The New Year is here, and you want to make 2016 the best golfing year of your life, right? But it’s cold, the course is closed and you are confined to the range for the next few months.

How can you make the best of these next few months and transition your game from the range to the course when the season begins? How do you peak your performance for those important tournaments you wanted to win?

I have dedicated a vast majority of my career to designing and creating the ultimate practice plans for golfers. My book, “The Practice Manual,” is dedicated to improving both the learning and performance of golfers. In this article, I share a part of my book called “The 5 Phases,” which deals with how you might structure your practice over the course of a session, week, or even year.

Phase 1: Technical

During this phase of your training, you are going to focus 100 percent on your technique. This could be club movement/body movement, etc. “But I already do that,” most golfers tell me. Yes, but this is going to be very different.

Most golfers half-heartedly focus on a mix of technical changes and hitting good golf shots, and they usually end up getting neither. Technical changes are tough to do, as evidenced by the number of golfers who struggle to make the movements they intend to make. But this process can be much more difficult when a golfer’s attention is split between making a swing change and creating good results.

So, during this phase, make it your goal, and place 100 percent of your attention on making the desired technique. This means that the shot result becomes temporarily unimportant. Sure, we always want to hit good shots, but if you want to hit shots better than you normally do something’s gotta change. And that change might mean you hit it worse for a little while, at least until your body figures out how to put all the other pieces to the puzzle together.

Phase 2: Experimental

This is a very unorthodox phase, and 15 years ago I would have thought you were a mad man if you suggested it to me. Basically, this phase involves exploring and pushing the boundaries of your movement patterns and skills.

This will vary in intensity depending upon the current player’s skill level and comfort with this style of practice, but it may involve:

• Exploring shaping shots
• Trying to hit the sweet spot with varying set-up positions (aligning the ball on the toe or heel, for example)
• Intentionally trying to hit “wrong” parts of the clubface. As my study showed, it improved golfers quicker than the standard way.
• Exploring the scale of certain technical elements, such as hitting a few shots with a weaker grip or stronger grip.

This type of practice is skill/coordination building, and while many good golfers shy away from this type of practice due to a fear that they might “ruin” their swing, nothing could be further from the truth. Exploring different movement patterns, in the long term, can not only make golfers better, but it can improve their self-correcting capabilities, which is a vital skill to have on the course when things inevitably go wrong.

As an example, through learning to slice and fade the ball on the range, I now have the ability to fix my hook, should it occur on the course. Even though I may never use a fade shot on the course (I play a predominant draw shot), learning it helped other areas of my game.

Phase 3: Calibration

Phases 1 and 2 can be great for pushing a golfer’s potential, but they can also be quite disruptive to performance (just ask anyone going through a swing change). So when it gets closer to the golf season starting, I get more of my players to use what we call “calibration.”

During this phase, golfers focus more of their efforts on the performance of the shot, with specific analysis to the main contributing impact factors. For example, when they make a mistake, I asked them to define what kind of mistake it was. Was it:

• Ground contact?
• Clubface contact?
• Face-to-path?
• Speed (short game)?

When players see a pattern of faults occurring (through specific analysis), they then go into a training mode where they put their full attention on that specific problem. For example, if face strike was an issue, the player would then go through specific drills to improve that element before repeating the entire process.

Phase 4: Performance Training

This is a concept I devised after doing several studies with golfers and seeing varying results with players across the board. This led me to believe that everyone is different, and what works for one may not work for another. So, with this quandary in mind, how do we find out what is best for us?

This is a topic I will go over in more detail in a future article, but I would like to give a primer here. A/B testing (performance training) is where you look at two different protocols, test them both and see which one performed the best. It is such a beautifully simply idea, yet few golfers actually do it.

For example, should you focus on the target, or should you focus on your swing? While science as a whole may take the external option (target), I have seen other players actually perform better with a swing focus or swing key. If you hit 100 balls to a target and get a better dispersion while thinking about your swing than you do while thinking about the target, that information is very valuable.

In the example above, the clear-cut winner was the swing thought that produced the yellow shot grouping. I like to use Trackman data to back up this process. I can see statistically which swing thought may be functioning better for a golfer at any one time, but there are also ways that golfers can test this for themselves without launch monitor data.

Phase 5: Transference

How many golfers struggle to take their hard work from the range to the course?

Transference training is about creating situations that simulate a course scenario better than normal practice. This is often in the form of a game, such as playing the course mentally while on the range. You could also try this game below:

• Hit a drive between two markers 25 yards wide.
• If successful, hit a 7 iron between two markers 20-25 yards wide.
• If successful, hit a 60-yard pitch and stop it within a 20-foot circle of the flag.
• If successful, give yourself a point. Repeat to see how many points you can make with 60 balls. If you fail one level, start from the beginning.

This changes your mindset into a performance one, and also adds an element of pressure. It also allows you to test your ability to maintain the focus you identified in the previous phase (performance training) to see if it holds up under game-like pressure.

It also uses elements of random practice (hitting to different targets with different clubs) as opposed to blocked practice (hitting the same club to the same target over and over). The former has been shown to improve ability to transfer to the course much better.

Summary

Ideally, during the winter months, you may spend more time working in Phases 1 or 2. When spring comes around, you might transition to spend more time in Phase 3. And when time for performance has arrived, Phases 4 and 5 should dominate your sessions. Some plans I create for Tour players may include a little bit of each phase in each day, but most of my players will know what they will be doing for the full year ahead.

You can find out more about these training philosophies and much more in his amazon bestselling book “The Practice Manual – The Ultimate Guide for Golfers.” Buy it on Amazon.