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How to Improve Your Golf Game

2. Practice

Dave Tutelman -- June 28, 2006

Unless you are inherently an outstanding athlete, simply knowing what you're doing wrong -- and even how to do it right -- will not go very far to letting you do it right. Of course, it's an essential first step. But you also have to practice doing it right until you "groove" it, until it becomes "muscle memory". That is going to take more practice and more discipline than you might imagine.

The great Ben Hogan was widely rumored to have found the secret to a great swing. Even after he published his famous "Five Lessons" book, in which he spelled out the essentials of a good swing in over 100 pages, people would ask him for "the secret." His stock answer was, "The secret is in the dirt." It took a long time for golf pundits to figure out that he meant the secret is practice. Hogan's practice discipline was legendary; it makes Vijay Singh look lazy by comparison. He would practice until his hands bled. Then he'd bandage them and practice again the next day. He'd say, "Every day you don't practice is a day longer it will take you to become a good golfer."

He's right of course! But I'm a numbers guy. Let's see if we can hang some numbers on practice.

It is generally accepted for training in most sports that it takes thousands of perfect repetitions of a movement for it to become ingrained, natural "muscle memory." The numbers I've seen range from 3000 to 30,000, with most of the consensus around 10,000.
Note that the repetitions must be proper executions of the movement. As my school teacher told me when I was eight years old, "Practice makes perfect? No. Practice makes permanent. Practice an error and you'll have a permanent error."
So let's work the numbers. Suppose you can find calendar space to practice three times a week for an hour each time. An hour is about the right amount of time (given stretching, proper rest between swings, full pre-shot routine, analysis, etc) to hit a medium bucket of 50-60 balls, 80 at the most. Let's be conservative and use 50 as the number.
Suppose you're good enough so that two thirds of your swings are proper executions that help, rather than hinder, grooving your improvement. That means that every week you do about 100 proper swings.
At that rate, assuming you practice at that rate year-round, it will take you about two years to groove what you're practicing.

That's a lot of practice! If you don't have the patience and the discipline to do it, don't kid yourself that you can improve your golf game significantly. Yes, you can see significant improvement on the course in a lot less than two years, provided:

You are working on only one thing -- two at the most -- not a general swing makeover.
You can carry swing thoughts to the golf course with you, and play using them. Not everybody can. And most people can't under pressure. For the must-make shots, the improvement is more likely to unravel.
You have the patience to expect and accept at least the same fraction of bad shots on the course that you see in practice.

With these caveats, you can see improvement in your game long before the two years is up. But, if you don't go through the whole course of practice -- the whole two years with that same swing improvement in mind -- then the game improvement will not last.

(Added 8/7/2006) Yes, this even applies to Tiger Woods. After his convincing back-to-back victories in the 2006 British Open and Buick Open, an instructor/journalist pointed out that the swing changes he began several years earlier were finally "maturing" -- becoming enough of a habit to be reliable. The message, which you can see in its entirety at ESPN.com, is that swing changes take years to become ingrained.

There is a bright side to this. Some of the best instructors I know insist that the biggest and most damaging flaws they see (in the words of one of them, Larry Gantzer) are GAS: Grip, Alignment, Setup. These are static positions, not swing movements, so they are easier to practice. You don't need a range or hitting cage; you can practice them at home. You can even practice your grip while watching TV.

But it does say something significant about how you should practice. You need a pre-shot routine. You need one anyway, just to play consistently. If you watch the pros during a tournament, you'll see that at some point they start a set of motions and actions that is exactly the same, every shot. These actions will vary from golfer to golfer, but every good golfer has such a routine and sticks to it -- identically -- on every shot.

You should have one, too. You might want to put a little thought into what it should be. You will probably change it from time to time. But a few things are important:

It should be designed to finish with proper Grip, Alignment, and Setup -- just before you "pull the trigger".
It should help you focus and relax, take your mind away from the special perils of this shot and instead bring out the sameness of this swing to every swing you have practiced.
It should take at least 10-12 seconds and definitely less than 30 seconds. Mine takes about 20 seconds.
Every shot you hit in practice, you must go through your entire pre-shot routine. Only if you do this does the routine become ingrained and serve as a focusing, calming process.
If anything distracts you before you actually make your swing, back off to the beginning of the pre-shot routine and go through it from there. Do it both in practice and on the course.

Let me share with you a regimen that has worked for me, given these principles and limitations. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) When I wanted to do a major swing makeover, I started in November, near the end of our golf season in New Jersey. I signed up for a six-month program of lessons and practice. It worked out to a lesson every two weeks and unlimited practice in between. As implemented, I generally put in about five hours of practice between each pair of lessons. (More would probably have been better, but I was employed full-time.)

The best part of it was that, because of the season, my on-the-course golf, and thus my expectations for my game, was limited. Why was this important? Because you will get worse before you get better. If you try to short-cut the getting worse, you'll only wind up limiting how much better you can get.

The lesson/practice facility was indoors, with hitting cages outfitted with video cameras and playback apparatus. I hit into a net no more than four yards away. Therefore:

I could not see the ball flight.
Using the video gear, I could certainly see what my swing did and tell whether I did it right -- and when I did, I could correlate that with what it felt like.

If you're working on your swing, this is a good thing. Golfers are very adaptable, and they adapt rapidly to seeing things they don't like about ball flight. But, if you're making any significant change in your swing, you don't want to be adapting to ball flight. You want to focus on the swing itself, not the result, especially in the first few months of the change. Remember, it will take a lot of correct repetitions to groove it. Don't let your focus on the swing be diluted by disappointing results in ball flight.

That's why it is good to schedule the change:

When you expect not to play much golf.
Where you can see the swing, but not the result.

A few words about #2. Today, most indoor practice facilities don't just have video; they have "simulators" or "launch monitors" that give you a lot of information from each swing -- too much information for many practice purposes. You should focus on just the video of your swing, or specifics like the clubhead path and angle at impact. Ignore (or turn off, if you can) things like the distance you hit the ball. That winds up breeding compensations; you try to improve distance rather than groove the swing. It has all the weaknesses of seeing your ball flight.

For the results-orient reader... So how did those swing changes work out? Here's a time-line of my progress, which confirms what I said earlier about getting worse then getting better. It starts in late 1999, when I began the regime of swing change and practice.

Before I started, I typically shot in the mid-90s. I would occasionally break 90, perhaps once or twice a year.
Midway through the regime, I was shooting in the high 90s, and often over 100.
By the Spring, I was shooting in the 80s more often than not. Big improvement! At that point, my lessons package (including the indoor video setup) ran out. I still practiced, but outdoors and without video feedback.
After two years, where my practice was not video practice but rather reinforcing the changes already made, I was usually shooting in the low-to-mid-80s, and breaking 80 a few times a year. That is substantial improvement over the end of the formal lessons-and-practice regime.
Since then, I have gotten a bit worse. The change was made when I was close to age 60; I will turn 70 this year. The "gotten worse" is mostly lack of distance due to age. But I still shoot in the mid-80s most of the time. I often come close to breaking 80, but seldom do it any more.

Last modified 2/20/2011