system does, and these are stored as memories. What we think of as ‘muscle memory’ is better labelled an engram. Engrams are the memories themselves. These engrams are reinforced the more that they are accessed. And while all motor learning creates synaptic change, where we can draw learning from another skill (transfer learning, or generalization) we better create synaptic pathways that further reinforces the core engrams. But, repetition isn’t enough to develop skill. What’s more important is challenging the brain so that it stores and reinforces our engrams and related synaptic pathways. This is why variable practice is better for skill improvement; the brain can’t fully go on autopilot, it needs to find a solution because the pattern is different than what is already encoded.

Seems weird that hitting another 9 iron shot, something you’ve done over and over again, is going to be different if you change one little thing–the target or slightly close the face. But we are trying to pull our brains out of the habit mode to be active. Mindless repetition doesn’t build engrams; solving problems does.

Know Your Limits

You have to know when to ask for help. If your fundamentals are flawed — if your grip is causing a face-open impact, if your sequencing is upside down, if you’re coming over the top – no amount of practice will fix the fault, variable practice will just encode the broken pattern more efficiently. You will get better at being bad.

Depending on your ability to self-coach, this is where a coach will likely be the smartest play. Motor learning research tells you how to practice. It does not tell you what to practice. The “what” requires someone with a trained eye, ideally with video and/or launch monitor data, who can identify the actual motion you should be encoding before you spend thousands of reps encoding the wrong one.

The correct sequence is: get the technique sorted with a coach, then use variable practice to build it into a retrievable pattern. Reversing that order is one of the most common mistakes in amateur improvement, and it produces years of well-practiced bad swings.

Summary

Ironically, the rougher a practice session feels the more likely you are to get some meaningful gains. When we are challenged, it may feel like we are not performing perfectly but that means we are learning. We don’t just want to retain that learning, we want to transfer it to the course. Remember, feel versus real–try to objectively measure your practice and don’t assume conclusions based on feelings.

Using variable practice shouldn’t be a tough sell. Especially with golf it is easy to see how the random shot practice is closer to how we actually play the game. But don’t stop at variety, add in those stressors, practice your shot routines. Time is our only true commodity, make it count.

Bonus points for practicing in line with your goals. Remember, we’re trying to get just a little bit better every day, so practice smarter.