How to Practice Golf

HOW TO PRACTICE GOLF

Practicing your golf swing can either be a deeply fulfilling or incredibly frustrating experience. If you want to build a consistent, powerful swing, you need a complete golf swing learning system that has a proven track record of delivering results — whether you practice at home in your backyard or at the driving range.

The RST Learning System I have developed has helped tens of thousands of golfers dramatically improve their golf swings because of the way it is structured and the mechanically sound, fundamentally correct information you receive. But even more important than the swing fundamentals themselves is the learning system built around how to practice golf at home and at the driving range.

Over the years, I continue to hear one question about RST more than any other:

"How do I practice golf?"

Specifically, these students are asking a crucial question about how to transfer their new golf swing mechanics from the mirror to the driving range — from slow speed to full speed.

To answer this question properly, let's step away from golf for a moment and talk about something that may paint a clearer picture.

An analogy I often use is learning how to play a song on any musical instrument. As a guitarist, I'll use this as an example because it directly relates to practicing golf movements.

When I start learning a new song, it is always very slow at the beginning.

I'm simply trying to learn the notes I'll be playing and the mechanics of the finger positioning. This takes considerable time at first, because there are many new notes arranged in a sequence I've never played before.

Getting the sequence of notes and the mechanics of how to play them is the exact same process you go through when learning a new movement in the golf swing. You are first learning the movement itself and the feelings associated with moving through those new positions.

This process, depending on its complexity, can take weeks depending on how often you practice. The golf swing is no different.

If you practice RST more frequently, you will improve your golf swing faster. And just like learning a song, it is completely unreasonable to expect that doing something once in front of a mirror at slow speed means you've mastered it and are ready for the driving range and then the golf course.

You couldn't do this when learning a song on the guitar or performing any other motor movement pattern.

Once you recognize that this is a process and it takes time, you will be much more patient with yourself and develop a clearer understanding of how to practice golf at the driving range and at home indoors.

So, we have now learned the basic movement and can perform it accurately at slow speed. Obviously, we need to be able to execute it both faster and in rhythm.

How quickly do you think this is going to happen?

How to Practice Golf - Adding Speed

You have just learned a completely new song (movement pattern) and now need to play it at a much faster tempo, on beat.

If you think about trying to learn something very fast from a highly skilled guitarist — let's use Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin — you can imagine this is going to take a while.

In the golf swing, you are trying to practice and learn a new movement pattern that doesn't just involve the muscles in your hands and forearms — it engages nearly EVERY muscle in your body!

Clearly, this single fact means this process is going to take even longer than learning a complex musical piece where you are primarily training your fingers to move a certain way.

Let's now complicate this matter further. Let's assume you have already practiced hard and learned a song that is somewhat similar to the one you're learning now.

You have played this old song thousands upon thousands of times and know it inside and out.

What inevitably happens is that while you are playing the new song, you mess up and play a few notes from the old song because the movements are similar. Your brain falls back into the old habits because you have reinforced that behavior thousands of times through practice and repetition.

In golf, this is much more obvious because when we are working on a swing change, we often keep repeating the same swing fault over and over. It takes considerable practice time to overcome these deeply grooved bad habits.

The brain is a remarkably efficient machine and will default to existing movement patterns (neural pathways) whenever possible. Knowing how to practice golf correctly is the key to overcoming this hurdle in your swing development. For a data-driven look at where your current swing mechanics stand, try a free AI swing analysis that scores your movement patterns objectively.

This efficiency is usually great for us — we don't have to relearn how to walk every morning when we get out of bed! But when you are trying to change your golf swing, this same efficiency can be tremendously frustrating.

This is simply the way our brains are wired, and the only way around it is repetition of the new movement pattern through dedicated hours of practice.

Once this new pathway in the brain has been established, you can start calling on it more frequently and gradually perform the movement faster and faster as you continue to reinforce it. But again, this takes time and consistent, diligent practice.

How to Practice Golf - Repetition

So, we have learned the basic golf swing movements, we are gradually learning to perform them in rhythm with continued practice, and the swing is slowly starting to resemble what we're after. The process to this point has taken weeks for most of us who have a day job and a family and can't simply spend all day at the range.

We still tend to make mistakes — both the movements themselves as we revert to old patterns, and the tempo because we can't execute at full speed yet. As we speed up, we tend to mess up more. Again, all part of how the brain learns new motor patterns.

So, we do more slow motion work on the more challenging parts, and then try it faster until we mess it up. This is the point where many golf students go wrong.

They either start trying to swing at full speed all the time — repeatedly making the same errors in rhythm, sequencing, and positions — and get stuck because they don't actually improve.

Or, they continue to only practice in slow motion and never challenge their brains to perform at normal tempo. The movements may be technically correct, but it doesn't translate to a real swing because they've never practiced at the speed the golf swing actually requires.

