We've been practicing all wrong

The most common affliction in golf is not the slice but the driving range swing that has mysteriously vanished. For many players the typical practice session involves a bucket of balls, a series of swings and the occasional sense that a problem has been solved. If it rarely works out, it’s because this way of practicing has little to do with golf.

The moment this idea really sunk in I was hitting wedges at The Grove XXIII, and not particularly well. The Grove is Michael Jordan’s South Florida golf oasis. It has plush leather chairs in the clubhouse and drinks and snacks delivered on the course by drone. Most of the experience is built around maximum comfort, but the practice area is designed around the opposite.

On the Grove range, the golf coach Darren May paced me through a drill he gives some of the best players in the world. There was a green 100 yards away, where May had planted four wooden stakes around the edge. The arrangement was not random. May uses strokes/gained data to create an appropriate-sized target for a player’s skill level, which isn’t to say the drill for a 10-handicap like me was meant to be easy. All the target greens are elevated with an assortment of shelves, and the wind was blowing. After I missed the first target from 100 yards, May moved me back another six yards, and I missed that one. Then May moved me again. That I missed most of my targets and felt flustered throughout was precisely the point. In that sense, it felt like my usual day of golf.

May’s sessions differ from typical golf lessons in that they are not meant to be back-slapping confidence builders—or at least not in the moment. Along with Jordan and other Grove members, May works with major champions like Keegan Bradley and Justin Thomas as well as tour-aspirant college golfers. All entrust May to structure practice sessions largely built around failure. The more strain May can create at the Grove, the better, because they recognize tournament golf is even tougher. (No matter how impressive Grove’s setup, it, too, is subject to improvement. The club is renovating both the course and practice facilities.)

If the facility stands out because of the exclusive address and the golfers who show up there, it also represents an overall shifting approach to golf practice. Thanks to launch monitors, there has never been more information available about how we swing the golf club and the way the ball reacts, but this feedback rarely accounts for golfers’ tendencies in specific situations. It’s one thing to groove a pitching wedge on an open range, but what happens to the swing when you’re staring at a narrow green surrounded by bunkers or with a one-shot lead on the 18th tee? It’s only when training under what May calls “mental load” that golfers are provided an accurate sense of both a problem and a solution.

“People don’t want to fail on the golf course, but that’s not the right way to coach them because it’s going to happen,” May says. “I’m desensitizing them to it, so they have a better sense of what they can handle and what they can’t.”

As much as May believes golfers should strive for better mechanics, he believes limiting practice to the controlled setting of a driving range or a simulator misses the point. Unless your usual Sunday game involves hitting 40 consecutive 8-irons off a perfect lie, you need training conditions that can bridge the gap between low-stakes range sessions and pencil-in-your-pocket competitive rounds.

Other sports figured this out long ago. College football teams will pump crowd noise during practice to prepare players for the chaos of Saturday. In baseball, hitters transition from batting cages to live pitching, then to hitting with runners on base. But it’s taken longer in golf. The old stories of Earl Woods jangling his keys during Tiger Woods’ backswing represented an extreme form of situational practice, the father conditioning his son for inevitable distractions. Decades later, it speaks to a philosophy that is gaining more widespread traction, reflected in elaborate practice areas like the Grove’s and other high-end clubs that are meant to sharpen players’ focus under different forms of duress.

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Down the road, Apogee Golf Club is nearing completion of its 60-acre facility with a 360-degree range featuring elevated tee boxes and target greens shrouded by bunkers, plus a separate short-game area with an AimPoint practice green designed by tour putting coach Stephen Sweeney. Augusta National’s 18-acre tournament practice facility has devoted careful thought to every element, including practice greens and bunkers that are precise facsimiles of the actual course. A similar feature is available at New Jersey’s Metedeconk National, with replica fairway routings allowing players to practice different shot shapes. Leading Division I college golf programs like Arizona State and the University of Illinois have invested millions in creating elaborate training areas meant to entice recruits and sharpen current players for tournament play.

It’s not just where golfers are practicing. More important is what they’re choosing to emphasize. The reason May works with several players who have separate swing coaches is because they seek his input in structuring practices that are inordinately demanding. Similarly, Nico Darras and Kevin Moore developed their company, Golf Blueprint, to devise “reactionary practice” routines of assorted game-like challenges for tour players and other competitive golfers.

“It’s a lot about keeping your finger to the flame as long as you can and just kind of becoming numb to it,” says Nico Darras, co-founder of Golf Blueprint. “We will create stressors so that when that moment happens, you’ve now done it enough.”

