- 9 hours ago
Make Golf Easy With This Simple Approach To Practice.
In this video, Joe 'the pro' Ferguson demonstrates a simple but effective approach to practice that should help the game of golf feel and seem easier out on the course. Give it a try next time you're working on your game as we're confident it will have almost instantly positive results on your performance.
In this video, Joe 'the pro' Ferguson demonstrates a simple but effective approach to practice that should help the game of golf feel and seem easier out on the course. Give it a try next time you're working on your game as we're confident it will have almost instantly positive results on your performance.
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00:00Are you fed up of putting work into your game and not seeing that effort reflected in your scores?
00:05Well, I've got a little hunch as to why that might be, and I've come to the beautiful Parkston
00:09Golf Club to tell you why. The number one thing I see with poor practices is people not making
00:14their practice difficult enough. Now, what I mean by that is taking it easy on yourself in practice
00:19and giving yourself lovely, fluffy lies and not really challenging yourself might be good fun,
00:24but I don't think you're going to see the benefits on the other end. Think about it. If you're trying
00:28to get fit, you don't go to the gym and put the treadmill on the slowest setting with no incline
00:33whatsoever. You challenge yourself. You make that more difficult and you see the benefits in your
00:37cardiovascular fitness. The same principle should apply to your goal. I've got some practice tips
00:43all the way from driver, irons, down to your short game and your putter. Let's get to it. Let's get
00:48on that driving range. Starting with driver, how do we make driving practice more difficult? Well,
00:53one of the things I see all the time down at the driving range is people just picking out,
00:56say, a marker post on this range and hitting balls towards it. Whilst that's not a bad use
01:02of your time, I think we can be a little bit more focused. A fairly average-sized fairway here in
01:07the UK, at least, would be about 35 yards wide. One of the things I love to do on the range is go
01:13ahead and pick out a target that is significantly smaller than that. For example, on this range here
01:18at Parkston Golf Club, I've got some markers out here that are really, really useful. I'm picking out
01:23an area that's about 20 yards in width, in my opinion, between the black marker up in the
01:28distance there and the yellow marker. That's a significantly smaller target than I would see
01:33on the golf course. When I'm practicing towards that, it will fine-tune my feels and my perception
01:38of what a fairway is. When I get back out onto the golf course, all of a sudden, that 35-yard fairway
01:44feels absolutely massive. Now, you don't just have to stop there. You can also challenge yourself and
01:49make it more measurable. A lot of things I like to do, hit 10 balls in a row and see how many of those
01:55balls I can keep between those two parameters. If you've got a bit more time, you can keep going and
02:00hit ball after ball after ball and not stop until you hit your target number, which might be 20 fairways.
02:06It might take you a few to get there, but like I said, once you get out onto the golf course and get to
02:10that 35-yard fairway, you'll really feel the benefits from a confidence point of view. A little tip for you
02:15that I would use either bring a notepad or use the notes section on your phone. Note down what you've
02:20done in terms of a score so you can track it and see if you can beat it next time. While we're on
02:24the driving range, you can use the same principles in your iron play as we've just spoken about there
02:29with driver. You can create small greens and smaller targets to sharpen your focus. One thing that I
02:34really like to do with the iron side of things is to me, strike is absolutely key. Your front-to-back
02:41dispersion is equally as important as your left-to-right dispersion. To achieve good front-to-back
02:46dispersion with iron play, you need precise striking. One thing that I've picked up recently to help me
02:54with that strike is this clever little training aid, the Butterblade. The Butterblade is essentially a
03:00little training aid iron that has been through the honey I shrunk the kids machine. It is tiny. It's
03:04about half the size of my normal Gamer 7 iron. What this does is puts a real premium on strike. If you
03:12miss the middle, you really, really know about it. There's not much margin for error here. As much as
03:17you might think that might affect your confidence, it's actually going to really, really dial you in.
03:21You don't need to be confident here. The point of this is we're making it far more difficult to find
03:26a strike in practice so when you get out onto the golf course and you see your normal iron in front of
03:30you, it feels enormous and it feels like you cannot miss. So what I've been doing over late, I've been
03:35incorporating at least half a dozen shots in all of my warm-ups and practice sessions with this
03:39Butterblade. Just making it that much more difficult for myself in practice makes it so much easier when I
03:45get to the golf course and it's one less thing to think about knowing I've already dialed in my strike.
03:53Another good option if you don't want to spend the money on a training aid like the Butterblade is
03:57head to your pro shop or somewhere like Golf Clubs for cash and find the oldest smallest bladed iron
04:02you can and hit a few shots with that before you play or in your practice sessions. It'll essentially
04:06do the same thing for you.