The key at this phase in the learning process is that you need to:

• keep practicing some slow motion reps to continue reinforcing the correct movement, and
• begin to challenge your brain to perform the movement at speed.

Yes, you will make mistakes at speed, but it is critical to start ramping it up once you can perform it perfectly in slow motion.

That doesn't mean go from slow motion to full speed!

Why would anyone think they could do that?

That's like learning how to drive a stick shift on a quiet back road and then the next day entering the Indy 500!

There are intermediate steps to becoming proficient at anything, and golf is obviously no different. But most golfers don't understand how to practice golf using this progressive approach.

Now you know better!

With my students, here is the progression I require them to follow:

1. We learn how to perform the movement with no club and no arms (assuming it is a body-centric movement we are working on).
2. We add the arms to the movement, then a club, then a ball.
3. With the ball, we start out hitting a chip shot that may only travel 10 feet. That is PLENTY at first.
4. Then we may hit it 50 yards, then 100 yards, and so on.

This process may be completed in a day for some and a week for others.

But if they follow this process, they DO make MASSIVE fundamental, quantifiable, visible changes in their golf swings that LAST!

Not a "change" that is here one day and gone the next like the typical tips you read in a golf magazine or hear on TV. Those don't work because that is NOT how your brain learns a new movement pattern! Teaching the golf student to practice correctly is one of the MOST IMPORTANT fundamentals of the RotarySwing golf instruction online learning system!

So, when you're working on your swing changes, you must go through this progression and combine both slow AND faster reps — but you can NOT just jump to warp speed.

Your brain is not prepared for that, and you need to be patient and recognize that this process takes time, just like any other complex movement you have learned in your life.

If you look back at how you've worked through swing changes in the past, you can likely now see the flaw in your process and understand why you haven't made the progress you deserved given how hard you've worked.

If you follow the simple principles I have laid out today, you WILL make progress on your swing and you WILL get better!

So get to work — but now you can practice your golf swing smarter, not harder. Practice correctly at home and at the driving range and you will achieve amazing results! To accelerate the process with real-time AI coaching that tracks your reps and provides instant feedback, check out a free AI golf lesson.

If you REALLY want to know how to properly practice your golf swing at the range, you MUST WATCH my video below on "How to Practice Golf Productively" where I walk you through the details of how to make AMAZING swing changes the fastest way possible!

Checkpoints for Practice

• Practicing in slow motion at first allows your brain to learn new movement patterns correctly
• Once a movement is mastered in slow motion, try it at progressively faster speeds to identify where it begins to break down — then work at that speed
• New movements are learned sequentially — don't skip around!
• Practice somewhere quiet with minimal distractions

Related RST/RS1 Articles & Videos:

• How to Practice Chipping - Ring Game
• How to Practice Golf - Perfect Practice 1
• How To Practice Golf - Rotary Swing Tour

Video Transcription: How to Practice Golf and be Productive

One of the most common things we hear when people are working through RST is, "I can do it perfectly in my drills in slow motion, but when I get to practicing at the driving range I can't execute it."

While, to us, it seems like common sense, the reason this happens isn't clear to a lot of people. This is one of the things that, during the clinics, I spend a tremendous amount of time on — the science of how to practice golf.

A lot of people wonder, "Why do you spend so much time in the classroom on the first day of the clinics? If I just watch all the videos on the website, don't I know everything you're going to cover?" Absolutely not. I go ten times deeper on that first day than anything you'd ever see on the website.

In fact, I spend over an hour in the morning just discussing how the brain learns, which is only touched on briefly on the website. Clearly, that's something that a lot of people don't fully understand, and that's why I've recommended books like The Talent Code and others that help illustrate the process.

As I said, I spend a tremendous amount of time going in depth on this, and I want to touch on it here so you get a much clearer picture of what you're really trying to accomplish with your swing.

Any time we practice movements in slow motion, there's a specific purpose. That purpose is to start communicating to your brain what you want your muscles to do — how you want them to move your bones, your joints, and everything else — and you have to start slow at first.

That's simply so you can perform the movement correctly. You clearly can't do it fast yet. That's why everything you see on the website is a progressive, step-by-step process — we start without a golf club, without even our arms involved.

If we're learning a body-centric movement, we take our arms out of the picture entirely and learn how to move our body correctly. Then we slowly introduce the arms, then the club, then the ball. The same exact process applies when you practice the golf swing at home or at the driving range — you've got to follow these stages.

You can't skip from Point A to Point B. I try to explain this frequently in the clinics — it's like driving up a very steep hill in first gear. You're cruising along, making progress, and then you think, "All right, let's just skip ahead to fifth gear." You skip everything in between.

Clearly, you're not going to make it up the hill, and that's not how you practice the golf swing. When you jump from slow motion drills to full speed at the range, why would you expect that to accomplish anything? You've skipped second, third, and fourth gear, and there's a reason those gears exist. You need them to help you reach fifth gear, and the same is true when practicing your golf swing.

