Most of your range practice is wasted — here's how to fix it

Halve your range session, give every ball a real target and a different club, and spend half your time inside 100 yards — you'll improve faster than the golfer beside you hitting twice as many. The default session of beating a bucket with the driver feels productive and changes almost nothing. The fix is unglamorous, proven, and takes less time.

Why bucket-bashing fails

The default session — pull the driver, empty the bucket, leave sweaty and satisfied — is close to useless. You groove one swing on a flat lie to no target, get ball-flight feedback you'll never have on the course, and call it practice. It's exercise, not improvement, because it removes the two things that make golf hard: a consequence and a fresh shot every time. On the course you hit one drive, then walk two hundred yards, change clubs, face a new lie and a new target, and have to commit to a shot you can't take back. On the range you hit forty identical 7-irons off a perfect mat to nothing in particular, and the second ball is easier than the first precisely because nothing about it is real golf.

There's a deeper trap, too. Hitting the same shot over and over makes that shot look like it's improving — your tenth ball flies better than your first — and that visible improvement is exactly what fools you. It's short-term performance, not learning. The moment you change clubs, or stand on the first tee a week later with one ball and a hazard, the groove is gone, because you never practised the thing that's actually hard: producing a good shot cold, once, with consequences.

What actually transfers

The opposite of fun: small baskets, a real target on every ball, and a different club and shot each time so you have to re-commit — the way golf actually happens. Spend half your time inside 100 yards, because that's where your strokes live; the genuinely large majority of an amateur's shots happen from wedge range and in, yet that's the part of the range almost everyone ignores in favour of crushing drivers. Run your full pre-shot routine on each ball, pick a specific flag or marker, change the club, and treat a miss as a miss. Finish on a shot you have to 'win' so you leave with pressure-tested reps, not muscle memory for a driving range.

This is the 'block versus random' distinction, and the motor-learning research behind it is unambiguous: block practice (the same shot repeated) produces better practice-day performance but worse retention and transfer, while random or interleaved practice (a fresh, different shot every time) feels harder and looks worse on the day but transfers far better to real performance. That counter-intuitive gap — practice that feels worse working better — is the single most useful thing an amateur can understand about getting better, and it's why the golfer hitting half as many balls with full intent out-improves the one mindlessly emptying two buckets. It also explains why so many golfers feel sharp on the range and then fall apart on the course: they've been rehearsing the easy version of the task and never the real one, so the only thing they've truly grooved is range golf.

Build the session deliberately

Put it together rather than wandering up with a bucket. Start with a proper warm-up — a few swings with a tempo trainer or some half wedges, not three full drivers from cold. Then play 'holes' on the range: imagine the first at your home course, hit the drive to a target, then the approach to another target with the club you'd actually have, and only move on once you've committed to both. Mix your clubs constantly, never hit the same shot twice in a row, and bias the whole thing toward scoring distances — if you've forty balls, thirty of them should be inside 150 yards. Keep notes on what you were testing. The goal is to make practice feel as awkward and consequential as the course, because that awkwardness is the signal that learning, not grooving, is happening. If a session ever feels smooth and satisfying the whole way through, that's usually the tell that you've slipped back into block-mode repetition and stopped actually challenging yourself.

Tools that enforce the discipline

Aids only help if they make you practise better, not more. A tempo trainer like the Orange Whip — voted the number-one aid by tour pros — or a Lag Shot fixes sequencing inside a real swing rather than a drill you'll forget, and both double as a warm-up so you don't open with cold full swings. If your aim is honest, measured clubhead speed, the Stack System tracks it with structured overspeed protocols instead of letting you guess whether 'that felt fast' — but it only pays out if you actually do the work a few times a week, which is the honest catch with any speed system. The thread tying them together is the same as the session itself: they enforce intent and give feedback, rather than just letting you hit more. We named the ones worth owning in three training aids worth buying.

The fix, in one line

Halve the session, give every ball a target and a consequence, vary the shot, run your full routine, and weight it toward scoring distances — practice that feels harder is practice that transfers. The same intent applies on the putting green at home, where pressure and structure beat aimless rolling for exactly the same reason. The best training aids guide has the kit that keeps you honest.