Golf Vacation Practice: Range Drills

Some people define a golf vacation as a simple recreation. Something that is meant to be fun and not warrant seriousness. But there are other golf enthusiasts who are simply filled with passion for their chosen sport enough to make a few sacrifices. They cherish victories and take every defeat as a painful reminder to excel further. With proficiency aptly defined by handicaps (the number of strikes it takes to finish a hole), a dedicated golfer will do his or her best to reduce the frequency of those swings... If you'd like a refresher on the handicap concept, look back to our "Basics of Handicap" post to have a better understanding for these tips.  

One of the first things to improve when reducing handicaps is the spatial skill. Practicing this skill requires dogged repetition. If you are interested in skillfully launching your ball at an approximate distance your eyes have determined, you need to keep doing the range drills.

Why the Golf Range?

A golf range is pretty similar to a shooting range. You stand at an aisle and send forth a ball's flight to the prescribed distance (your target). Unlike an actual leisure game, you don't move towards the landing site of the ball. The reason for the stationary position is that it allows you to focus on individual aspects of your game – like distance, accuracy, and flight of the ball.

Muscle Memory

This is the first hurdle to being an adept player. It takes hundreds of club swinging for your body to be familiarized. A dozen trials would not yield a desirable result simply because the mind and the body is not yet fully synchronized. Muscle memory works the same in golf as it does with other sports. You often need at least a month of repetition to have smooth and fluid reflexes, making the swing of a golf club second nature.

Accuracy

As your body gets accustomed to launching golf balls with ease, the next concern is accuracy. It takes a certain tweak in the swinging curve to redirect the flight of the ball to an actual target. Muscle memory is crucial in order to be able to pull off split-second modifications in your swing. Practicing accuracy is a matter of recurring calculations of distance. It is one thing to let yourself drift in the “second nature” of club swinging, it's another thing to curb that impulse and take full control of it.

Repetitive drills can be tedious and time consuming, but positive results will eventually unfold in the latter part of the process. If you are truly committed to improving your game, always visit the range. It will never be a waste of time even if you delegate fractional hours of it into your golf vacation.