When I work with my students, we spend significant time once we've gone through the basic slow-motion fundamentals where they grasp the movement and can roughly perform it. Then we break it down and hit 5-yard pitch shots. Then 15-yard shots, then 50-yard shots, gradually working up toward full swings.

But in a one-hour or two-hour golf lesson, getting all the way to full speed is very difficult to accomplish. Maybe, if we work really hard and I have a student who's progressing well, we might reach 60 or 70 percent speed by the end of the lesson.

But more importantly, when they go home they need to understand how to practice golf, and that means going back to the beginning — making sure they're doing their slow motion reps first to verify the movement is correct. Then they slowly add speed, building incrementally.

By that same token, a lot of students spend all their time doing nothing but slow motion drills at home, and that's not in the context of the actual golf swing. You're not going to be moving at that speed when you're on the range or on the course. You're learning a movement pattern at slow speed initially because that's the fastest pace at which you can perform the movement correctly.

However, you need to challenge yourself to gradually ramp back up to the actual context of swing speed. If you're working on your takeaway and you're going at this very deliberate pace — well, that's great because you're purely focused on the movement itself.

But your real takeaway is going to happen fast — very, very quickly. You have to challenge yourself to move at that speed until it breaks down. Don't be afraid to shift into second gear and add a little more speed. Check yourself and say, "OK, when I start adding speed, I start to pull the club inside," or "I roll my wrist," because at speed, things will change.

Your brain is going to want to fall back into its old movement patterns that it already knows how to execute, so you've got to recognize that. If you just jump from first gear to fifth gear, you're never going to see where things break down. You've got to go to second gear and observe what happens — see where your old tendencies start to reappear.

Then you'll know, "OK, I realize in slow motion I've got it perfect. When I go to second gear, I start to roll it inside a little. When I go to third gear, I really dump it a lot, so I've got to focus on keeping this trail wrist straight," or whatever specific element you're working on. That information tells you where things are going to fall apart at full speed.

You're not going to discover that if you jump from slow motion to full speed at the range. It doesn't work. You'll simply go right back to your old movement patterns immediately.

How NOT to Practice Golf

The biggest mistake I see people making, again, is doing slow motion drills and then going straight to full speed on the driving range. If you're trying to change a movement pattern in your golf swing — or anything else you're working on — at the driving range you need to start out making small, controlled swings and see if you can perform the movement correctly.

If you can do it at that speed, then you slowly add speed, and you need to. As I just mentioned, you need to challenge yourself until it breaks down. Go a little bit faster until the movement deteriorates, then go back and drill closer to that speed until you can perform it correctly. Then you add on and add on, building progressively.

Hopefully that helps you understand the process a little better. As I've said, in the clinics we go extremely in depth on this — it takes over an hour just to cover the science of motor learning — so it's too broad a scope for a single video.

But you've got to go from first gear to second gear to third gear to fourth gear to fifth gear. That's the simplest way I can explain it. Think of anything else you've ever learned, and it will help this make more sense.

When you learned how to drive a car — since I'm stuck on the car theme — when you learned how to drive a stick, a lot of us started out in a parking lot or a back country road somewhere. No distractions, no traffic. You didn't start out on the 405 in Los Angeles.

You started someplace quiet, with minimal distractions, until you could get the feeling of how to let the clutch out and push the gas, how to shift gears. Then, the next day, you didn't go enter the Indy 500.

That's what people are doing when they go from slow motion — no distractions, quiet environment in their golf swing practice — to full speed on the range or the course. Then they wonder, "Why did it break down?"

Nothing that you've ever done in your life was learned that way. You have to start slow — it's clumsy and cumbersome, and you're consciously thinking your way through every step, so it feels choppy and not very smooth. That's completely normal learning.

When you're in that phase, you've got to go really slow and build up gradually. You have to consciously override your old habits until the new movement pattern becomes more natural.

But at the same point, as I mentioned earlier, at some stage you've got to trust the process a little and see what happens when you add speed. Objectively evaluate what broke down. Then you're able to add a little more speed, or go back and drill further, and keep building.

Eventually, you've got to transfer that skill into your subconscious and stop overthinking it. You've got to let it start to flow. That's when your subconscious mind begins to take over and assist you — but you can't start there. You have to force your body to do something new at first, until it becomes ingrained.

That's what all the reps and drills are for. But you need to go through this progressive practice system — don't just get stuck in first gear the entire time, and don't think you can jump from first gear to fifth. You need all the steps in between, and that's why the website videos are structured the way they are: very progressive, very specific in how I add pieces to the swing, making it a little more challenging each time until it resembles a complete golf swing.

But you can't start with a golf club right away. That's not how the process works. Just take your time working through the drills on the website. Challenge yourself, add a little speed at a time until you become proficient.

It will take time. That's simply the way it is — it's how our brains are designed to work. But if you follow this approach, you will make dramatic improvements once you understand how to practice golf.

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