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Practice Golf Distances On The Driving Range

Practice Golf Distances On The Driving Range

Like with most things in life, practice makes perfect and golf is no exception. To be a competent golfer you need to put in the hours on the practice green, the driving range, and on the golf course. In this article, we will discuss how to practice golf on the driving range so that you can gauge your distances with each club.

Gauging Your Distances

Being able to correctly gauge the distance that the ball will travel for each club in your bag is an important aspect of golf course management. When you are on the course, you will need to know which club to pull out off your bag for your next shot. You will probably have noticed the pros deliberating over club selection as it is such an important thing to get right.

Unless you have a caddy or a golf rangefinder telling you how many yards you have to hit your shot to get it onto the middle of the green, you will have to learn how to calculate these distances which comes through experience.

The Driving Range

The driving range, sometimes called the practice range, is a great place to gauge distances. Most ranges have yardage flags set out every 25 or 50 yards; try and choose a tee box that has the marker flags in front of it so that you can see with more precision how many yards your ball went.

Warm-up and Stretching Exercises

The first thing you will need to do is properly warm-up before hitting buckets of balls. Go through your stretching routine, making sure to stretch the muscles of your back, shoulders, arms, and legs. Next pull out your driver and swing the club back and forth but without hitting a ball; swing the club like a normal practice swing but after the follow through, swing the club back in the opposite direction, and so forth.

Driving Range Conditions

The first thing to note is that you will probably being using range balls and not your regular golf ball. Range balls are cheap and well used do they will not emulate the correct distance that you will get with your normal balls. Another thing to take into consideration is that the conditions are ideal on a driving range. For example, you will be hitting the balls from a flat lie across a flat stretch of grass. You will have no pressure, no side-lies, down or up-hill lies, and no elevated greens.

It is important to treat the driving range like if you were playing a round of golf. Don’t just step up to the ball and swing away; approach each shot with your pre-shot routine, adopt the right setup position, and use your normal swing. You might have a tendency to try and over hit your shots, especially with the driver, as you will be trying to see how far you can hit the ball. This will not do you any good though as you are trying to get an accurate distance for each club.

How to Gauge Distances

Normally you hear advice to start hitting balls with your driver and work down the clubs until you get to your wedges. This is not a good idea as you should start from the wedges to the driver; by the time you get to the driver your muscles will be warmed up and your flexibility will allow for more shoulder turn.

The Wedges

Start with your wedges and start hitting balls towards a target directly in front of you. Once you have hit several balls to the same spot consistently, note down the yardage in a notebook. With the wedges and the pitching wedge, you may want to hit several shots with a full swing, three quarter and half swing and note down the distance for each type of club and swing.

The Irons, Woods and Driver

Continue in this way with your irons (or irons and hybrids) and your woods until you finish with your driver. By now you should have a notebook with the distance for each club but remember that you will have to adjust these distances for when you are on the course with your normal golf balls.

You may have to gauge your distances over a period of a couple of days or more so that you don’t over do things. Gauging distances on the driving range is a lot more strenuous than a round of golf – in the sense that you will be hitting hundreds of balls in the space of a relatively short time. So, make sure you rest every so often and stretch to ease muscle tension.

On the Golf Course

When you are out on the golf course, use your distances from your notebook as a guide and try and gauge the distances on the course with your preferred balls. The easiest way to do this is with the aid of a golf rangefinder or Golf GPS, but if you don’t have one then you will just have to try and judge the distances the best you can.

Remember that on the course you will be faced with conditions that will affect your distances; the wind strength and direction, whether the ball is on an up-slope or down-slope, and the elevation change between your ball and your target. With experience you will instantly know how far your next shot has to go and the correct club selection.