Best Practice Strategies

[wakefield724]

It is my unpopular belief that the majority of golfers do not practice enough and when they do practice, they are entirely too focused on one club (the driver). I feel most comfortable hitting the range two times for every one round that I play. My favorite way to practice is to use the range time to focus on one or two parts of your swing you're looking to improve for the first 80% of your shots (ball placement, follow through, grip, ect.) Then with the last 20% you simulate a golf round or focus on targets. Going to the range and blasting 90 balls is not the most efficient way to improve. 

What are some of the strategies and ways you all practice? 

[iacas]

Well…

and

speak to it a little bit.

[klineka]

2 hours ago, wakefield724 said:

My favorite way to practice is to use the range time to focus on one or two parts of your swing you're looking to improve for the first 80% of your shots (ball placement, follow through, grip, ect.) Then with the last 20% you simulate a golf round or focus on targets.

I do something similar and it has seemed to work well for me.

I typically hit ~10 shots or so to warm up and get loose, no strict number or certain clubs but typically like 3-4 shots each with like a PW, 7/8 iron, and a long iron or hybrid.

Then I will work on my priority piece and either try to improve something with it or reinforce the proper feels that have been working. This portion involves a lot of slow motion/practice swings and takes up the majority of my practice time. In the off season or when I'm trying to make a swing change, I'll do quite a bit of filming my swing at this point too.

Then I will do target and yardage based work, going through my pre-shout routine each swing, trying to keep driver dispersion within a certain width (I know how far the driving range poles are apart so it's fairly easy to tell my dispersion width), trying to hit a variety of different flags, yardages, marks on the ground, etc with wedges, mentally simulating holes of whatever course I'll be playing next, etc. At this point I rarely hit more than 2 or 3 shots to the same target in a row.

Towards the end I'll mix in a couple all out driver swings too as a way to get my body used to swinging at faster speeds. I have found that I'm just as accurate (if not more) on these "all out" swings so that has given me a ton of confidence to take that swing to the course and smash the ball instead of trying to guide it with driver.

[p1n9183]

Deliberate practice is really important for improving. 

I hit the range on the week like 2 times and play golf at my golf club on weekends.

There are several stuff you learn over time on how to translate your ball-striking from the range to the course.
Is well known that we are all better at the range than we are on the course, so over the years I learned how to do it, at least this has been working for me. 

Step 0- I always keep stroke gained stats of all of my game to spot weak areas. Let say that I'm lacking on long irons.
1- I came up with new ideas to improve the long irons area, normally I look for ways to narrow my dispersion. As a feel player I look for new setups, alignments,  aims, paths, feelings etc. For a more traditional player It could be a mechanical swing change.
2- I test those ideas at home with whiffle balls and discard the ones that don't feel comfortable or consistent. 
3- I take the selected ones to the range and hit balls with all of them and keep the best one.
4- On the weekends I hit the course and test the new idea on a practice round (i go out with 5/7 balls and hit long irons all over the place), now I'm not in a perfect aligned carpet, this is a test on grass with different direction of winds ( I discovered that wind direction and it's strength make my body adjust to it so I need to test the new idea on all wind directions and strengths ).
5- If the idea is still holding it's ground is time to test it with different slopes (sidehill, downhill and uphill ). Not every swing reacts the same when you hit it from a slope, you have to know how your new swing or idea is going to behave in this situations.
6- Almost at the end is time to test it on rough to know how it reacts. 
7- Finally, and the most important one, is to go out and play a local tournament with this new idea to see if it hold up to the pressure involving scoring low. If that is the case then it became a new part in my golf game, if not you can guess why it went wrong under pressure and fix it or you can just throw it under the bus and look for more ideas.

A final really important matter about all of it, it to write everything down. Every swing change, every idea, every ball position chance, every change in alignment, is important to have all that vital information of your game in paper so if for some reason you forget about it, you can always read it again and keep yourself doing it correctly. 
The worst that can happend to you is to find that miracle swing change and forget how exactly you make it work.