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On the course, everyday duffers have no chance of keeping up with the pros.

The same is true on the driving range.

But at least there we can keep up appearances.

Here are 9 ways to make it look like you know what you’re doing when you practice (even if you don’t).

1. Limber up

Even in his teens, long before his body became an Operation board game, Tiger Woods adhered to a regimented pre-range stretching routine. You needn’t drop into a downward dog. But if you want to fake it until you make it, at least windmill your arms and touch your toes.

Instruction

2. Use alignment sticks

Just because your shots fly in all directions doesn’t mean your body can’t be pointed properly to start. Even the best players in the world need to double check alignment. They know that there’s no shame in a visual aid.

3. Employ a pre-shot routine

A lot of amateurs treat practice sessions like aerobic workouts, smashing balls in such quick succession that they’ve got the next shot teed up before the previous one lands. Hint: That’s not how the pros do it. If you want to pass as a serious player, implement a pre-shot routine.

4. Work through your set

We know you want to let the big dog eat. But it’s a better look to start with half-swing wedges and work your way up. And get this: It might even help your game.

5. Pick a target

Pros don’t whack balls willy-nilly. Choose something to aim for. Something specific. A tree branch. A flagstick. And, no, the range picker doesn’t count.

6. Tidy up

A bucket of balls dumped on the ground. Clubs scattered about like kindling. Those are sloppy signs of a sloppy player. The tighter the game, the tidier looking the hitting area. Keep all but a few balls in the bucket, and every club but the one you’re swinging in your bag.

Lifestyle

7. Contain your divot patterns

The range is not farmland in need of tilling, even if amateurs treat it that way, taking hacks in no particular pattern until they’ve turned up a giant swath of turf. The professional look is to work in a linear pattern, hitting from the back end of your last divot. Save your random gardening for home.

8. Bring a launch monitor

Many of today’s models are modestly priced, and, boy, do they create an air of expertise. Set one down beside you and, every now and then, click the buttons and inspect the numbers. No one needs to know that you can’t tell a spin rate from a mortgage rate.

9. Get locked in

This just in. You are not Butch Harmon. Don’t stand there watching other golfers hitting balls, arms crossed, head cocked, as if you’ve got something insightful to say. Pros aren’t so easily distracted. Keep your eyes locked on what you’re doing, or set your gaze on the horizon, looking like you see things that others can’t.

Want to overhaul your bag for 2022? Find a fitting location near you at GOLF’s affiliate company True Spec Golf. 

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Tina Tombs, a GOLF Top 100 Teacher at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, was explaining the best way to maximize a quick warmup when she mentioned the way in which she’d finish it: by hitting shots with her feet together.

I’d heard of this drill before but never actually knew how it helped (the point of this article). So I asked. But first, let’s backtrack. Here’s how Tombs, a former LPGA winner, said she’d make the most out of a 15-minute range session.

“I think a great warmup is hitting 15 footers to the edge of the green. Then if you can hit a few chips, you hit a few chips, and then you can put a towel on the end of a club, flip your club over and stretch,” she said. “A lot of people spend a lot of time hitting balls and then they don’t have feel for the greens or feel for their chipping, so I think it is important to warm up for feel first to get your mind and your body ready to play. You can hit 20 balls with your feet together, whatever you need. But it’s really important to putt and chip first. … If I have that feel of the greens and know I can get it up and down, I know I can do a lot of things. But if you don’t have feel of the greens I don’t think you can score.”

Instruction

OK, that seems logical enough. Now, here’s why hitting shots with your feet together is a smart warmup.

“The benefits of hitting balls with feet together is the in sync-ness of syncing up the arms, the club and the body,” Tombs said. “It slows things down and it trains the arms and the club to work together to sync things up timing-wise. You can’t take really big swings. You don’t want to hit it really far and swing 100 percent, so you start off small and just work it up and separate your feet.”

This aligns with what renowned golf coach Pete Cowen has said. In an old Today’s Golfer interview, he said 90 percent of players should swing with their feet together. But even if you don’t want to take that big of a step on the course, you can still practice that way.

“The key is to focus on these balance points and keep them all working together for the good of the swing,” Cowen said in a 2010 edition of Golf International Magazine. “Another benefit of this drill is that it encourages you to keep your knee and chin levels constant throughout, which is important.”

