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Do you not practice enough or not know how to practice correctly? If you want to get down to scratch, you need to put the time in on the driving range and short game practice area but it’s important you maximise this time and use it as efficiently as you can. So in this video, Golf Monthly staff writer and former tour player Joe Ferguson outlines some drills and habits you should incorporate into your practice to help you lower your scores and your handicap!
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Right, are you fed up with not getting any better when you practice or do you not even know what to
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practice? Well, I'm a scratch golfer and I'm here to show you how to practice like one
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Right, so one of the most important factors in practicing like a scratch golfer might be one
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of the least glamorous, but it really is essential. It's taking care of the fundamentals of the setup
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position. So this is my preferred method. I use three, what I've got alignment sticks here, you
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can use clubs, you can use whatever you've got handy so long as it's straight. So the first thing
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I do is I establish my ball to target line where I'm going to try and hit the ball. My first stick
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will go just outside the ball and that gives me a really good guide on my club face alignment
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and the path I'm looking to take the club away on and deliver the club on. That's a really good
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visual cue for me. The next one I put down is dead parallel to that and that's my toe line
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So that's to ensure my toes, my knees, my hips and my shoulders are all lined up parallel to that
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ball to target line and that's really essential for consistent ball striking and consistent
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dispersion. The final one I always put down, I put perpendicular to that over the top of my
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toe line stick and this gives me a really good guide on the ball position, where I need to have
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that ball in relation to my feet in the stance to produce the shots that I want to produce
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And that varies from club to club as we know, but this is a really good recalibration tool
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in order to help you set up the same way every single time
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And a lot of swing faults can be traced back to having something like this wrong
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For example, if that was my ball to target line and my alignment got out
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and I was aiming a long way right, that's when you start to see people throwing the club over the top
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And that's not necessarily a move that's come from a fault in their swing. That could simply be an alignment issue
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forcing your body to react and put it back in the right position. There's countless other compensations that you might have to make if you get one of those simple things wrong
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Again, a ball position issue. If it's too far back, you might find people start leaning back to try and scoop the ball up
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because they can't get the ball high enough from the ball too far back in their stance
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So just simply having the setup station when you practice, doesn't have to be for every shot
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I tend to use it to sort of calibrate my address position for maybe the first 10 minutes of a practice session
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and then I might move on to something else, which I'll show you in a second. But it's absolutely essential to start in the right way, get yourself set up nicely
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And it will really help you deliver the club consistently from a better position
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Right, so there we've covered the fundamentals of getting yourself set up correctly and the importance thereof
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That's something we call block practice, when you're covering the fundamentals, repeating the same movement, aiming at the same target
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But something else that Scratch or better players do when they're practicing is something we call
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variable practice. We know out on the golf course you never or very rarely get the same shot twice
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in a row. So in practice it's really important to vary what you're doing in accordance with what's
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going on in the golf course as well. And that would include things like just changing target
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every now and then. So I think it's really important to pick out different targets. And
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here on the range at Northamptonshire County Golf Club we've got an abundance of different targets
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we're really fortunate, we've got loads to aim at. Look at different targets
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and look at different shapes of shots as well And that really where you start to learn the on skills that are gonna take you from where you are to where to where you want to be So instead of just hitting where I been hitting I going to aim at that yellow flag on the right now and I going to hit a little low punch shot
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So I've brought the trajectory down there, it's quite a windy day, that's an important skill to have
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So instead of just now repeating that shot four or five times in a row, I'm going to
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change target and I'm going to hit a completely opposite shot. So I'm going to aim a little further left
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I'm going to aim at the 200 yard marker in the distance and I'm going to hit a really high balloon ball
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So again, another skill that a better player will have is shot shaping
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So we've just looked at trajectory. Now you might want to vary it up
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and start moving shots left to right or right to left. For a third time in a row
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I'm going to pick a different target. I'm going to go at the white flag in the distance