Recognizing this type of competitive practice doesn’t always require a sophisticated facility, Darras and Golf Blueprint have assisted Golf Digest with the development of a series of “Stress Tests” that are practice games designed to approximate round-like scenarios—for instance, a putting game that teaches speed control under pressure or an up-and-down game that tests recoveries from short-sided misses. The options can vary depending on the setting, but they all trigger more thought than hitting a ball into an open field or chipping aimlessly.

“I go to the driving range all the time and just sit and watch what golfers do,” says Darras, a former college baseball player who turned his attention to golf after suffering a career-ending injury. “They have no targets, no alignment aids. It’s just bad, bad, bad, bad. The goal is to give them some structure. That’s the lowest-hanging fruit.”

The lazy habits ingrained at the typical driving range are often traced to the misconception that dropping a bucket of balls at your feet and swinging away can only help. In fact, Golf Digest Best Young Teacher Will Robins says the reason golfers of the 1940s and 1950s used their practice time more constructively is because they had no other choice.

“Back then a Trackman was a shag bag,” says Robins, who is based in Folsom, Calif. “You went out to a field, and you put your umbrella out there, and you hit at that target, and you learned your distances to your umbrella and your towel. Everything had a purpose because you’re like, ‘I have to go and pick this thing up. I have to go and find it afterwards.’ We’ve totally taken that away with the driving range. There’s just absolutely no accountability there.”

May has plenty of gadgets at his disposal at The Grove. But his best tool in measuring accountability is the four wooden stakes. After I complete the wedge-control drill, May calls over the Chinese tour pro Yuxin Lin to demonstrate his version. Lin is 24, has twice played in the Masters after wins in the Asian-Pacific Amateur Championship, and now plays the Korn Ferry Tour. May tightens the stakes to limit Lin’s target to a small shelf in the back left quadrant of the green; this dispersion is based on the average of the best wedge player in golf. Lin lands his first shot within the stakes, but it trundles off. The next shot hits and spins back. Through every missed shot, Lin appears unfazed. Eventually, Lin sticks a ball to pin high, two feet from the flag.

“When you first start teaching and that client’s failing, you want to help them straight away,” May says. “We’re used to getting in there and stopping the bleeding, but we’re trying to help them be a little more creative and imaginative without being so conscious of their mechanics.”

It is not a coincidence that the backdrop for this exercise is a golf club founded by Michael Jordan. The Grove’s ornate touches underscore Jordan’s status as a living icon, but the practice area reflects how he became one. As a basketball player, Jordan emphasized “self-discovery,” which was only possible through resistance. He became a better jump shooter when the lanes to the basket started to close, and he became a better passer once defenders began to challenge his shot. This emphasis on self-discovery is how May designs his training sessions. “Confidence in Michael Jordan’s view is not hoping you can do something. It’s knowing you can do something,” May says. “That doesn’t happen if you don’t train without a sufficient level of discomfort.”

May’s connection to Jordan can be traced to another basketball legend. In the early 2000s, he was working at Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and giving lessons to Larry Brown, the Hall of Fame coach who won both an NCAA title with Kansas and an NBA crown with the Detroit Pistons. During one lesson, the basketball coach mentioned he viewed himself as an “execution coach.” He sought not just to teach players skills, but how to apply them in specific moments. May realized this wasn’t something he thought about enough.

“At that point, I was just giving people lessons, and they would just go and practice on their own, but we were not training under any sort of load,” May says. “I was an instructor, but I wasn’t responsible for someone’s execution. I was only helping them with how they hit the ball.”

Two decades later, whenever May sees Brown, he reminds the coach of his influence on his career because eventually May migrated to the Bear’s Club in South Florida, where Jordan was a member, and the two men recognized a shared philosophy around the relationship between failure and improvement.

“I also talked to Michael about how he viewed coaching.” May says. “We had the same ideas about how if you’re not failing, you’re not learning, and that you shouldn’t search for comfort … Then when he wanted to start his own place, and he knew that I was involved with coaching a certain way, that led him to ask me whether I had some insight into how to design a practice facility.”

The Grove facility attempts to modernize some of the practice principles used with a shag bag and an umbrella, giving golfers insight into why certain shots work and others don’t in an environment that more closely resembles real golf courses. The design draws inspiration from a graphic May uses to reflect ideal training conditions, with performance on one axis and difficulty on another. Where the two converge is what May calls “the learning sweet spot.” Suppose a drill is to sink a series of two-foot putts. The task is so easy, a golfer’s performance would be high, but he or she wouldn’t learn anything. Conversely, if a drill asked golfers to hit a small target from 250 yards away, golfers might disengage because they don’t believe they can do it. The sweet spot is when players are presented with a challenge that is just difficult enough that they understand why, both when they fail and when they succeed.