In the article, Cowen suggests hitting a few sets of 10 balls with a 7-iron (and using a tee at first to get started). Then, move back to your normal stance and you can see the difference.

“Try and maintain this balanced feel in your full swing to build consistency and control,” he said.

Want to overhaul your bag for 2022? Find a fitting location near you at GOLF’s affiliate company True Spec Golf.

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I spent two long days in November roaming the range at Pinehurst Resort asking some of the best golf teachers in the world tips for amateurs to get better. The most common answer was a predictable one: amateurs don’t practice properly.

But there are layers to that and, more importantly, ways to fix it. Here are three things amateurs must do on the range if they want to get better, according to Matt Wilson, a GOLF Top 100 Teacher and the director of instruction at Baltusrol.

Practice with intent

“I would say most amateurs do not practice,” Wilson said. “I see a lot of recreational golfers going out with no intent. They are just going to hit balls — they are not going to practice. Practice implies a concerted effort to improve in some capacity or in one facet of the game.”

The fix: Don’t just mindlessly hit balls. Find a range target and aim at it, not in the vicinity of it. Go through your pre-shot routine. Don’t rush it. Double check your alignment. There are countless ways to make sure you are practicing properly. Here’s another:

Get feedback

One of the biggest mistakes when it comes to not practicing correctly, Wilson says, is practicing in the absence of feedback.

Instruction

“What if you turned in your math homework and never got it back with a green check mark or red X?” Wilson said.

His point is a simple one: That swing change you are working on? You can’t see if you are actually progressing toward a positive change if you aren’t practicing with feedback. You can start small by using something like alignment sticks, but the best option is to rig up a phone to record your swing or have someone record it for you. The slo-mo technology does wonders to help dissect the golf swing — and see if you are on the right track.

Frequency over duration

You had a good range session? Great. Now don’t skip the next one. Wilson says another major issue amateurs struggle with is having too much time between practice sessions.

“I always say frequency over duration,” he said. “Practice more often for far less, assuming there’s intention and feedback, and you are going to see a lot faster progress.”

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Two different golfers recently told me they didn’t like putting an alignment stick down when they’re on the range. Why? Because they were embarrassed by the thought of it. I put the question out on Twitter earlier this week and turns out it’s way more common than I thought — anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of golfers, according to my unscientific poll, feel this way.

Worse yet, more people reached out to me saying there were other things they were worried about doing on the range. This alarmed me further, and while it’s easier said than done to say, simply, “don’t be embarrassed,” you really shouldn’t be. I feel so strongly about this I wanted to put it down in writing, on the digital pages of GOLF.com, for all to see. Here are things golfers should never feel embarrassed about in the first place.

1. Being there as a beginner

Lots of new golfers tend to feel embarrassed going to the driving range. I get that on the surface it can be an intimidating place, but this isn’t a PGA Tour range. There’s no crowd watching. It’s a judgement-free zone where golfers of all ability have come to work on their game. There’s no reason to be embarrassed about wanting to get better.

2. Alignment sticks

Speaking of PGA Tour driving ranges: One thing you’ll see all over the place are alignment sticks. That’s because they work. Bad alignment can cause all sorts of issues in your golf swing that are far more embarrassing than laying a club on the ground pointing toward your target.

3. Videoing your swing

This was another that came up a lot when I put this question out there. Remember: Working to get better is nothing to be embarrassed about, and no, there’s no such thing as not being good enough to film your golf swing.

RELATED: 6 ways to film your golf swing perfectly

4. Drills and training aids

I do understand why this can be embarrassing, but once again, if they help you avoid hitting bad shots (which are more embarrassing), then who cares? If major-winner Louis Oosthuizen uses a homemade training aid that rests up against his backside on the range, why should you care how something looks?

5. Doing your pre-shot routine

And finally, doing your pre-shot routine. Yes, it may make you look like you’re taking yourself seriously, but that’s the point. Doing your full routine on the range, and then on the course is one of the best ways to improve the quality of your practice.

Want to overhaul your bag for 2022? Find a fitting location near you at GOLF’s affiliate company True Spec Golf.

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Golf is a confusing, complicated game. And when things go wrong, it’s only natural to do what most of us do in confusing, complicated situations: Try to figure them out.

