If you’re like me, you want to improve your golf, but find it difficult to get to the golf course often enough. With this in mind, what can you do to play golf at home?
If you want to know how to practice golf at home, I have prepared some useful and productive exercises and drills for you to try and that will help you to progress your game in the right direction.
In this article, I’ll cover my best ways to practice Golf at home and maximize your golf progress while stuck. This is not an extensive list of 50 exercises, but the best set of ideas to help you improve at golf.
In total, this will give you about an hour of focused practice.
Table of Contents
How To Practice Golf At Home
Many people are going to be spending more time at home than ever. This guide will help you with various ways to play golf at home.
I will focus on seven main categories: Golfing Fitness, Putting, Complete Shots, and Wedge Play, Swing Drills, Mental Practice. Not everyone will be able to work on all of them due to size limitations, but I hope you get some good ideas from whatever method you can practice.
Also, I have linked to other articles that I have written to help explain certain concepts in more detail.
Also, if you are interested in building a golf simulator setup at home, check out my guide here.
Improve Your Golfing Fitness
Let’s start with a golf exercise that requires very little space and one that will help improve every aspect of your game. Probably the most forgotten golf exercise of all … the exercise itself.
Improving your overall health, fitness, and flexibility at home will help your golf in many ways. Improvements in your posture, balance, clubhead speed, and overall range of motion.
It will allow you to swing the golf club more flexibly and easily, helping you add a few extra yards to your shots and more control to your iron shots.
There are many resources online to help you find the right exercises, but the things you want to focus on the most are:
- Balance and flexibility – yoga and stretching are perfect for these
- Core Strength – Again, yoga or Pilates are great for this, along with any other abdominal exercise like the plank.
- Overall Muscle Strength – Bodyweight exercises are perfect, and if you have a few dumbbells around the house, there are a host of different exercises you can do to help add strength and power to your game.
Youtube is full of home workout routines that you can choose from, so take your pick. Exercise is a very personal thing, so make sure that what you choose is something you enjoy.
Staying in shape to play golf at home requires very little space and is something that will help you in all aspects of your life, not just golf.
Putting at Home
Everyone wants to improve their putting and there is no better way to do it than by practicing at home. There are so many options to choose from when it comes to putting practice aids at home:
- If you have carpeted floors, although the ball will run very slowly through them relative to the stimulation meter, it is a great exercise to gain feel and control of your putter. Get a trusty old school mug as a dummy target hole and you’re done.
- Another great exercise is balancing a coin on a golf ball at one end of the room and the object of the exercise is to practice putting another ball as close as possible so that it touches the other golf ball but does not hit the coin. off.
- If you have a mat at home, you have a bit of space along your baseboard, or you can put some kind of tape on the floor, then a good exercise is to practice your putting stroke making sure your back doesn’t go over the line of a goal. carpet or tape. and does not hit the baseboard. This helps ensure you build a solid, straight, repeatable putting shot.
- Of course, the other option is to use one of the many putting mats that are currently available that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
However, if you decide to putt at home, the most important thing to remember is that your shot must remain square to your target and that your swing must be kept smooth with slight acceleration through the ball.
Practicing Into a Net
I realize that not everyone has the space in their apartment or house to make full shots on the net. But if you do, there are many ways to make this practice meaningful.
I’ll break this section down into a few parts, depending on whether or not you have feedback on your shooting from a launch monitor. I’ll also include links to articles that explore each method in more detail.
Impact Practice
Anyone who has read Practical Golf for some time knows that I am a huge advocate of tracking your impact trends.
This would be my number one recommendation for anyone throwing balls into the net at home, especially if they have no way of knowing how the shot turned out.
Tempo practice
Another favorite practice method of mine when hitting balls at the net is working on the tempo of the swing.
To understand why the concept is so important and how to practice effectively, I recommend reading my full swing tempo breakdown here.
Low Point Control
A critical skill of any ball hitter is low point control. Ideally, you want your irons to contact the ball first and then interact with the grass afterward on a downward trajectory.
Launch Monitors
Launch monitors have become a popular way to give feedback when practicing on a network. I’ve already covered this topic extensively on the site, and many of you know that I use a SkyTrak launch monitor myself.
Whether your budget is as low as $200 or in the thousands, there are many ways to use these devices to practice effectively.
The Full-Length Mirror Is Your Best Friend
Your fundamentals are the most important part of your golf setup and if you have a full-length mirror and a club from your golf bag, there are several exercises you can do to ensure you have the correct fundamentals.
Your Grip
Up to 90% of swing problems are caused by poor setup and it all starts with the grip. By practicing your grip in front of a mirror, you will ensure that your hands are exactly where they need to be on the stick and how they feel and look together.
Viewing this from all angles will give you confidence in the course that you have gotten it right.
Your Posture
Sometimes I suffer from poor posture in my golf swing and by standing in front of a mirror and taking my normal preparation position I can adjust the angle of my spine, the flexion of my knees, whatever it takes to know exactly how my body and, in turn, feel it.
Follow these posture-setting tips and practice them in front of the mirror to ensure you have a clear idea of good golf posture, which is key to your golf swing success.
You can use the mirror for your setup position, your starting position, and to see where your club is at the top of your swing. Seeing your body in these different positions will help you understand where you may be going wrong on the course.
