The Practice Paradox: Why hitting fewer balls with purpose beats mindless range sessions

There’s a scene that plays out at driving ranges everywhere: a golfer feeding ball after ball into the hitting bay, raking ball after ball onto the mat. An hour later, the bucket’s empty, the hands are sore, and the golfer leaves feeling productive.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: that session probably did very little to improve their game—and may have actively made it worse.

The Illusion of Productivity

Volume feels like effort, and effort feels like progress. Hitting a ton of balls creates the satisfying sense that you’ve worked on your game. But practice and repetition aren’t the same thing. Repetition without intention simply grooves whatever patterns you already have—often bad.

Hit balls mindlessly, and you get better at hitting balls mindlessly. That doesn’t transfer to the course, where every shot demands a commitment, confidence and execution.  Having clear direction with your practice, from your golf lesson, gives your practice purpose.

Purposeful practice may not always feel as satisfying as hitting large buckets of balls. It requires patience, discipline and honest self-assessment. However, it is far more effective in producing lasting improvement.

Let’s be clear that this purposeful practice is unlikely to come from a YouTube video because its not specific to you.  On the rare occasion that the YouTube advice is good, the chance that you are working on things in the wrong order is most likely.

The best golfers in the world don’t simply practice more, well, they do but they practice better. Every session has an objective. Every drill has a purpose. They are getting feedback from each shot.   

Every lesson with me will provide you with the tools for this purposeful practice and the ability to self assess the results of each shot, ie why did I hit that shot.  This gives your practice direction instead of jumping between random ideas you saw on YouTube.

For amateur golfers looking to lower their scores, the lesson is clear: stop measuring practice by the number of balls you hit and start measuring it by the quality of your focus.

What Purposeful Practice Actually Looks Like

Each golf lesson will provide you with this purposeful practice instead of mere ball-beating:

A clear, narrow objective. Instead of “work on my swing,” a purposeful goal might be “feel the club float back” or “finish facing the target”.  The goal will be specific enough that you can get valuable feedback from each effort. 

Specific drills, like swinging with your feet together, will help your swing evolve.

You will want to hit balls more often because you will see results from your effort.  How many members at your club have had the same handicap for 10-years?  You can be sure those guys aren’t taking lessons and practicing with purpose.

Feedback and adjustment. Every shot becomes data. Did that ball start where you intended? Did the contact feel solid? Purposeful practice means pausing after misses to diagnose what happened—not just raking another ball over and hoping the next one’s better.

Rest and reflection. Fatigue degrades motor learning. Shorter, focused sessions with breaks between reps outperform marathon range sessions where the last 50 balls are hit with a tired body and a wandering mind.

The Science Behind It

Guided deliberate practice with immediate feedback is the key to improving quickly whether its music or golf.

If you’ve trained with me you’ve probably heard me talk about how learning golf is more like learning to play the violin than improving in another sport.  Running faster or trying harder don’t work here, improving a specific technique does.   When you first play the violin it may sound like you are torturing a cat but with guidance and a better technique soon 2 good “notes” (shots) out of 10 soon becomes 6 out of 10 and later you are playing a song.

Imagine how much faster that process will be discovering with a coach versus trying to find your way on your own.

The Counterintuitive Payoff

Golfers who adopt purposeful practice often report: they hit fewer balls but improve faster. They also find practice more engaging because every shot matters. Just like on the course.  The range becomes a “laboratory for experimentation” ( I stole that phrase) rather than a treadmill for repetition.

You can still enjoy hitting lots of balls but make sure each session includes some specific practice, drills, which you can collect from our lessons.

The bucket mentality is hard to shake. Its fun, and I get it. I love hitting balls sipping coffee and telling stories with Robin at the range in Thailand but if the goal is actually to play better golf, the evidence is clear: a small bucket more often with a specific purpose beats just beating balls.