For many golfers, that means heading to the driving range. Working through a big bucket of golf balls as a way of troubleshooting the cause of what went wrong, and how to fix it. Except, at least according to one coach, that might be exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.

Justin Parsons is one of the best coaches around. After years studying under Butch Harmon, he now works out of Sea Island and coaches Harris English and Louis Oosthuzen, among others. He’s also the most recent guest on Claude Harmon’s GOLF.com podcast “Off Course” (which you can subscribe to on iTunes right here).

Instruction

And Parsons says golfers should be wary — very wary — of spending hours on the driving range.

“I think think the driving range is one of the most dangerous places for golfers to live.” he says. “I’ve probably spent far too many hours of my own time trying to perfect things.”

Why you should fear the driving range

Parsons says the reason why is because of a lack of consequences. When you hit a bad shot on a driving range, it doesn’t matter. On a golf course, it obviously does. When golfers put themselves in an environment where the bad shots don’t matter, their games won’t necessarily improve.

“It’s one of the least accountable places there is as a golfer,” he says. “At least on the putting green, you can ‘I holed this many putts from six feet’, or you can do chipping games; it’s very, very hard to quantify your behavior on the driving range. We fall down this trap of trying to be absolutely perfect on the driving range, forgetting that the driving range has absolutely nothing to do with the golf course.”

The range can, of course, serve a purpose. It’s good for ironing out your technique, and for warming up. The problem comes when you treat it as a solution to all your golf problems. It’s not; when you have an issue in your game, you’re often better off figuring it out on the golf course.

Listen to the full episode below.

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The revolution of the range is coming, folks. For everyone who grew up logging hours behind the wheel of a range picker — like proud PGA Tour pro Daniel Berger — now is the time to lament. Robots will soon make that job obsolete!

Enter the BallPicker from Belrobotics, or the RP-1200 from Echo, or Herr Robot from Golf Robotics. All of them look basically the same and do one thing well: they pick the range. 

They pick the range well enough that one club in Mississippi — The Club at Ole Brook — just made the humans-to-robots transition, and it made the local news. Ole Brook chose the Echo Robotics version of automated picker, which goes for about $19,000, and bought two of them. 

Could it be a fad? It’d be a pretty expensive fad to get involved with, if that’s the case. The pickers run on a rechargeable battery and scoot around your range at just more than 2 mph. They can scoop up about 300 balls and return them to a washing station before heading back out again. Wires laid in the ground at range’s edge work like an electric dog fence, telling them when to turn back to the grassy area. And the controls for all of it sits in a pretty dashboard on the general manager’s cell phone. 

Okay, maybe robot range pickers are better, after all. 

“They took some tweaking at first, but we’ve had fun with them,” GM Jeff Henning told the Daily Leader.

As far as he knows, these are the only robotic range pickers in the state. For now, at least. 

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“It’s an interesting story,” Daniel Berger says. He’s right. How does a range-picker from south Florida turn into one of the best golfers in the world?

“When we moved up to Jupiter, my dad [a former tennis pro] got into contact with Ivan Lendl, who was one of his tennis peers back in the day,” Berger says on this week’s Drop Zone podcast. “And Ivan set us up with the pro at a course called the Dye Preserve in Jupiter. The pro, Matt Doyle, took me under his wing. He gave me a job at the course: I picked the range. Every day. I would set up the range on the weekends and close it down, sunrise to sunset.”

My Drop Zone co-host, Sean Zak, pointed out that a sloppy range setup must bother him to this day.

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m gonna go fix it.”

(You can listen to the entire episode with Berger below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean or anywhere you find your podcasts!)

Berger is hardly unique in having grown up in Florida, but his story is different in one fascinating way: He was a kid in Jupiter, which had recently become golf’s international capital. And he wasn’t just a good junior golfer: He was a golf course employee, a range-picker with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. That chip might still sit there.

“I would say that of all the golfers on the PGA Tour, none have ever picked as many ranges as I have in my life,” he says.

It’s a fascinating claim, and begs the question: If Berger’s right, who’s No. 2 on Tour?

Berger says he got lucky to have a dozen or so aspiring Tour pros practicing at the Dye Preserve at the time, including Steve Marino, who took the teenage Berger under his wing, adopted him as a playing partner and helped plunge him headfirst into an extremely high level of golf.

