You’ve finished playing for the weekend and believe that your putting cost you quite a few shots.  For the practice sessions the following week do you

a) focus almost exclusively on putting to try to ensure it is better next week

b) keep to a balanced practice schedule or

c) buy a new putter?

Most people tend to do either a) or c).  The reason is more related to short term thinking or perhaps desperation.  The outcome is often that the following week, the putting is better, but at the expense of the areas of your game that have been neglected.

So how should you divide your practice time to ensure there is a balanced approach to developing each area of your game?  The table below shows how the proportion of different shots is broken down for most players.

Driver	Fwy wood	Long Iron	Mid iron	Short iron	Pitch	Chip	Sand	Long putt	Mid putt	Short putt	Total
6%	4%	5%	10%	10%	12%	10%	8%	9%	14%	12%	100%

A good starting point in planning practice is to divide your time according to this table.  There are two factors to take into account with this table.

1. There are a lot of shots played with the driver on the course, so in practice this percentage could be reduced a little; perhaps from 6% down to 3%.

2. There should be a little extra attention devoted to areas of weakness.  In the example above where the player putted poorly, it would be ok to increase the total time spent putting by 5-10%.

The way the shots are divided doesn’t need to be exact, as the principle is to ensure that each area of your game receives some attention.  Another important aspect is to create variety into the practice; some of the time you will be developing your technique, so time spent completing competitive drills and some time spent with varying targets, distances and incorporating pre-shot routines.  This allows the transfer of practice to the course.