How many hours per week were you practicing when you saw significant improvement?

[SPJr]

15 hours ago, Grizvok said:

Even if I'm hitting a small bucket of balls I'm at the range for roughly an hour where I'm shooting video of a lot of swings while focusing on a specific piece (for me right now my practice is all focused on Key # 2 - weight forward at impact) and tweaking things during the session that I continue to video and change throughout to get the look that I want.

What sort of drills do you do to help you with this?

Transfering my weight forward at impact is probably my biggest issue right now.

[MarvChamp]

@RFKFREAK, these are all good comments, indicating the individuality of practice and improvement. I suggest you purchase, read and put in practice Lowest Score Wins (LSW). Also spend a lot of time in the Instruction thread. Best to you, -Marv

[Grizvok]

6 minutes ago, SPJr said:

What sort of drills do you do to help you with this?

Transfering my weight forward at impact is probably my biggest issue right now.

This is the first one I started with and one that I still regularly do :

 

These guys at Athletic Motion Golf are pretty damn good. Definitely worth checking out their other content as well.

 

Then after getting used to the feel of more weight forward I simply begin video'ing tons of strokes working on certain feels or thoughts that produce the best result.

[Foot Wedge]

17 hours ago, RFKFREAK said:

Was there any other type of practice that was incorporated?

Have you or are you planning on taking lessons?  You'll get a lot more out of practicing the right bits based on lesson feedback than just doing reps.  When I first got more into golf, I made the mistake of getting a year membership at a cheap course to play as much as possible.  All I did was ingrain bad habits. 

[RFKFREAK]

35 minutes ago, MarvChamp said:

@RFKFREAK, these are all good comments, indicating the individuality of practice and improvement. I suggest you purchase, read and put in practice Lowest Score Wins (LSW). Also spend a lot of time in the Instruction thread. Best to you, -Marv

I bought LSW when it first came out.  See my badge? 

[Groucho Valentine]

At my peak i was playing +3 golf. I feel like i was practicing an hour or two a few times a week, and playing 36-45 holes a week on average. 

These days, I'm probably down below half of that. 

[RFKFREAK]

8 minutes ago, Foot Wedge said:

Have you or are you planning on taking lessons?  You'll get a lot more out of practicing the right bits based on lesson feedback than just doing reps.  When I first got more into golf, I made the mistake of getting a year membership at a cheap course to play as much as possible.  All I did was ingrain bad habits. 

In the past I've had an instructor from Evolvr but the site currently has issues and I'm waiting for them to be resolved.  At the moment, I'm practicing what the the instructor suggested I work on in last lesson I received in Oct. 

[RFKFREAK]

5 hours ago, Moxley said:

 As with most sports, the better you get, the more practice is needed to move up a level, along with an initial burst needed to get going. At your level , a few hours a week ought to cut it if it's the right practice, since there are probably a lot of quick wins to be had. 

For me,  pitching and chipping was key to getting my scores down to around the 100 mark, since if you can chip & pitch, you can take 3 controlled shots to get to the green with the confidence that most of the time you'll have then have a 2 putt for bogey, which is fine if breaking 100 is the main aim. Only gets you so far though.

Full swing practice has the potential to be more transformational I think, but less predictable. 

Presently I dedicate fairly little time to practice due to wrist & back issues, but I improve by playing a lot of practice rounds (~2 a week), which helps things like course management and playing from tricky lies. In the 18 months that I've been seriously playing (was once a month player before), I've gone down from struggling to justify 28 , to 14. First few strokes were short game, then after that largely full swing. But even now i'm a poor 14, other folks that play to a similar handicap usually have a better technique but think less about course management. 

Good luck.

This is encouraging, thanks.