“I understood what it took to get to that level and I was around it so often that when I did get to that level it didn’t feel any different than what I had been through my entire life.”

Still, Berger’s success doesn’t mean he’s lost any blue-collar sensibilities.

“You’re never too good to be picking the range,” he said. “There’s a humility that comes with going back to the golf course and getting back to your roots and just feeling like a kid again.”

But as pro golf’s pre-eminent range-picker, Berger has a PSA for golfers everywhere: Stop hitting balls at the guy in the cart!

“I do not hit stingers at guys picking the range,” he said. “Camilo [Villegas, then a member of Dye Preserve] did that to me one time and the cart that I was driving was like, 20 years old, it was all rusty on the side and he slapped it into the rust, which hit me in the face. After that, I was like, ‘I’m not hitting balls into pickers anymore.’”

So there you have it. Stop firing missiles at the range picker! The cart’s probably older and less bulletproof than you might guess, the driver might be a nervous teenager and that same teenager might go on to become one of the best golfers on the PGA Tour. Better safe than sorry.

For more Berger stories on growing up in Jupiter, betting for money he didn’t have, losing his game and then finding it again, check out this week’s Drop Zone! You won’t be sorry. It’s here on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean or at the embedded player below. Enjoy!

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The post This Alex Noren-approved range game will improve your driving accuracy appeared first on Golf.

Callaway Golf staffer Alex Noren‘s go-to shot is a trusty fade. He’s relied on it for 10 European Tour victories, two top 10s in majors, and a winning Ryder Cup appearance.

But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, when Noren was a college golfer at Oklahoma State University, he hit a big push draw that he often struggled to control.

“When I got to collage people would tell me, ‘you’ve got to hit it in-between the jungle. You’ve got to hit it in the fairway,” Noren said.

To help Noren learn his now-signature draw, his coach created a game for him to play, and it’s something you can easy try yourself: He’d put a stick down the target line and pull his drive. The goal is to aim straight at the stick and have your ball finish in line with it, but the route it should take will be different.

First, aim at the stick, try to start the ball left of it and curve it back in line with it.

Next, aim at the stick, but this time start the ball right of it and curve it back.

Here’s GOLF Top 100 Teacher Krista Dunton illustrating the drill…

Instantly, the drill started to work.

“I remember being able to play rounds with out bogeys all of a sudden, on tough courses, when before I was struggling with hitting so many provisionals,” Noren said.

It’s something he said he’s been revisiting more recently with his Callaway Mavrik Driver as he attempts to ingrain a more neutral ball flight off the tee.

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The post The 10 worst habits golfers have when they practice appeared first on Golf.

I’ve recently spent some extra time watching my members and students warm up before they play and practice. It is so interesting to see how some are being efficient with their time while others, to be honest, are probably making themselves worse.

The good news is you don’t necessarily have to have huge chunks of time to improve your game, you just have to be a bit smarter and more calculated.

Here are some of the bad habits I often see on the driving range.

1. No Practice Swings

While everyone is different and some golfers will go through full stretching routines, I think at a minimum you should take a few swings with your club or chosen warm up aid to loosen the body before adding a golf ball. The hitting instinct can make golfers swing harder than they realize and better safe than sorry.

2. Starting With A Full Swing

I often compare starting with a full swing like running before you walk. It can be really helpful to start with a less than full swing with a club with bounce (lob, sand and gap wedges have rounded bottoms that are less likely to dig). Smaller swings are much easier on your body, will help avoid injury and will also help build confidence as smaller swings are typically more consistent.

The reason I suggest most golfers start with a bounce club is because often the first few swings are not to your normal speed and when the club hits the ground, it is more likely to glide than dig and get stuck. I want to reinforce that hitting the ground is a good thing.

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The key to breaking 80 consistently, according to 5 low-handicap golfers

3. Not Hitting The Ground With Their Practice Swing

Especially with my ladies, often they don’t hit the ground when taking practice swings. I think all practice swings where the ball is on the ground should hit the ground. If you’re not hitting the ground, you are effectively practicing topping or hitting it thin. Make your practice swings real so you can repeat rather than recreate.

A practice swing can also be an opportunity to exaggerate what you are trying to adjust. You will often see professionals making very exaggerated motions in the effort to make adjustments to their own swing.

