How To Practice Golf At Home
Do you practice at home? If so, how can you improve the quality and structure of your sessions to see improvements on the course?
These are important question as many people practice sporadically and don’t work on any specific. This is good as it “keeps your eye in” but how do you practice golf to get better?
The number one rule is structuring the practice, think about what you want from it, or what you want to achieve from it. Whether you're working on hitting a soft fade with the driver, working on pitching technique from 50 yards or simply holing more 6ft putts, BE specific in what you want to achieve.
If you have a driving net in your garden try not to just hit driver after driver, maybe imagine in your head your home course, play every shot as you would do normally. Remember a target line that you know on the course, it could be a draw off a bunker, fade off a certain tree. Just visualise the course and the practice will fly by. It's important your practice is fun, it will make you want to come back again and again.
Garmin has produced a launch monitor which really suits home practice. The Approach R10 will of course help you crunch the numbers if your looking at tweaking something in your swing, with 12 different golf metrics this is exactly what we mean when we say 'specific'. It also records your swing, has 10 hours battery life and allows you to play virtual rounds without leaving your house or garden!
A quality putting mat is a must if you are to transfer practice at home to the golf course, some mats offer pads that can be placed underneath the mat to allow you to create breaks that you would find on the course, others offer a “fast” and “slow” pace to the mat depending on which way the grain is brushed. At the end of your practice why not set a challenge like holing 5 consecutive 3ft putts, move that back to 4ft then 5ft. The practice doesn’t finish until you hole all 15 putts in a row! This creates a real “pressure” to hole the putts similar to that you would find if you were playing a competitive match.
By being specific, putting ourselves in situations as we would find on the golf course this will replace old habit’s with new ones and bring a renewed confidence to your game.
