Golf Editor | Thunderfoot Sports
Walk down any driving range on a Saturday morning and you’ll see the same thing: a row of golfers with drivers in their hands, swinging hard at a flag 250 yards away. Most of them would tell you they’re working on their game. Some of them are. A lot of them are just having fun, which is fine, but it’s not the same thing.
Here’s what most of us don’t want to hear. The problem usually isn’t that we don’t practice enough. It’s that we spend the time on the wrong stuff. Hand a 20-handicapper an hour and a large bucket, and there’s a good chance 40 minutes of it goes to the big stick. Hand a 10-handicapper the same hour and it often goes the same way, just with a nicer sound off the face.
The shots costing a 20 strokes aren’t the same ones keeping a 10 out of single digits. So your practice should change as your game does. Below is how I’d split up an hour at each level, plus a few habits that’ll make any session count for more.
Start by Figuring Out Where the Strokes Are Going
You don’t need a launch monitor or a fancy stats app for this. Over your next five rounds, jot down four things on the scorecard:
- Penalty strokes
- How many chips or pitches it took to get on the green from inside about 50 yards
- Three-putts
- How often a bad drive cost you more than one extra shot to get back in play
It’s crude, but it’ll tell you more than any range session will. If you’re losing four balls a round and three-putting once, putting isn’t your emergency, no matter how much you enjoy the practice green. If you’re hitting it fine off the tee but can’t get a simple chip onto the green, that’s where your next hour belongs.
The 20-Handicap Plan: Take the Big Numbers Off the Table
If you’re a 20, you don’t need more birdie chances. You need fewer triples. That might sound harsh, but it’s good news, because getting rid of the blow-up hole is a lot easier than learning to stick it close.
The quickest way to lower scores at this level is usually some mix of better contact, keeping the tee ball in play, getting basic chips onto the green and making the short putts you’re supposed to make.
How to spend 60 minutes
- Contact (20 minutes): Hit wedges up through your mid-irons. Pick a real target every time, and switch clubs every few balls so you’re not just grooving one swing.
- Tee shots (15 minutes): Practice with whatever club you can actually keep in play. If that’s a 3-wood or a hybrid right now, so be it. Aim at a target about as wide as a fairway.
- Short game basics (15 minutes): One go-to chip and one basic pitch, from decent lies. Nothing fancy.
- Putting (10 minutes): Mostly three- to six-footers, plus a few longer ones to get a feel for speed.
What you’re going for here is boring competence. Picture two golfers. One hits two jaw-dropping shots a round and spends the rest of the day digging out of trouble. The other just keeps moving the ball forward, stays out of the hazards and gets the chips somewhere on the green. Bet on the second golfer every time.
The 15-Handicap Plan: Turn Bogeys Into Par Chances
By the time you’re around a 15, you can hit good shots. That’s not really the question anymore. The question is how much your bad ones cost you.
This is where practice should get more specific about direction. Stop aiming at “out there.” On the range, pick two flags or yardage signs and pretend they’re the edges of a fairway. With irons, imagine a green-sized area around your target and only count the shots that finish inside it.
A 60-minute session
- Wedge distances (15 minutes): Work on three carry numbers you can repeat, like a half, three-quarter and full swing with your favorite wedge.
- Approach shots (20 minutes): Use the clubs you actually hit into greens most rounds. For a lot of players that’s 8-iron through pitching wedge, not 4-iron.
- Tee-shot dispersion (10 minutes): Driver, plus one backup club you trust on tight holes.
- Up-and-downs (10 minutes): Toss balls into different spots around the practice green and play each one out, one ball at a time.
- Short putts (5 minutes): Finish with a little pressure. Don’t leave until you make five in a row from four feet.
The big shift at this level is that you stop just making swings and start solving golf problems.
The 10-Handicap Plan: Find the Leaks
A 10-handicapper can hit plenty of good shots and still post an 84, because four or five small mistakes stack up over 18 holes. A chunked wedge here, a three-putt there, a drive that clips a tree, and the round goes sideways.
At this point, beating balls doesn’t help much. You need sharper feedback, and you need to ask yourself some honest questions. From which distances are you leaving it farthest from the hole? Do your penalties come from one side of the course more than the other? When you three-putt, is it a bad lag from 40 feet or a miss from three?
A 60-minute session
- Scoring wedges (15 minutes): Random targets within your normal wedge range. Don’t hit the same number twice in a row.
- Approach dispersion (20 minutes): Switch clubs often and keep score of how many finish inside a target zone you pick beforehand.
- Tee-shot decisions (10 minutes): Alternate between driver and a safer club, aiming at different imaginary fairways.
- Random short game (10 minutes): One try from each lie, then putt it out.
- Pressure putting (5 minutes): Use a drill where a miss costs you something, like a circle of putts around the hole where one miss sends you back to the start.
At a 10, nobody cares how good you look on the range. The point of the session is to find the shots that don’t hold up once you get to the course.
Quit Hitting the Same Club 25 Times in a Row
Hitting one club over and over has its place, especially if you’re working through a swing change with your pro. But if the goal is to play better golf, it’s not doing as much as you’d think.
On the course, you never hit seven 7-irons in a row off a perfect lie. You hit a driver, wait around, hit an iron, chip, putt, walk to the next tee and do it all again. Every once in a while you also stand in the trees wondering how in the world your ball ended up there.
So mix it up for at least part of every session. Change the club, the target, the shot shape. Make yourself go through your routine fresh each time, the way you have to on the course.
Keep Score When You Practice
This one’s simple, and it might be the most useful idea in this whole article. Give each shot a pass or fail:
- Tee shot lands inside your imaginary fairway: 1 point
- Approach finishes inside a green-sized target: 1 point
- Chip finishes within six feet: 1 point
- Three- to five-foot putt goes in: 1 point
Now you can actually compare one practice session to the next. Forty pretty swings don’t tell you much. Going 12-for-20 one week and 15-for-20 two weeks later tells you you’re getting somewhere.
What Each Handicap Should Stop Doing
20 handicap
Stop practicing hero shots. You don’t need a 210-yard carry out of a fairway bunker to break 90. You need solid contact and a ball that stays in play.
15 handicap
Stop thinking of your driver as either “on” or “off.” Find a tee shot you can count on, and get an honest read on how wide your normal miss really is.
10 handicap
Stop pouring most of your practice time into the part of your game that’s already good. Find the part that’s leaking two strokes a round and go fix it.
Take It to the Course
The range doesn’t punish you for a bad shot. The course does.
Use a practice round, or a quiet afternoon when nobody’s behind you and the course allows it, to test your decisions. Hit driver on a tight hole, then drop a ball and try it with a hybrid. Pay attention to which one sets up the easier second shot, not which one goes farther. You might be surprised.
And if you want a new course to put your game to the test, check out the Thunderfoot Sports regional golf tools, including the East Texas Golf Finder, to find public courses that fit the kind of golf you’re working on.
The Golf Editor’s Take
A good practice session should make your next round feel a little less surprising.
The 20 should walk away confident the ball is going to stay in play. The 15 should walk away with more control over the shots that turn bogeys into pars. And the 10 should walk away having practiced the exact situations that separate a 78 from an 82.
If all you ever practice is the club you like hitting, you’re practicing for fun. There’s nothing wrong with that. The game is supposed to be fun. Just don’t mistake it for a plan to shoot lower scores.
This article uses the Thunderfoot Sports Golf Editor editorial persona. It was produced with AI-assisted research and drafting tools under Thunderfoot Sports editorial standards and reviewed by the editorial team.