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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,
00:23but I don't think you're going to see the benefits on the other end. Think about it. If you're trying
00:27to 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 of your
01:02time, I think we can be a little bit more focused. A fairly average sized fairway here in the UK
01:07at
01:07least would be about 35 yards wide. One of the things I love to do on the range is go
01:13ahead and
01:13pick out a target that is significantly smaller than that. For example, on this range here at
01:18Parkston Golf Club, I've got some markers out here that are really, really useful. I'm picking out an
01:23area that's about 20 yards in width, in my opinion, between the black marker up in the distance there
01:28and the yellow marker. That's a significantly smaller target than I would see on the golf course.
01:34When I'm practicing towards that, it will fine tune my feels and my perception of what a fairway is.
01:39When I get back out onto the golf course, all of a sudden that 35 yard fairway feels absolutely
01:45massive. Now, you don't just have to stop there. You can also challenge yourself and make it more
01:50measurable. A lot of things I like to do, hit 10 balls in a row and see how many of
01:55those balls
01:56I can keep between those two parameters. If you've got a bit more time, you can keep going and hit
02:00ball 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
02:09course
02:10and get to that 35 yard fairway, you'll really feel the benefits from a confidence point of view.
02:14A little tip for you that I would use, either bring a notepad or use the notes section on your
02:18phone,
02:19note down what you've done in terms of a score so you can track it and see if you can
02:22beat it next
02:23time. While we're on the driving range, you can use the same principles in your iron play as we've
02:28just spoken about there with driver. You can create small greens and smaller targets to sharpen your
02:33focus. But one thing that I really like to do with the iron side of things is to me, strike
02:38is
02:38absolutely key. So your front to back dispersion is equally as important as your left to right
02:44dispersion. And to achieve good front to back dispersion with iron play, you need precise striking.
02:52And one thing that I've picked up recently to help me with that strike is this clever little
02:56training aid, the Butterblade. So the Butterblade is essentially a little training aid iron that has
03:01been through the honey I shrunk the kids machine. It is tiny. It's about half the size of my normal
03:07gamer seven iron. So what this does is puts a real premium on strike. If you miss the middle,
03:12you really, really know about it. There's not much margin for error here. So as much as you might
03:17think 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
03:25a strike in practice. So when you get out onto the golf course and you see your normal iron in
03:30front of
03:30you, it feels enormous and it feels like you cannot miss. So what I've been doing over late,
03:34I've been incorporating at least half a dozen shots in all of my warmups and practice sessions with
03:39this Butterblade. Just making it that much more difficult for myself in practice makes it so
03:44much easier when I get to the golf course and it's one less thing to think about knowing I've already
03:49dialed 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 you
04:02can and hit a few shots with that before you play or in your practice sessions. It'll essentially do the
04:07same 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
04:17low, plenty of grass underneath the ball, you drag another ball and you just do the same and you
04:22repeat, repeat, repeat thinking you're getting better at chipping. Well I would argue that you're probably
04:27not. In fact that was really good, nearly went in. If you think about it, how many times do you
04:31get that
04:31lie out on the golf course? Unless you're significantly luckier than me, it's not very many. We quite often
04:37sat down in the rough, we've got a tight bear lie. So all you're doing by treating yourself well in
04:42this practice area is setting yourself up for failure on the golf course. So what I like to do
04:47is quite the opposite. I like to flick the switch and make it as difficult as possible and I like
04:51to find
04:53some of the tightest, muddiest, most compact and scruffy lies possible to really fine-tune my strike
04:59and my feel. Now this is something that a lot of tour pros do and have done very successfully. Nick
05:04Faldo is one who very rarely would play his good shots in a practice round. He would go and find
05:10the
05:11most awkward lie or stance possible. So when it became tournament time, he was prepared for anything.
