Joe Laurentino

Belief systems can be held for very long periods of time until someone or something, like technology comes along and proves it otherwise. Of course there are some people who still believe the earth is flat, we never went to the moon, and that Jim Morrison and Elvis are still alive.

Now we are in the part of the practice program that I see golfers spend most of their time. This is for two primary reasons; the short game areas are often lacking and let’s face it, it’s more exciting to many of us to rip a driver on the range than it is to make a 10 foot putt on the putting green. And I don’t really subscribe to the statement “drive for show, putt for dough”. The fact of the matter is that if you are hitting it in the trees and OB off the tee, I don’t care how good you putt, it will be impossible for you to play your best golf.

This is Part 1 of “Making the Most of Your Practice Sessions.” In my last blog I laid out the time frame if you had only one hour to practice and the ration of practicing to playing. It’s important that we start close to the hole and work our way to the full swing when working on all aspects of the game in a single practice session. I recommend starting from the hole (putting) then work your way to chipping, sand, etc and finish with the full swing. The reason for this is if you start with the full swing, you may never get to the short game.

So what’s the ideal practice plan? While it can differ from student to student here are some general guidelines if you have an hour to practice. If you are REALLY serious about improving your game, ideally for every hour you play you should practice close to the same amount of time. So if you play nine holes and it takes 2 hours, you should try to practice 2 hours. I know that’s a lot, but it gives you an idea of the ratio of playing to practicing, but I think if you can spend 50% of you time practicing that would be great. So in the same scenario, that would be 1 hour for every 2 hours of playing. So here’s an example of how I think you can effectively use 1 hour of practice time:

Recently a student called me in dire need of a lesson, and unfortunately I wasn’t able to do the lesson the day the student was requesting. In the meantime, I was asked to watch a video of a lesson he had taken at a resort when he was on vacation. It’s pretty much become the standard, at resorts and golf schools, to either give a student a DVD of the lesson or to email the student a link in which they can view the lesson. Fortunately this was the latter so he emailed me the link, clicked on it, and viewed the lesson. This was at a very reputable golf school.