[DDBowdoin]

This is my first summer off as a teacher and the key to my practice is staying off a driving range.  I have a bad left hand, numerous MRI's showed nothing wrong but there is an acute pain when playing golf.  I have a tendency to come down hard and steep and I take a big divot.  Therefore, range time has to be limited especially if I can't find a grass range.  The key for me is to stand in the fringe and hit a 100 chips, 10 yards back, 100 more chips, 20 yard pitch, 100 balls.  Final practice for me is 100 balls using either my 56 or 60 degree wedge to pitch a shortsided pin OVER a trap.  Doing this 2 days a week helped me tremendously.  My tendency was to decelerate and chunk a ball into the sand.  I never find myself with easy chips that are short of a green.  I tend to find myself pulling or pushing irons that are pin high but off target, or perhaps aimed poorly! 

[p1n9183]

At 2 i just played on weekend 27 holes in average.

At +1 i used to practice 2 hours on the week and played 36 holes during the weekend..

At +1 i quit practice but added 18 more holes to the weekend.

Now i´m at 2 again, just play for fun on weekends.

Practice it´s important, on the range and on the course. 

[Vinsk]

On a light work week I practice about 20hrs/week. I see no improvement. 

[Big C]

Just my two cents, but practicing the right way (knowing your priority and having the discipline to stick with that) is far more important than total time spent on the range. 

When I joined TST, I was hovering between a 9-10 hcp and had drifted as high as 13. 

Thanks to some help from a few members here, mostly notably @mvmac, I identified a few key priorities for myself and stuck with them faithfully (okay, mostly faithfully). 

With kids and work eating a significant chunk of my hours, I don't get to the range more than 1-2 times a week. And I never spend more than an hour practicing. But I try to make my practice count and ingrain good habits at every possible opportunity. Whenever I feel like I'm drifting, I go back to my swing thread and review the basics. Almost always, I'll find a nugget or two that I have forgotten or neglected. 

Despite my relative lack of practice hours, I've been able to maintain a 6-7 index for several years now.

[billchao]

My scores have been trending down faster in the last two years than the years before and I've spent less time practicing these last two years than ever. It's probably because I'm a bit of a tinkerer so more time spent working on my swing isn't actually productive. Now I hit into my net maybe once a week but spend a little bit every day doing inside stuff, it's really helped me focus on one piece instead of doing too many things at once.

[Sandy Divot]

I play a lot. Very rarely practice.

[JonMA1]

7 hours ago, Grizvok said:

This is the first one I started with and one that I still regularly do :

 

These guys at Athletic Motion Golf are pretty damn good. Definitely worth checking out their other content as well.

 

Then after getting used to the feel of more weight forward I simply begin video'ing tons of strokes working on certain feels or thoughts that produce the best result.

Thank you for this @Grizvok. I'm going to work on the drill tonight. I like the emphasis they put on learning to do the drill correctly.

[Grizvok]

32 minutes ago, JonMA1 said:

Thank you for this @Grizvok. I'm going to work on the drill tonight. I like the emphasis they put on learning to do the drill correctly.

No problem. Of course you can potentially run into contact issues when doing this drill (although that's completely irrelevant to the drill) but don't be surprised if when you do make solid contact that you probably see some close-to record distances with your irons. I think the huge takeaway is just how early on in the downswing and even late backswing that the weight should be getting forward.

[MarvChamp]

11 hours ago, RFKFREAK said:

I bought LSW when it first came out.  See my badge? 

Sorry! I made an ASSumption! Regards, -Marv 🤐

[Shindig]

My times of biggest improvements:

* April - June 2008, played 72 holes a week and often practiced the other days.  Went from ~25 handicap to ~20 handicap and broke 90 for the first time.

* Summer 2014 and Summer 2015, practiced or played nearly daily, went from ~19 handicap to ~13 handicap (despite not much practice/play in between those two summers).  It's only this summer (2018) where I'm also practicing a lot more, although the handicap doesn't yet reflect that.  Summer 2016 and 2017 were largely maintenance for me I feel, although I did some improving then.

Like many here, I'm also a teacher so I suspect summers going forward will be the times of my biggest improvements.