05:17Padraig Harrington has also been known with his short game practice to find those sort of railway
05:21sleeper steps that you get going into bunkers and clip chips off that because it's the ultimate firm
05:27tight surface. Now that might be a little bit extreme, but like I say, especially in the winter,
05:31you might be able to find some less than optimal lies. And if you can drag your ball onto those
05:37lies,
05:37and it's a little tricky at first, but if you can learn to find strike from some of these really
05:42tough scruffy lies, all of a sudden, every time you get out onto that golf course, let's go again here,
05:48let's give it even worse. Every time you go out onto that golf course after this,
05:54when the ball's even sat halfway reasonable, and that's a really good example, or not quite,
05:59it's going to seem like an absolute delight compared to this. So once you've really fine
06:03tuned your strike here in the tougher conditions, every time you get on that golf course, it'll be
06:07a nice surprise. So furthermore on the short game, it doesn't just stop with chipping. We're in the
06:11bunker now and there's loads of ways you can make bunker shots difficult. Again, what I generally see is
06:16people chucking them down on nice fluffy lies and just splashing away till their heart's content,
06:20but I like to make it progressively more difficult. So if you've got a line of say three or even
06:25more
06:25golf balls, try and make each one progressively worse in lie. The first one's good. I'm going to tap
06:30on the head of that one. So it's a bit more buried and we're really going to bury that last
06:34one.
06:35Almost half the ball is submerged beneath the ground there. Then when you're practicing, the first one
06:40should be relatively easy to splash out. Now we know we've got a slightly more difficult one with
06:47the second shot. So I'm preparing myself for eventualities on the course. So my technique
06:51is here, I get a little bit more weight forward, stick the club in the ground and we're getting the
06:56ball out of the bunker. Now this last one, we have to go a little bit more extreme and we
07:00have to dig it
07:02a little bit more and we played that one really, really nicely. But it's not just
07:06about the lie of the ball. There's slopes in this bunker we can use. So I can come here and
07:11instead
07:11of a lovely, perfectly flat lie, which we rarely get, I can pop myself on this down slope here
07:16in a less than optimal lie in an awkward situation. And these are situations you face on the golf course,
07:21so why would you not practice them? I'm going to get my body level with that slope and I'm going
07:26to
07:26go digging for the ball and that would be a perfectly acceptable result on the golf course. I've got
07:36plugged it up the face here, so we're going to, on a heavy up slope, we're going to stand on
07:40that ball.
07:40I can barely see it. That's not an uncommon occurrence for me, unfortunately. So again,
07:46how do we deal with it? If we haven't practiced it, it's going to be a nasty surprise on the
07:50golf
07:50course. So all the difficult things you do here that make it awkward will make it significantly
07:57easier on the golf course when you're needing to escape from these very difficult situations.
08:01The putting green is one of the easiest areas to make your practice more difficult. We've got
08:06plenty 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
08:14to try
08:14and hit some sort of four or five foot putts. And instead of aiming for that hole, which we know
08:19is
08:19plenty big enough to take a golf ball, I'm going to be going at a smaller target of that tee
08:24peg.
08:26And if I can hit that tee peg, that probably, you know, I've missed my target there,
08:29but that probably would have gone in. So if I can start hitting putts where I'm consistently
08:34hitting that tee peg, then I can be very sure and very confident when I get out on that golf
08:39course,
08:40I can hit the hole and it's all about getting that confidence.
08:43Another way of narrowing your target, particularly on these very holeable short putts, and I do this
08:48up to about six feet, which I consider a really important range for your scoring. Again, just
08:54narrowing your targets. What I've done here is up by the hole, instead of giving myself the entire
08:58hole to aim at, I've just made a small gate at the front with the tees. It's obviously slightly
09:03bigger than the ball because I still want the ball to be able to go through. But all of a
09:07sudden,
09:07instead of having the entire hole to aim at all of a sudden, I know that was just creeping in
09:13the
09:13right half. It's gone in, but it's only gone in off that right hand tee peg. So the idea of
09:17this exercise
09:19is to get yourself to a point where you can get straight through that gate without hitting either of
09:24those 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
09:46bands.
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 centimeter in the middle of the putter face there for me to make contact with
10:02that golf ball. All of a sudden, if you miss the face, miss the center of the face slightly on
10:06the
10:06heel or 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,
10:25you've narrowed your focus and dialed in your strike. So again, it's one less thing to think
10:29about on the golf course. So there's a few tips for you to help make your practice more difficult
10:33and benefit your game. And I've got a hunch if you're willing to follow those practice tips,
10:37because 2025 could be your best golfing year ever.
10:42So
10:42as
10:42as
10:42as
10:42as
10:42as
10:42as
10:42as
10:42as
10:42You
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