Full swing · Grip

Practise to play, not to improve

There are two entirely different activities sharing the word practice, and most golfers only ever do one of them.

The first is improving: changing a movement so that it becomes something it was not before. The second is playing: rehearsing the actual demands of golf, which are one shot, one club, an unfamiliar lie, a target you have not hit to before, and no second attempt. Both are necessary. Almost everybody stops after the first and wonders why the scores do not move.

1The course is random whether you practise for it or not

Eighteen holes present you with a sequence of problems you have never seen in exactly that combination: this lie, this wind, this distance, this consequence, this state of mind. Nothing about it resembles a bucket of balls hit to one flag from a flat mat. If your practice never approaches that, you are rehearsing a sport that is adjacent to golf rather than golf itself.

2Which is what representative practice means

Pinder and colleagues formalised this in 2011 as representative learning design: practice tasks should preserve the perception-action couplings you actually face in competition. Not merely look similar, but require the same reads, the same decisions and the same commitment. This is why hitting a hundred balls to one target transfers so poorly - it removes the decision, which is the part the course is really testing.

3But you cannot start there, and that is not a failure of nerve

A movement you cannot yet execute at all does not benefit from being placed in a hard, unpredictable context. Grooving a rebuilt grip needs exactly what the transfer literature warns about: repetition, immediate feedback, an easy environment. That is practising to improve, it is genuinely necessary, and skipping it in the name of being game-realistic just means practising a broken movement under pressure.

4Difficulty is the dial between them

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork gave the umbrella idea its name: desirable difficulties, conditions that make practice harder and performance worse in the moment while leaving more behind afterwards. Spacing sessions apart, varying the task, reducing feedback, adding consequence, and interleaving are all levers on that same dial. Interleaving is one of them, not the whole idea, and treating it as the whole idea is how the popular version went wrong.

5The right amount of difficulty is personal, and that is the whole trick

Guadagnoli and Lee argued in 2004 that what matters is functional difficulty - how hard something is relative to your current skill. There is an optimal challenge point, and learning falls away on both sides of it. Too easy offers nothing to learn from. Too hard and you cannot extract the signal from the noise. The same session can sit on either side of that point for two different golfers, which is why practice advice stated as a universal rule is nearly always wrong for somebody.

6You are a beginner and an expert at once

This is the part almost nobody says. Your challenge point is not a property of you, it is a property of each skill. You might be rebuilding your takeaway from scratch while your putting is grooved and your bunker play is competent. The correct answer is to block the takeaway work, vary the bunker work and play games with the putting, in the same session. A single practice philosophy applied to your whole bag will be wrong for most of it.

7The ladder, and when to climb it

Groove it, then vary it, then interleave it, then simulate holes, then play. Move up a rung when the current one has become comfortable - comfort is the signal that you have dropped below your challenge point and stopped learning. Move back down when a change stops working under the added difficulty, which is information rather than failure. Random practice sits near the top of this ladder. It is a destination you climb toward, not the rung you start on.

8Which reframes what a good session feels like

A session spent practising to play should feel worse than one spent practising to improve, and should produce a scrappier-looking bag of results. That is the trade you are deliberately making. The only way to know whether the trade paid is to look at what happened on the course several weeks later, which is a different measurement problem entirely.

Common questions

How do I know which rung of the ladder I am on?

Comfort is the tell. If you can execute the thing reliably in the current setup and the session feels smooth, you have dropped below your challenge point and should add difficulty. If you cannot execute it at all and the session is a mess, you have overshot and should take difficulty away.

Is this just saying play more golf?

No, though playing more helps. Playing is the top of the ladder but a poor place to build anything, because you get one attempt per problem and no repetition. The argument is for a session that spans the ladder rather than living permanently at either end.

How much of a session should be practising to play?

It depends on how much of your bag is still being built, which is exactly the point. A reasonable default for a competent golfer with no active swing change is most of it. For someone mid-rebuild, considerably less, and the rebuild work should come first while you are fresh.

Does this apply to putting?

More cleanly than anywhere else, because putting is easy to make representative. Never hit the second putt from the same spot, always play to a specific target with a consequence, and vary the distance every time. Most putting practice is three balls from six feet, which is the least course-like thing available.

Sources

Every claim about evidence on this page traces to one of these. Follow them and check.

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475-479.
The authors own account of desirable difficulties: conditions that depress performance during acquisition while improving long-term retention and transfer.
Guadagnoli, M. A., & Lee, T. D. (2004). Challenge point: A framework for conceptualizing the effects of various practice conditions in motor learning. Journal of Motor Behavior, 36(2), 212-224.
Functional task difficulty is relative to the performer, so an optimal challenge point exists and the same practice condition helps one learner and overwhelms another.
Pinder, R. A., Davids, K., Renshaw, I., & Araujo, D. (2011). Representative learning design and functionality of research and practice in sport. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 33(1), 146-155.
Practice tasks that preserve the perception-action couplings of competition are the ones expected to transfer to performance.

Last updated August 18, 2026