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I'm going to aim a little left of it and I'm going to hit a little hold off fade. So that's teaching me the importance of varying my path
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and my club face to create the shape of shot I want. But again, we're not going to stop there
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Change target, picking the 200 yard marker further on the left now
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So I'm going to aim right at that, I'm going to turn my club face in a little bit and I'm going to start to hit a draw
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So nice soft draw, exactly what I was looking for, but more importantly than that I've got
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four different targets I've just hit to there. I've had four completely different shapes of shots and trajectories and I'm really beginning
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to get an understanding of what I need to do with my setup, my club path, my club base
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to create the shots that you might get on the golf course. And that's absolutely critical
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Golf is not a static sport. We don't play from flat lies very often
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We often need to shake the shots so it's really important in practice to vary what you're
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doing to make sure you can do it. Right, so that's us done at the driving range
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We've covered a lot of the long game there and how to practice as a scratch golfer in
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the long game. But now we're down at Northampton County's beautiful chipping green to discuss the importance
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of the short game. Any good player will tell you if you really want to shave strokes off your game and do
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it quickly, the short game is where to do it. One of the most important parts of the short game, particularly chipping, is being able
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to land the ball where you want. If you can control your landing area, you can then pick out spots on
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the green, you want to land it in certain slopes and you'll understand better how it's going to
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react and therefore you'll be able to get the ball closer to the hole and save shots doing so
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One of my favorite drills that I use to help me control distance and practice learning how to
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control the distance is what I call the ladder drill. I've got it set up here and again I'm using
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my alignment stick so you'll be seeing these are really crucial tools in the arsenal of the better
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to golfer for practicing. So I've got a basic chip here. I'm not even looking to hit to a hole here
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I'm purely controlling my landing area. So I've got a basic 10-yard chip
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and I've set out my alignment sticks at increments, and I change these regularly depending on
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how harsh I want to be on myself. And you can change it depending on your current ability level
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But I call it the ladder drill because I start working up the ladder and back down the ladder
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I want to land one, my first one in the first rung, second one in the second rung, and so on
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and then work back down. So you're going up and down the ladder, you're tuning in your feel
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and you starting to understand how hard you need to hit it to go certain distances So the first one I would want to try and start to land it try and land it in the first little rung there just about made it into the first rung
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And then obviously, I want to try and work my way up from there. So generally speaking, I'll vary the lie a bit
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I'll have a little look at the second rung, try and hit it a bit harder
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and I've managed to land it in the second rung. I continue to work my way up and down that ladder
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teaching myself how I'm going to hit it further, how I'm going to hit it softer, am I hitting it harder
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am I varying the length of my swing. It'll be different for various other people
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people will have different methods of doing it, but you'll begin to figure out your own way
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if you continue to work on the ladder drill and work your way up and down that ladder
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So that's one way of practicing the short game. But as with the long game, it's really important to vary that practice
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because probably even more so around the greens, we very rarely get the same length of shot
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the same lie, the same slopes, et cetera. So it's super important to vary the practice with the short game
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One of my favorite ways to do this is I play a little game. I've got three golf balls in my hand
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I like to throw them randomly around the green. They come into different lies, slightly different lengths of shots
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I generally play to the same target for a little while, maybe mix it up after three. But I also bring my putter and I try and finish off those shots
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So I have three golf balls in my hand. I do this six times to signify 18 holes of golf
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If I consider each of these holes a par two, my goal is to get up and down as many times as I can to stay as close as par as possible
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or even with the odd chip in, maybe sneak under par. So the first ball I've arrived
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that has actually been really fortunate. It's sat up lovely, I've got a really nice lie
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so I shouldn't have a problem just going ahead and playing a pretty basic chip shot. I'm popping that up relatively close. Second ball I come to is a different proposition altogether
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Nestle down a little bit, it's in an old sort of track mark that probably the green keepers
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created here and I've got a little tuft of grass behind the ball so all of a sudden I need to
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figure out how this ball might react and that's one key to better players. Some of the best short
