How can I improve my course game using mats?

[RandallT]

11 minutes ago, JediFish said:

Multiple people have mentioned hitting irons off of a tee. I'm curious how to translate that to hitting off grass? I have a problem hitting thin and although I think that drill could help my contact, I think after removing the tee, it might be hard to adjust to the loss of the height seeing as I'm prone to hit the upper half of the ball anyways. 

Seems like a good question and was wondering the same thing. Here are my guesses:

When we are at the range we should be typically working on swing fundamentals. Backswing, transition, hand path, club path.  Those big things that decide how the swing goes, and its consistency/repeatability.

Adjusting for the height of the ball and making solid contact is a relatively minor thing. In fact, on the course, we need the skill of adapting to different lies, so we already know that we can mostly "find the ball" when we need to. 

But it's the big things with the swing that count- so range work needs to be focused on improving fundamentals. Use video to confirm that we are fixing our priority- don't just use feels or ball contact. See it on video. Don't worry about contact really.

its hard to do, but trust that when it's time to really swing, you'll find the ball pretty easily.

Just my thoughts. From my experience of the past few months I have practiced pretty hard and frankly haven't even made many full swings at the range. Now that things are more sound, I feel that making adjustments higher or lower would be far simpler. The hard part was changing the big picture.