We all know the answer to better golf is better practice, but few golfers know how to do this. Resulting in hours on the range without lowering their golf scores. In this article, we’ll walk through how to build your own personalised golf practice routine and share some additional golden nuggets along the way.
I’ve built personalised practice plans for hundreds of amateur golfers and even players who have won on tour. After 15 years of doing this, I’ve certainly learned a good few things about optimising practice, and made some mistakes along the way. Here I share everything I’ve learned along the way.
No, I’m not going to give you 4 drills every golfer should practice, because that isn’t helpful. We’ll cover the best process for you to shoot lower scores, then I’ll link to a load of great drills you can pick that best suit your game.
Let’s dive in.
Where to start?
Above is a visual for how most golfer practice (and why they don’t shoot lower scores) and what is optimal, which is the foundation we used to build Break X Golf.
If your goal is to shoot lower scores or to lower your handicap, the most important thing to understand is what to practice. Later, we’ll cover the ‘how to practice‘ but most golfers just practice the wrong things to lower their scores.
A great golf practice plan focused on developing the area in your golf game that is most affecting your scoring (your biggest weakness). To do this, you need to know how you build your current scores – the answer is to keep playing stats.
Playing stats tell you how well you are driving, hitting approach shots, how good your short game is and if putting is a strength or weakness.
Without this, you can practice 10 hours a week, and your scores won’t improve, or they could get worse!
What kind of playing stats?
If you are over a 15 handicap, basic playing stats (Fairways in regulation, greens in regulation, up and down % and putts per round) are fine and will give you a good start point. If you are under a 15 handicap, I would suggest using strokes gained data. This is a little more work, but gives you a much truer reflection of how many shots you are losing in each area of your golf game.
We have a free strokes gained calculator here, just enter your last 9 or 18 holes and get all the data you need.
Deciding What To Practice
Once you have this information, you can rank the areas of your game from strongest to weakest. If you have strokes gained data, this is pretty simple: look for the areas of your game with the biggest minus numbers.
If you are keeping basic stats, this is a little trickier, but to start off, check the following:
- Are you having more than 36 putts per round?
- Are you hitting less than 25% of fairways, or are you losing 2+ golf balls a round?
- Are you hitting less than 20% of greens in regulation?
In the screenshot below from the Break X Golf app, which ranks the areas of your game for you. We have a golfer who now knows that driving is the strongest area of their game and that short game is the weakest. This gives them a clear focus for their practice plan and a way to practice that will actually lower their scores.
Refining Your Practice Routine Based On Time
Next, you want to decide how much time you have to practice each week and then prioritise how many areas of your game to focus on. If you have:
- 2 hours or less – pick one area of your game
- 3-5 hours – pick the weakest two areas of your game
- 6+ hours – pick 3 areas of your game to focus on
How To Practice
Most golfers love to beat balls at the range, randomly throw some golf balls down and chip them onto the green, or pick different holes around the putting green and hit some putts, but this approach is pretty haphazard.
It’s like searching for your golf ball with a blindfold on; you might find it, but it will take you a very long time.
Great practice needs to be laser-focused on the areas you need to improve, and you need clear feedback on where your shots are missing and if you are getting better.
For this, I would recommend skill games or practice drills that match the kinds of shots you hit on the golf course and give you a clear score so you can track your performance. The example below is one of 130+ drills we have in the Break X Golf app for golfers who need help improving their driving.
Practice Drills For Every Area Of Your Game
Below are links to some of our favourite drills and practice games in the app so you can pick ones for your training plan.
[Links coming soon to more golf drills for each area of your game]
Should I work on technique too?
Golf is a very technical game, and the users we see improve the quickest use our app for stats tracking and practice plans and combine this with finding a local golf coach to improve the areas of their game.
The Break X Golf app doesn’t tell you how to fix your swing mechanics, but based on your data, it will suggest how much time to allocate to each area of your game for technique.
Example Practice Routine For Golf
So what does a great practice plan look like? Ideally, it should be a prioritised list of tasks, mixing together skill development games, technical work and games on the golf course to help you practice scoring.
The goal is to check off any many tasks as you can that are relevant to improving the areas of your game that are holding you back. Our research from the 2024 golf season shows that this was the best predictor of golfers who lowered their handicap the quickest.
Building your golf practice routine
To summarise, here is the process for building an amazing weekly practice plan:
- Keep 1-3 rounds of playing stats and find out your weakest area.
- Decide how much time you have to practice and pick 1-3 areas to focus on.
- Pick practice drills for these areas of the game and make a prioritised list.
- Check off as many tasks as you can and focus on beating your best score each time.
- If you are stuck with a specific miss, find a local golf coach to help with your technique.
- Enjoy moving towards lower scores quicker than you ever have before.
Extra tips for your practice plan
After building practice plans for the best part of 20 years, here are some extra tips to get the most out of your practice.
How long Should I stick with My practice plan?
If you are building your own practice plans, stick to the same games for 4-6 weeks, or until you complete each game 4-10 times. This gives you enough time to repeatedly play the skills games and gain some learning from them.
Think of it like going to the gym, you need to do the same exercises a few times before you start to see progress.
In the Break X Golf app, you just have to log your golf stats and the algorithm automatically detects when you should switch up your plan, and it will build you a new plan in one click.
Weekly Golf Practice Plans: To-Do List vs Daily Plan
Many golfers love the idea of blocking practice sessions into a calendar, but the truth is, this is tricky to follow. A drill may take you longer than you expected, the weather is bad, or life gets in the way. Before you know it, you are behind, less motivated and you may have missed the most important tasks of the week.
This is why after many years of running this with amateurs and pros, I prefer golfers to use a prioritised to-do list with the most important task (hitting the weakest areas of your game) at the top of the list.
Make it Manageable
Most golfers make a wonderful-looking practice that is nearly impossible to complete. The result is that they give us in under 3 weeks. You really do not need much practice if it is targeted at the right areas and focused on skill development.
Two drills a week for your weakest areas of your game (40-90 minutes practice) will result in good, steady progress and is sustainable.
How Much Do Pros Practice?
This is the next question all golfers want to know. I’ve written practice plans for golfers on all the major men’s tours now. Tournament weeks are busy and they focus more on keeping their basics in check and learning the course, pace of greens etc.
Away from tournaments, 16-28 hours is a good approximation for ‘practice time’; there is far more time involved in setting up drills, moving around the golf course, gym training, etc. So, just be aware that pros who spend 35 -55 hours a week on their golf game are only fitting in 16-28 hours of ‘practice time’.
To be able to focus and swing a golf club effectively for this amount of time, you have to be pretty fit, in a golf-specific sense. If you aren’t, your practice quality diminishes and you stop gaining value from any extra practice time.
High School Golf & College Practice Plans
My previous role was Head of Golf at Exeter University, a shout out to Harry Scott and the teams there. Similar to the pros situation above, there is a lot of time that goes into golf-related activities. However, if players can fit in 4-6 practice hours a week and play 2-3 rounds of golf a week. They’ll make great progress, even when they are playing off a plus handicap.
Summary
I hope this article has given you a great foundation and simple approach to building your own practice routine, which will actually lower your scores. If you want an automated way to build personalised practice routines, check out the Break X Golf app with a free 7-day trial.
Happy golfing – Will @ Break X Golf