4. Not Aiming At A Target

I often see golfers hitting randomly toward the range and not to a target. If I am with a student I watch this very carefully. It’s common for one to ask, “Why did it go way over there?” My most common answer is… you guessed it, “You aimed there.” It can be extremely helpful to have a target so that you learn to aim properly by looking at your target during your setup to see what it does look like when you do aim properly.

5. No Alignment Aids

If you are practicing without a teacher who can watch this for you, it is really important to have some type of alignment aid to be sure you are aiming relative to your target. Time practicing, where you might aim improperly, will often result in another compensating error to get the ball to go to the target you “think” you are aiming toward.

You can apply this to both your full swing and all areas of your short game. With a full swing it can be as simple as using an alignment rod to check club face alignment as well as ball position. For putting it is particularly important on short putts to learn to aim the face well, and there are many training aids out there to help you do this. While at the U.S. Open this past year, it was interesting to see how many PGA Tour players were using alignment stations for putting to be sure to aim their putter faces well.

Gear

Best golf training aids: 10 training aids sure to straighten out your game

6. Practicing Without Feedback

Other than what your golf ball may be telling you, it can be productive to practice with feedback to let you know if you are practicing properly. For example, if you tend not to hit your golf ball in the center of the clubface, you could use powder spray on the face to see where impact occurs, or have two tees on either side of the golf ball to see that your club passes through and centered contact is happening. I practiced this last week with one of my students with a pencil. Her arms were contracting on her forward swing and she was hitting the ball on the toe of her wedge. I took a pencil out of my bag and placed it on the ground on her side of the golf ball and told her to miss the pencil. This was instant feedback and something she could do if I wasn’t there with her.

7. Not Having A Swing Thought

On the fun but rare occasion that you are hitting the ball perfectly time after time, just enjoy. But more often than not, most of us mortals have something in our swing we are trying to improve. By having particular goals for your practice and sticking to that topic, you will improve over time. For example, let’s say you have three things you are working on in your swing. If each time you went to practice you divided your practice time into thirds and worked on each for a third of your time, you would improve. Things like adjusting your grip to keep from slicing, for example. When you are working on this fundamental it should be the only one you are judging. Staying focused on a singular task over time will lead to improvement versus not focusing and basically just exercising.

Instruction

A swing thought for better ballstriking: Get heavy, then light

8. Not Learning How YOUR Golf Swing Works

One of the true skills of great instructors is the ability to identify the most basic fundamental being violated that will often fix other issues as a result. Many golfers try to fix themselves and basically just guess how to improve their ball flight, often times without the success. Over time, a golfer can make themselves better with a compensating error, as two wrongs can make a right in golf. The downside to this is that it most likely will not hold up under pressure.

I am a bit vigilant with my students understanding their own cause and effect. I will ask them questions to help them identify the miss and the proper correction, and this allows them to improve themselves as they go. While you may or may not have access to private instruction, there are some affordable golf clinics as well as online platforms that will allow you to take the path of least resistance, fix your fundamentals and better understand your own swing.

9. Using The Same Clubs

When I ask a new student what clubs they normally use to warm up, they tend to use the same clubs each time and this often leads to being more comfortable on the course with these clubs. I suggest odd numbers one time and even the next. For example, one day might be sand wedge, 9-iron, 7-iron, 5-iron or hybrid, 5-wood, driver and the next gap wedge, 8-iron, 6-iron, 4-hybrid, 3-wood and driver. This will allow you to be comfortable with all of your clubs.

Instruction

There’s a big difference between how pro and amateur golfers practice

10. Not Having A Practice Goal

Often times practice is just random and once you move past skill development, it can be very helpful to add pressure situations like you would experience while on the course to make your practice time more real and help it to transfer to better results while playing.

An example of this that I used with one of my students last week to teach him to better control his distance in putting was to move around the putting green and try to roll his first putt closer to the hole than the length of his putter 18 times in a row. If he was outside of that length, he needed to start over. This helped him to replicate the situations he would have when playing and also apply some pressure later in the exercise, when he probably didn’t want to start all over again.

You may be a golfer who likes to practice, or one who doesn’t, but you certainly can learn from the mistakes made by others. The time that you do spend should be productive and focused and also help to avoid injury.

Better practice leads to better play and lower scores ,and it certainly is a lot more fun to play good golf.

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