04:12So how many of you practice like this? You've just hit a nice chip shot, you give yourself a nice
04:16fluffy low, plenty of grass underneath the ball, you drag another ball and you just do the same and
04:22you repeat, repeat, repeat thinking you're getting better at chipping. Well, I would argue
04:26that you're probably not. That was really good, nearly went in. If you think about it, how many
04:30times do you get that lie out on the golf course? Unless you're significantly luckier than me,
04:35it's not very many. We quite often sat down in the rough, we've got a tight bear lie. So all you're
04:41doing by treating yourself well in this practice area is setting yourself up for failure on the golf
04:46course. So what I like to do is quite the opposite. I like to flick the switch and make it as difficult
04:50as possible. And I like to find some of the tightest, muddiest, most compact and scruffy
04:56lies possible to really fine tune my strike and my feel. Now this is something that a lot of tour
05:02pros do and have done very successfully. Nick Faldo is one who very rarely would play his good
05:08shots in a practice round. He would go and find the most awkward lie or stance possible. So when it
05:13became tournament time, he was prepared for anything. Padraig Harrington has also been known with his
05:19short game practice to find those sort of railway sleeper steps that you get going into bunkers
05:24and clip chips off that because it's the ultimate firm tight surface. Now that might be a little bit
05:29extreme, but like I say, especially in the winter, you might be able to find some less than optimal
05:34lies. And if you can drag your ball onto those lies, and it's a little tricky at first, but if you can
05:39learn to find strike from some of these really tough scruffy lies, all of a sudden, every time you get
05:46out onto that golf course, let's go again here, let's give it even worse, every time you go out
05:50onto that golf course after this, when the ball's even sat halfway reasonable, and that's a really
05:57good example, or not quite, it's going to seem like an absolute delight compared to this. So once
06:02you've really fine-tuned your strike here in the tougher conditions, every time you get on that golf
06:07course, it'll be a nice surprise. So furthermore, on the short game, it doesn't just stop with
06:10chipping. We're in the bunker now, and there's loads of ways you can make bunker shots difficult.
06:14Again, what I generally see is people chucking them down on nice fluffy lies, and just splashing
06:19away to their heart's content. But I like to make it progressively more difficult. So if you've got a
06:23line of, say, three or even more golf balls, try and make each one progressively worse in lie. The
06:28first one's good. I'm going to tap on the head of that one, so it's a bit more buried, and we're really
06:33going to bury that last one. Almost half the ball is submerged beneath the ground there. Then, when you're
06:40practicing, the first one should be relatively easy to splash out. Now, we know we've got a slightly
06:45more difficult one with the second shot, so I'm preparing myself for eventualities on the course.
06:50So my technique is here, I get a little bit more weight forward, stick the club in the ground,
06:56and we're getting the ball out of the bunker. Now, this last one, we have to go a little bit more
07:00extreme, and we have to dig it a little bit more, and we played that one really, really nicely. But it's
07:05not just about the lie of the ball. There's slopes in this bunker we can use. So I can come here,
07:11and instead of a lovely, perfectly flat lie, which we rarely get, I can pop myself on this downslope
07:15here in a less than optimal lie in an awkward situation. And these are situations you face on
07:21the golf course, so why would you not practice them? I'm going to get my body level with that
07:25slope, and I'm going to go digging for the ball, and that would be a perfectly acceptable result on the
07:31golf course. I've got it to about 15 feet there. How many times have you hit a wedge shot
07:34into a bunker, and you've plugged it up the face here? So we're going to, on a heavy upslope,
07:39we're going to stand on that ball. I can barely see it. That's not an uncommon occurrence for me,
07:44unfortunately. So again, how do we deal with it? If we haven't practiced it, it's going to be a nasty
07:49surprise on the golf course. So all the difficult things you do here that make it awkward will make
07:55it significantly easier on the golf course when you're needing to escape from these very difficult
08:01situations. The putting green is one of the easiest areas to make your practice more difficult. We've
08:05got plenty of holes here on this beautiful green at Parkesland Golf Club, but I'm not going to use
08:10those holes. I want to use a smaller target. So I've got a tee peg with me. I'm just going to try
08:14and hit some sort of four or five foot putts. And instead of aiming for that hole, which we know is
08:19plenty big enough to take a golf ball, I'm going to be going at a smaller target of that tee peg.
08:26And if I can hit that tee peg, that probably, you know, I've missed my target there, but that
08:29probably would have gone in. So if I can start hitting putts where I'm consistently hitting that
08:35tee peg, then I can be very short and very confident when I get out on that golf course,
08:40I can hit the hole. And it's all about getting that confidence. Another way of narrowing your target,
08:45particularly on these very holeable short putts. And I do this up to about six feet,
08:50which I consider a really important range for your scoring. Again, just narrowing your targets.
08:55What I've done here is up by the hole, instead of giving myself the entire hole to aim at,
09:00I've just made a small gate at the front with the tees. It's obviously slightly bigger than the ball
09:04because I still want the ball to be able to go through. But all of a sudden, instead of having
09:08the entire hole to aim at all of a sudden, I know that was just creeping in the right half.
09:13It's gone in, but it's only gone in off that right hand tee peg. So the idea of this exercise
09:18is to get yourself to a point where you can get straight through that gate without hitting either
09:23of those tees. So we're just narrowing our focus again. It makes the task more difficult in practice.
09:29So once again, on the golf course, it becomes a lot easier. One thing that we never think about
09:34enough in putting, in my opinion, is strike. We all take it for granted that we're going to hit the
09:38putt out the middle of the face, but I've played enough pro-ams to know that's not the case.
09:42And one way I like to make practice difficult to ensure I do that is the use of two elastic bands.
09:47So if you've got a putter that permits, and some shapes do and some shapes don't, but you can
09:51generally figure it out. I like to wrap two elastic bands around the head like this and create a very
09:56small gap around a centimetre in the middle of the putter face there for me to make contact with that
10:02golf ball. All of a sudden, if you miss the face, miss the centre of the face slightly on the heel
10:06or the toe, the ball will shoot off at a very funny angle and you'll get that instant feedback.
10:12So when you've got that elastic band on there and you really need to meet the middle of the putter,
10:17you get a real sense straight away of whether you're hitting the middle of the face. So when
10:21you take those elastic bands off, you've done your hard work, you've done your training, you've
10:25narrowed your focus and dialed in your strike. So again, it's one less thing to think about on the
10:29golf course.
10:30So there's a few tips for you to help make your practice more difficult and benefit your
10:34game. And I've got a hunch if you're willing to follow those practice tips, 2025 could be
10:40your best golfing year ever.
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