Practice Gotchas That Can Hurt Your Game

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Many weekend players aren’t big on practice and like to show up on the weekends, knock the ball around, and have fun with friends.  I think that’s great.  The game is what we make of it, and hopefully we concentrate on keeping it fun.

But there are many of us that put in work to improve.  In many cases, it’s a significant amount of work.  That’s great, as well, but it’s painful to see people working so hard, all the while setting themselves back by not practicing effectively.  I’ve been guilty of it myself.

Dave Pelz is a big proponent of (and as far as I know, coined the phrase) “practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent”.  Bad practice will groove bad habits which can take years to erase.

Here are some areas where bad practice habits could hurt your game. I’ve done some of these in the past, so if any seem familiar, you’re not alone.

The Problem of Putt-Putt-Putt

I bet a lot of you are guilty of this one.  Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You grab three balls and head to the practice green.  After finding a putt you’d like to practice with a certain distance and break, you set the three balls down in a line perpendicular to the direction of the hole, maybe 6-12 inches from each other.

You step back, read the putt and then address the first ball.  You make your stroke, taking note of whether you had the speed and line correct.  You then shuffle forward to the second ball, and stroke it toward the hole, trying to adapt to what you learned the first time.  Finally, you repeat with the third ball.

All the while, you never step back and re-read the second and third putts.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the area between your three balls and the hole is perfectly flat and level, which is almost never the case, but let’s say it is.  At a minimum, you’d need to adjust your aim line a few degrees to account for the fact that you moved a little way around the circle around the hole that you’re standing on (think of spokes in a wheel – each successive one points toward the hub, not parallel to the previous one).

To illustrate that better, step forward a yard instead of a few inches, keeping your shoulders parallel to the line you putted along first.  Your second putt would finish a yard to the right of the first one.

Sure, you could shuffle a few degrees to the left as well to account for that, but are you used to aligning yourself that way?

More likely, you’d be playing some break and it wouldn’t be precisely the same for the subsequent putts from a slightly different spot.  This means that to have any chance of making those putts, you’d probably have to make subconscious compensations.  Further, that means in the best case, that you’re really not learning anything on the second and third putts, and in the worst case, you’re learning some compensations that you won’t even realize.

You’d be better of if you dragged the second and third balls over to where you hit the first one from, but you’d be infinitely better off if you go through your entire putting routine for each putt.

This seems all seems incredibly obvious, but I see it regularly.

The Power of Routine

That brings me to the power of the pre-shot routine.  The pre-shot routine, whatever yours is, is not about much more than comfort.

When the pressure is on, whether it’s a putt to win the Masters or overcome a personal scoring barrier, a long carry over a dreaded hazard, or two putts to win your league title, your body won’t comply the same way it does when you’re standing on the driving range or practice green.

Butterflies abound and maybe your hands tremble.

This is where your pre-shot routine demonstrates it’s worth.  At that moment, when you begin your routine, your body and mind fall into a comfort zone where you’re just going to do the things you’ve done a thousand times before.

If you don’t use your pre-shot routine when you practice, however, your comfort zone will be empty.  You might sort of have a routine that you kind of follow, but really it probably changes from shot to shot.  Maybe you even have to consciously think about it.

When that happens, you’ve robbed yourself of that comfort zone.

When I go to hit a shot, this is what I do:

Stand behind the ball looking at my target, envisioning the shot I want to hit.  I walk up and take a couple of practice swings about six inches away from where my stance will be, mimicking how I want to hit the shot.  Step back and then walk up to my ball and face it while still looking at the target.  I start to step forward and take my stance, right foot most of the way in, then left foot, then final adjustment with the right foot.  If I feel like I’m not aimed correctly or the ball isn’t where I want it to be relative to my feet, I shuffle a bit to get to where I need to be.  I waggle, tap the ground with my club a couple of times, move my feet a little, look at the target, look at the ball, waggle, look at the target, look at the ball, and then pull the trigger.

Every.  Single.  Time.

I do this when I practice, with one exception:  I usually skip standing behind the ball and just start at stepping into the ball because it saves a little time.  It’s not optimal, but I find it keeps me in a good rhythm at the range.

As a funny aside, I actually had to address a ball to be able to verbalize my routine for you above.  It’s so automatic that I’m not even consciously aware of all the steps.  On the course, that nearly automatic routine provides a familiar place of comfort when the pressure is on.

If you don’t have a set routine that you follow, I highly recommend that you not only develop one, I recommend that you do it when you practice, as well, so that play feels as much like practice as possible.  If you don’t do it when you practice, you’re depriving yourself of a happy place that you can go when the pressure mounts.

The Rake and Beat

I didn’t come up with that phrase, but it certainly describes many of the players I see in my regular trips to the driving range.  They dump a basket of balls, step up, beat one down range, rake over another one, and repeat until the balls are gone, occasionally pausing to switch clubs.

As we talked about above, it’s important to develop and go through your pre-shot routine so you’re prepared for pressure situations.  But the rake and beat mentality goes way beyond that.

You’ve heard me refer to this as practicing without purpose. The purpose of practice is, well, to practice. That is, to hit shots that will prepare you to play golf well. To do that, it’s very important to make practice conditions as similar as possible to those on the course.

We already talked about the importance of pre-shot routines during practice, but really, there’s much more to mixing up practice a bit.

How many times on the course are you faced with hitting 25 7-irons in a row?  I’m not saying that there’s never a time to hit 25 in a row on the practice tee.  On the contrary, if you’re working on a specific shot or swing technique, you might hit many in a row.

But, if you’re preparing to play or just keeping sharp, then practicing like you play means that sometimes you need to mix it up and do things differently. That means switching up clubs and shot types, because that’s exactly what you’re going to be doing on the course.

There are tons of ways to do this.  Play an imaginary round on the practice tee.  Pretend you’re standing on the first tee and hit the exact shot that would be called for from there.  Pay careful attention to the result and then imagine where you’d be if you had really hit that shot on the course.  Next, play the shot you’d have to play next if you were on the course.  Repeat this all the way through an imaginary 18 holes.

Or, challenge yourself to hit very specific shots to very specific targets.  Pick up a 7-iron and hit a high fade, followed by a low hook, followed by a punch, followed by – you get the point.  Do the same with your driver.  Select random clubs and visualize and hit random shots.  This will help prepare your mind to switch gears on the course since each successive shot is normally very different from the previous one.

Putting it All Together

These are just a few examples of many that show how ineffective practice might harm your game.  In a way, these things are a little more dubious than many kinds of swing flaws, because you may not be having trouble making flush contact with the ball, but maybe you can’t seem to score or you wilt under pressure.

Nonetheless, failing to adopt – and practice with – a pre-shot routine can not only affect your mental game, but it could introduce technical flaws or simply a lack of consistency in address that randomly affects the outcome of shots.

It’s a similar trap with practicing like you play.  If, on the course, you face perfect 7-iron shots from tight, level lies, then you’re golden.  But, if you need to hit a half shot, knock-down, high draw, or controlled fade, are you prepared? If you play these shots on the range, and thoroughly mix up your practice sessions (except maybe when your plan is to work on something very specific), then you probably are. If you typically hit comfortable, vanilla 7-irons for an hour, then you’re probably not ready for the challenges of the course.