May’s principles have gained enough traction that he has been contracted to help design other facilities, including a new one at TPC Sawgrass. He’s also developing a game-improvement platform for Dick’s Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy that will create an in-store learning environment that are simulator versions of the outdoor facilities he’s designed. If the program succeeds, he believes more golfers will have the chance to adapt a military approach to training, with rigorous preparation translating to better performance.

“If you talk to people in special forces, they’re trying to make that training as close to the actual event as possible,” May says. “They’re adamant that under pressure, you only fall to the level of training.”

Of course, the idea isn’t to make a typical short-game session as miserable as boot camp. A common misconception when talking about “stressful practice” is that stress can only be unpleasant. “When people say stress, they often mean distress,” says Dr. Jeremy Jamieson, who oversees the Social Stress Lab at the University of Rochester. “People rarely use the word stress in a way that’s positive. That’s just the way our culture works. Athletes are one of the few groups that get it. They understand, ‘Oh, yeah, I need to be on and activated to do anything well.’”

By Jamieson’s definition, stress is a signal to the body to pay closer attention, which in competition, is something golfers not only tolerate but need. Most tournament-tested players understand this, and the most perceptive recognize how that stress manifests in their golf swings, like how a sand wedge can travel 10 yards farther when they’re teeming with adrenaline.

At Papago Golf Course outside Phoenix, Arizona State’s 22,000-squarefoot practice facility features 21 target greens, including a series of eight cascading targets ranging from 30 to 145 yards, with bells in the middle that ring on perfect strikes, though around the chipping greens, head coach Matt Thurmond relies on just a piece of chalk to outline the delineation between success and failure.

“It creates just a little bit of stress and makes you accountable,” Thurmond says. “You either got it in or you didn’t.”

The goal is not to just tax his players. Thurmond recognizes practices that are defined only by difficulty have diminishing returns.

“We really believe that having fun practicing is vital,” he says, “because if you enjoy what you do, you’re going to do it more, and practicing golf needs a lot of volume. We try to create an environment where they just like having a club in their hands. Most golfers are pretty sadistic. If you give an elite golfer a shot that they’re going to maybe succeed one or two times out of 10, they actually kind of like it.”

The last part might be most important because a practice facility is only as valuable as a golfer’s motivation to use it. A good facility might help stimulate the type of focus other golfers can manufacture on their own. As Thurmond notes, a golfer doesn’t make it to Arizona State without already knowing how to practice effectively, yet some golfers enjoy solving the puzzle more than others.

Former tour pro and current Golf Channel analyst Tripp Isenhour shares a story of when he was hitting balls next to Tiger Woods two decades ago on a Saturday at Torrey Pines. This was after a round in which Woods had struggled with his driver, and Isenhour recognized the superstar was working through an assortment of curious shots with his irons—draws and fades way up in the air, straight bullets barely off the ground. When Isenhour asked why, Woods said his driver was problematic enough he needed to practice the recovery shots that follow wayward drives.

“That’s the reason why I’m a freaking announcer now and not playing the Champions Tour,” Isenhour says. “When that happened to me, my thought was, ‘Damn it, I gotta fix my swing.’ ”

Woods could get wrapped up in swing mechanics like any other golfer, but he understood better than most the need to adapt to specific situations and to work through the challenge on his own.

Which brings up another essential lesson in effective practice: The best sessions aren’t the kind with someone hovering over a golfer’s shoulder.

When Will Robins describes his facility adjacent to a public course in Folsom, Calif., he knows it will never be confused with the Grove. The bunker is one they dug themselves, there’s scarce room to chip, and the range balls are bad. “Apart from that, it’s great,” he says.

He’s not entirely joking because in other ways, Robins has created an environment that trains his students for real golf with lots of drills featuring similar elements as competitive rounds. In one, players compete on the putting green in pairs. There’s a circular course, and every putt is recorded on what Robins calls a “purposeful practice card.”

“They go through all the emotions, starting off well, then getting frustrated, then rushing, and that’s when I just walk away,” Robins says. “The lesson starts because now I’m adding pressure.”

When players struggle, often Robins is not inclined to inject a solution, preferring instead to pose questions that will help the player attack the problem on their own. “If you don’t know the problem,” Robins says, “you’ll never know the solution.”

It goes back to self-discovery. Michael Jordan learned by way of opposing defenders. Robins’ students learn when they start counting putts. You don’t need the fanciest facility to practice effectively. You just need something that forces you to pay attention.