Golf Practice Blog

When I haven’t played for several months, the first thing I want to do is crank up the driver and lauch a bucket.  It’s hard to get excited about spending time around the practice green searching for the ”feel” you know will take weeks or longer to get back. 

We all know, nearly 60 percent of the shots in a round are played within 100 yards so isn’t this the area we should practice at the beginning of the season?

Here’s a great tip from Jason Sutton that will start your season off on the right foot by practicing off the “right foot”.  It’s called the Stork Drill and it will focus you on hitting short shots with a solid impact first. 

Stork drill: Hit chips, pitches and sand shots with your rear foot off the ground and up on your toe for balance. This places most of your weight on your front leg to give you a descending angle of attack, essential for solid contact.  Here’s a link to Jason’s full tip.

After getting back consistent and solid impact, restablishing your touch and feel around the green will be much easier. 

Bringing out the big dog and launching a large bucket can wait.

By RICK MARTINO
Scripps Howard News Service
Tuesday, September 04, 2007

One of the true learned skills of playing golf is the ability to read greens. Even for experienced players, this skill varies from course to course because there are many different types of grasses used on various green surfaces, and many outside factors that have an effect on the roll of the ball.

– 3. The line chosen for the putt.

Read the rest of this artice by Rick Martino at ScrippsNews.com.

For the best golf training aids to help you line up putts and read greens, visit PracticeRange.com!

As you get back to work this week, you keep going over and over in your mind what you did on the course this weekend and how you can work to either correct it, improve upon it, or perfect it! FindaLesson LPGA Pro Pamela Rogers provides an excellent Top Ten list of practice tips to keep you “putting for bird.”

Golf is a sport that requires a great amount of dedication and commitment. Just like every sport you have ever played, golf requires a lot of practice. In order for you to see improvement in your golf shots as well as lower scores, time must be spent in enhancing your skills. Being realistic to the amount of time that you are able to dedicate to your golf game, you must plan a practice session that will be compatible for you and your busy schedule.

As I tell all of my students, practice does NOT make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. Whether you practice one hour or six hours a week on your golf game, if you are not practicing efficiently and effectively, you will not improve. I would like to offer you some excellent practice tips that have worked well for my students.

View Pamela’s Top Ten Practice Tips at FindaLesson.com.

We’ve also generated a list of golf training aid bestsellers for the month of July that should give you step in the right direction toward cleaning up the last few problems with your game.

There are two things this year that are hotter than ever: temperatures and golf.  Fortunately for all of us “fair weather golfers,” there are a slew of golf practice tips that you can use in the air-conditioned comfort of your own home… and thank goodness for twilight golf! One golf practice tip, from LPGA Pro Christine Lovrine, works as well during the blistering summer months as it does in the middle of winter.  Lovrine suggests doing exercises for stretching and building back strength, and also suggests swinging a shorter weighted golf club, such as the Momentus Traveler, doing so two to three times per week when you can’t make it to the golf course.  

Golf is a sport that requires a great amount of dedication and commitment. Just like every sport you have ever played, golf requires a lot of practice. In order for you to see improvement in your golf shots as well as lower scores, time must be spent in enhancing your skills. Being realistic to the amount of time that you are able to dedicate to your golf game, you must plan a practice session that will be compatible for you and your busy schedule.

Here’s a great list of practice tips from Pam Rogers. She tells her students, practice does NOT make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. Whether you practice one hour or six hours a week on your golf game, if you are not practicing efficiently and effectively, you will not improve.

#1~ Make practice swings whenever possible. Place clubs around the house or at work so that it will be convenient to pick one up and swing it. You do not have to always be at the range to practice.

#2~ If you do not have a club handy, make imaginary swings with your arms and hands in front of a mirror or window. Picture and feel the correct positions. Seeing is believing, use mirrors whenever possible.

#3~ Grip a club while watching television. Swing during commercials. Strengthen forearms, lift free weights if you do not have a club near by.

#4~ Create a practice area in or outside your house. Make practice sessions more convenient for yourself.

#5~ Practice by yourself. Don’t make your practice session a social hour. Avoid distractions when you practice, stay focused.

#6~ Begin all practice sessions with the short clubs and progress to the longer clubs. This prevents personal injury in addition to developing a good tempo.

#7~ Never practice with out a target in mind. Always have perfect alignment when practicing. I suggest laying clubs or wooden boards down to promote proper alignment.

#8~ Quality vs. quantity. I would rather see my students hit fewer balls and stayed focused than hit hundreds of balls and lose concentration.

#9~ Focus on only 2 main swing thoughts when practicing. Do not become overly mechanical. Stay as natural as possible.

#10~ Make it competitive for yourself! Set goals during practice. Hit 6 out of 10 shots exactly how you want to hit them.

Fun and exciting are not often used to describe practicing golf. That’s about to change. TopGolf Learning Centers use radio frequency (RF) technology to transform your practice session into a point-scoring game played at a high tech driving range. 

Played with real clubs and premium golf balls, players hit into one of the range’s 10 scoring zones and get real-time feedback on their shots. The system also features target-practice games you can play solo or against others. The first US TopGolf range was built in Washington, DC, last summer; swingers in Chicago and Dallas can log on and tee off later this year. 

RF technology is also being introduced on the course to help find lost golf balls. RADAR GOLF System uses advanced electronics to enable the handheld to transmit a specific radio frequency (RF) signal. When this signal reaches RADAR GOLF Golf Balls , the ball returns a separate specific RF signal. The handheld receiver is tuned to “listen” for the signal from the ball. An LCD provides visual feedback and an audio tone allows you to hone in on your lost ball. You will receive stronger feedback as you get closer to your ball. The system has a range from 30 - 100 feet depending on the terrain.

No matter how sexy driving the golf ball can be, your mammoth drives don’t mean squat unless you have the skills to follow them up with solid iron play. The same goes for putting—you can’t score if you can’t putt well, and part of making more putts has to do with how close you can hit your approaches to the hole. Put it this way: Scoring well requires a series of chain reactions. Great drives stage easier approach shots, and better approach shots lead to shorter putts, which likely lead to lower scores. Invariably and frequently, these links are going to weaken most often with the big stick and flatstick, making it all the more critical that you keep your iron game in top form.

Read the full article in Golf Tips Magazine By Ron And Michael Castillo, PGA

Vijay’s work ethic on the practice range is without equal among his peers on the PGA.  Vijay works out mainly by himself using a variety of swing training aids and drills to reinforce key fundamentals — alignment, timing, club head path — that amateurs ignore at their peril. Here’s a list of four drills that Vijay uses in his practice sessions from a Washington Post interview.

He mentions the Inside Approach as tool to keep the club “on plane” — neither too vertical nor too horizontal — which is essential to a repeating swing.