Practice Should Be Harder Than The Game - Part 1, Driving

Practice Should Be Harder Than The Game - Part 1

, Driving

Probably the most outstanding statistic in any sport is that of the great Australian batting legend Sir Don Bradman. "The Don" averaged 99.94 runs for his test career, the next closest is the South African Graeme Pollock with 60.97, and the highest for any current player is Sachin Tendulkar with 55.56. What, you may ask, has any of this to do with golf, apart from the fact that Bradman enjoyed his golf immensely playing off a handicap of 1 at The Royal Adelaide Golf Club. Well the answer is the way Bradman practiced, at a young age the cricket mad Bradman invented a game in the yard behind his parents house that involved him throwing a golf ball at the brick part of an old water tank a few yards away and then trying to hit the rebound, not with a cricket bat but with a stump. What Bradman had done was made his practice much harder than the real game, he said that no bowler could create the speed and variation which the golf ball did bouncing of the brickwork at him at all angles and then having to play his shots, not with a full width bat but just a skinny stump, how big the ball must have seemed to Bradman and how wide his bat when it came to playing for real.

So why, I ask do golfers, in the main, practice in a way that is so much easier than the actual game. Is standing on the range aiming the driver down what is in effect an unmissable fairway really going to improve your skill level, well sure you're maybe grooving your swing but how is this going to help when you are faced with a tee shot to a narrow fairway with out of bounds on the left and water on the right, the answer is not a great deal because you haven't been practising for a tight shot, you've had all the room in the world to aim at.

Take a leaf out of Don Bradman's book and make your practice more demanding than the game. Next time you get the driver out on the range first get a couple of umbrellas or suitable stakes and place them 25yards apart around the distance you normally drive, these markers are now your fairway. You now have 10 drives with the aim to get a minimum of 7 between the markers, if you fail, take a note of where your misses were as this is invaluable information to take to your Pro when working on the technical side of your game, and that's it for the day, you only get one chance to play and as soon as you fail go on to practising other areas, this way you are practising with a consequence and putting an element of pressure into the drill. If you succeed, you now draw the markers 5yards closer together and start again trying to score 7 out of 10 between the markers, if successful reduce your target area again, to 15yards. It's up to you how much you want to keep reducing the width but if successful at 15yards normally you should go back to 25 again and just keep through the drill going until you fail to make 7 out of 10. Just imagine when you get to 15yards for the first time, you have 6 balls in the target area and only one ball left, now you are really making a tight shot under pressure just like the real thing.

For more great game improvement tips visit Golf Psychology Online.

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