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game players in the world are simply the best reader of the lie. We hear a lot about reading
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putts but people don't often talk about the art of reading the lie and how a ball is going to come
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out of certain lies it has. So this one here I know if I just had a normal sort of chipping action
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I'm going to catch a lot of this grass behind the ball and that's going to really affect the ball
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flight. So what I would generally do here for me is I would put the ball a little bit further back
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and get a little bit steeper and try and pop it out a little bit. That's come out really really
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soft so that's really important that you figure out that that goes in the bank and you figure out
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that for next time that you need to give that a little bit more rumpf. Moving across to the third
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ball I'd say this is somewhere between the other two. It's not lying fantastic but it's not as
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problematic as in the track mark over there. So probably put a little bit more weight forward
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And because I now know how sticky and probably grabby this rough is, I'm going to give this a
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little bit more oomph. And that's come out a lot better, still not quite made it to where I wanted
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to go. But again, it's feeding the computer. So what I would do now, grab my putter and I would
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go up and try and finish all those off in the fewest amount of strokes I can. Repeat that six
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times and I've got my 18 holes. You can then quantify that, you can keep a record of that
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you can keep your best scores and you got something to beat against there so your practice becomes measurable as well You can start to see you getting better Not only are you learning through variance you learning through keeping the records and figuring out as you go in alarm
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Right, so now we find ourselves on the putting green and just as equally as the driving range
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and the short game that we've just taken care of, putting is absolutely critical
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when you're trying to get down to a scratch handicap. One of the most important elements in putting
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is simply being able to point the putter in the right direction. I play a lot of pro-ams, I play with a lot of amateurs
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who hit some great putts but are just simply pointing in the wrong direction
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So one of the ways I like to ensure my alignment's good is I do a lot of work with what we call a putting mirror
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We've got a line coming on the back of the ball here, out the back of the ball, which shows our ball to target line
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Then we have these perpendicular lines which show us where to align the club face
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And I just put the club face in behind the ball and keep getting a visual reference to make sure that I
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what I'm seeing is square with my eyes matches what I know to be square with a
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mirror. If I'm not seeing that then I know there's some recalibrating needs doing. So I'm happy that's a square alignment. It's a relatively straight
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putt, there's a little bit of break on it to the left so you can counter that
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with a little bit more pace. So then once I'm happy that, I'll do that for probably five or ten minutes at the start
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of most sessions when I'm putting, just recalibrate the eyes to know what square looks like
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Pace is really just as crucial as line. When we've got breaking putts, for example, whether you're dropping it in the front edge
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hitting it at mid pace into the middle of the hole, or slamming it off the back of the
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hole will all affect how much break you need to play. so if you've got that level of control where you can go up and down the scale
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and choose your pace before you even hit the putt that gives you a much better understanding of where
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you need to start the putt so another variation of what I'm doing here with the mirror is going up
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and down the scale in pace so I'll use the first ball so I would start with the first putt and just
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try and drop it really gently in the front edge so just tumble to the hole which is great
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So now, second putt, I tend to go up and down the scale
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so I would try and hit this at more of a mid-pace for me. And that's gone nicely in the center at a middle pace
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Then on the last one, I would try and take all of the break out and I'm trying to really get this to slam in
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off the back of the hole. Pulled that a little bit, but it had the pace
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that took it about two foot past. So then once I've done that, I would work back down the scale
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I'd probably then go mid, front edge, back up the scale, and then vary it a little bit
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So once you really delve into the finer points of control in the pace
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you can really start to select your breaks, and that's really important in holding more putts
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Right, so there's a few ideas on how I think you can structure your practice better
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to practice like a scratch golfer. The one important thing I want you to remember
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from taking away from this video is varying it. Block practice and variable practice, both important skills
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Don't just stand there banging the same shot on the range, vary it up. Vary it up around the chipping green with your lies as well
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and that is how to speed up the process of getting down to scratch
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