Change Your Practice Habits to Improve Your Golf Game

July 5, 2007
By Butch Bundy

One of the biggest things that I notice about most golfers is that they don’t know how to practice. They go to the putting green, drop 3 or 4 balls and just putt to random holes. They go to the driving range and beat golf balls, usually only with a driver and an occasional iron aimed towards nothing but a big open field. If you are warming up that is fine, but don’t confuse practice with getting loose. If you don’t know where you are aimed and how far you are hitting the ball, then you cannot practice and expect to get consistently good results.
The one thing that I have learned through playing competitive golf and by watching tour players hit balls at an event is that they always know where they are aimed, they always know the distance to their intended target and they know what club or motion will hit the ball that distance. The next time you go out to practice lay a club down on the ground to ensure that you are aligned properly for your full shots and try to have some idea of how far you can consistently hit each club. I encourage you to do the same on the putting green. I always use a carpenter’s chalk line both in my teaching and in my own practice sessions. I find a straight, 6 foot putt and hit putts on top of this line to rehearse a perfectly aimed putter and a perfect path. It becomes much easier when you go the course to aim if you have practiced it.
When you are watching a tour event on television next time, note how deliberate the players are in aligning themselves to hit a shot or a putt and how much effort they put into controlling their distances. If the best players are putting that type of emphasis on something as simple as alignment, it can only benefit those of us that play for fun.