Why Your Range Time Isn’t Helping: The Truth About Golf Practice
When players are asked how many hours they spend practicing each week, I’m always surprised by the dedication. Most amateurs report practicing at least one hour—and often two to three hours—every week during golf season. To fit that in on top of playing two rounds a week is impressive. But here’s what’s more surprising: when you look at their handicap over time, you see almost no improvement.
To be working that hard and seeing so little progress must feel demoralizing. So what’s really going on?
The problem is how we define “practice.” Most amateurs count any time at the driving range as practice. That 45-minute warm-up before their Saturday round? Yep—that’s logged as “practice time.” But here’s the reality: your pre-round warm-up is not practice.
Your warm-up is meant to get you mentally and physically ready to play golf. It’s not a late-night cram session before a college final. In fact, most tour pros keep their warm-up sessions under 30 minutes. They're not grinding swing changes right before a round. They’re loosening up, calibrating, and preparing to compete.
So, what should a warm-up focus on?
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Loosening the body – Make sure your movement feels free, with no physical hindrances.
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Calibrating your game – What’s your shot shape today? Where are you contacting the ball? How’s your alignment?
These are the real-time variables that matter when preparing to play. You’re not working on fixing your swing—you’re checking to see what game is showing up today and adjusting accordingly.
But if range time before a round doesn’t count as practice, what does?
Practice time is time dedicated to failure.
That may sound strange, but failure and experimentation are essential to real improvement. And those two things are the last things you want to deal with right before a tee time.
Effective practice means working on a specific skill or movement, whether that takes 5 minutes or 50. It’s structured, focused, and intentionally difficult.
Compare that to your pre-round warm-up: its focus is broader—feeling the club, judging your tempo, reading the greens. It's about getting ready, not improving.
At Legends of the Links, we use golf drills for kids and adults alike to reframe what good practice looks like. Our golf practice games create the right kind of challenges—ones that push players to grow without overwhelming them. They help players of all ages separate warm-up from true training. Because as fun as last-minute cramming might be, in golf, it rarely pays off.