Make the most of your range sessions this winter

PGA Professional Alex James on how to keep improving over the winter.

We want to try to create some consequence in our practice as well as some intensity. By hitting 10 balls with a wedge, 10 with a 7-iron and then 50 drivers it isn’t going to help your game or achieve very much.

If you can get to the range a couple of times a week, with a little bit of golf, then you can certainly see some real improvements or at least maintain your form until we get some better weather. Here are five easy ways to make your range visits more worthwhile.

1. Warm up

This is so obvious but so rarely happens. Get ready to go properly; do some stretching, make some practice swings and do some dynamic stretches to ensure that you are ready. Practice balls can be expensive and you don’t want to waste them. You don’t want to machine gun a load off before you’ve even warmed up.

Nowhere near enough of us warm up our bodies before we play golf, maybe five per cent max. There’s no real excuse why we can’t do some stretches either in the locker room or before we head to the first tee. I need 20 minutes at least before I hit my first ball, just to get loose. Either in practice or when we’re playing, we want to feel like we can swing the club properly from the first shot.

2. Slow down

Make the most of each shot. Have a goal with each shot and try and have an idea of what you’re going to do. Have a practice swing to help with your rhythm and to improve your feel on certain movements – it’s a lot easier to do this without a ball than with one. Always have a target and always have a club on the ground for alignment – there are a lot of angles in driving ranges and it’s easy to get offline when you’re hitting to different targets.

3. The pre-shot routine

People wonder about where to start with a pre-shot routine – if you don’t have anything then have a practice swing, come back behind the ball, visualise the shot and pick an intermediate target.

In terms of building the stance work from the ground up. Get your feet into position, check your grip, feel your posture, check your alignment and then you’re ready to go. For beginners this can be a complicated checklist but you can do it as they’re not swing thoughts. After a while it will all become second nature and it will slow you down and help your focus.

Go through your full routine before each shot so, the more this becomes automatic, the more comfortable you are going to be on the course. Nobody practises their pre-shot routine but, when you watch the best players in the world, they do the same thing on every shot.

4. Play some games

-  Play your home course or somewhere well known – it gets you to change your club, gets you thinking, slows you down and makes it more intense. And it’s fun. There are enough flags and markers out there to visualise certain holes.

- Split your balls into sets of 10 and give each ball a score and see what you score out of 100 – 10/10 will be the perfect shot, 9/10 would be a good birdie chance, 8/10 safely on the green and so on. A good target would be around 70. Build up your score and, when you get to the last few balls, there will be a bit of pressure. Then add some consequences if you don’t score too well. Then you can mix up your targets to work on different clubs and you can be a bit more lenient with the longer shots – just give yourself an honest ranking.

5. Shot shaping

Play around with this and have some fun with some different ball flights and tempos. See what a 50 per cent does to a shot and gain more understanding of how your swing works and what might work well on the course. If you haven’t practised these shots then you are very unlikely to try it on the course.