So often when I see players practicing they are hitting the same shot repeatedly. Their reasoning is that they just about have the right feeling for their golf swing and just need to hit a few more shots to cement that feel. Usually the player is refining their rhythm and timing for that particular shot by hitting multiple shots rather than improving their swing.
Hitting the same shot repeatedly will certainly allow you to hit some good shots, but in that same group of shots are usually some average and poor shots as well. While this type of practice seems logically correct as you are looking to build the feel or “muscle memory” of your swing, the reality is that there is very little transfer to the golf course with this type of practice.
Research into different types of training for golf and other sports consistently shows that the best type of practice is one which incorporates variety and complexity. For golf this means constantly changing the club, target, shot shape, swing effort level, swing speed, swing length and shot trajectory, hitting from different types of lies (rough or fairway and level or sloping lies) and including your shot routine.
If you’ve never practice this way, then you might find this type of practice challenging, because you have to recalibrate your intention for the shot as well as adjusting for any changes you have introduced. The benefits though are massive; you will be able to transfer your learned skill to the golf course much more successfully with variety in your practice than with blocked practice (hitting one shot repeatedly).
Adding variety also builds your golfing intuition, strategic thinking and imagination. These are all skills that are instantly recognisable in the greatest players.
Playing golf successfully requires adjusting for each shot, which is likely to be subtly different to any shot you have ever played. Every putt you have is subtly different to any part you have hit in the past, and part of your preparation is to make adjustments for green speed, grass type and length, putt length and single or multiple breaks.
A philosophy which most athletes have is that they try to make their training more difficult than competition. In reality this is difficult to do for golf, but adding lots of variety is the closest that you will get to it.
When you practice with lots of variety you will hit far fewer golf balls in the same period of time compared to what you would if you were using blocked practice. The good news here is that while you are spending less in range ball fees your game will benefit.
Research also shows that improvement in the very short term may not be guaranteed by having variety;in your practice, however in the long term it is the vastly superior to any other type of practice. If you are able to combine variety in practice with competitive drills, then you are guaranteeing yourself the greatest possible chance of taking your good practice performance to the golf course.
Cybernetics has the Law of Requisite Variety which states “The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.” Essentially this means the greater the options available to an individual (or thing) the more likely it is to be successful. So whether it is cybernetics or golf, the more variety and options that exist, the better off you are.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”
– Leon C. Megginson