Swing Drills
You can still practice your golf swing indoors. Just make sure you have a space in your home where you can comfortably take full swing. If you have a problem, you can:
- Just grip down the club.
- If you are confident enough and have an old replacement stick, you can shorten it to use only for practice.
- Or you can invest in a swing trainer like the one I use. It’s much shorter than a regular club, has a training grip attached, and is weighted on the lower end to help improve swing tempo and speed.
First of all, and you can still use the full-length mirror here, the main goal is to slowly move your club into the required positions throughout the entire swing to check your positions, and then use the mirrored feedback to make adjustments on the fly.
Another great exercise is to simply take two sticks of similar length and wrap your hands around both.
So you want to do a normal backswing and you should instantly feel a pull when you are at the top of the backswing through the extra weight of the backswing.
Continue swinging and complete a full swing with both clubs. Do this 5-10 times and then go back to the single stick.
This is great for improving your control of the golf club, especially at the top of the backswing, and it will also help you add speed to your swing because one club will feel much lighter than two.
Again, this is a great exercise to practice in front of the mirror.
Wedge Play
If you have a patio in your house and are willing to break up the grass a bit, there are many ways to improve your wedge game.
Since the size of your turf will be a limiting factor, you will likely work on shorter chip or pitch shots.
There are 3 skills you can work on, which primarily dictate success on the golf course:
- Distance control
- Trajectory
- Turf interaction
I’ll give you some ways to practice each of these in this section.
Distance Control
How well you can land the ball within the desired distance is perhaps the most essential wedge skill.
If you can land the ball on the green and keep it there regularly, you will conquer one of the most important challenges in golf: preventing bogeys and double bogeys.
Of course, you want to save pairs more often, but avoiding wedge shots that miss the green is a skill available to all golfers.
In general, you cannot perfect your distance control unless you are actively trying to land the ball within a reasonable distance around your target. Also, don’t expect perfection.
I also prefer simplicity when it comes to wedge games. Be good at controlling your distance with just a wedge or two, so you know what to expect on the field. I do 95% of my practice on these shots with my 56 degrees and 60-degree wedges.
Lastly, you need to mix your practice between repetitive and random goals, which I recently talked about in this post. Here are some examples:
Pick a target and hit 5 to 10 balls repeatedly, paying close attention to general proximity. Track your progress and be competitive with yourself.
Play a game of “jumping frog.” Take the first shot at a shorter distance and then try to progressively land the next set of balls one step further than the previous one. You can also do this in reverse order.
Test yourself at random. Set 4-5 targets around your yard at various distances and run them randomly.
Trajectory
How low or high your wedge blows travel through the air is also very important for scoring. As you may have noticed, a shot on a lower trajectory tends to spread further across the green, while a higher shot will stop a little faster.
Without getting too complicated, there are two main ways to control your trajectory. The first is with the selection of clubs. All things being equal, chipping with an 8 iron will start the ball on a lower trajectory compared to a sand wedge.
The second way to control the trajectory is how you deliver the stick. Some players are more adept at using their hands and are preparing to add or decrease loft with the same suit.
I think the loft control is a wedge play area where a little experimentation can help most players. What I like to do is pick a target and try to get the ball to land the same distance with a low, medium, and high trajectory.
You can do this with the same club and experiment with the position of the ball, opening or closing the face, or altering your technique.
Rather, you could also choose different clubs to achieve those different trajectories. Performing this drill will give you a better idea of what is required to keep the ball slightly lower or higher.
My only caveat is that you don’t need to get too fancy about things. For the most part, you can achieve very similar wedge trajectories and perform well in the field.
Turf Interaction
Another critical skill of the wedge is reading your lies. Not all balls will sit perfectly on the fairway.
When your ball lands in the rough, you will have to deal with a spectrum of lies ranging from buried to being “fluffy” and on top of the grass. Your technique and club selection should be adjusted accordingly.
Your garden may suffer a bit, but if you’re up for it, you can experiment with different lies and see how the club reacts. A general rule of thumb to follow is the following:
If your ball is buried, it is better to steer a bit with the delivery of the club. Think of it as a nosediving plane.
On the contrary, if your ball is well supported on the grass, you can do the opposite. Instead of the imaginary plane making a steeper descent, you can make a shallower approach to the ball, such as a soft landing on the runway.
Sometimes I like to think of it more like a putting stroke and I just gently rock my torso back and forth without compromising my hands too much.
Mental Practice
The mental side of golf is a rather underrated and neglected area, especially when it comes to amateur golfers. Visualization techniques that build confidence in your own game are great ways to improve your golf at home.
Many professional golfers have mental trainers and use various imagery exercises to help them become better on the course, so why shouldn’t we take a leaf out of their book and sharpen our minds as much as our swings?
Imagery
The first exercise is to visualize how you want your golf swing to look. Imagine what your perfect swing looks like in your mind, how you feel, what your arms are doing, and where your wrists are on impact, for example. The mind can be a very powerful tool, and visualizing the perfect swing in your mind, can often help you create a better swing on the field.
Course Management
If you’re playing the same course week after week, then mentally going over your perfect round is a great way to help build confidence in your game and to give yourself some kind of game plan before you start.
See where you want your tee shot to land on each hole, which side of the fairway you want to land on to get the best shot on the green, and where the danger spots are on the course.
Viewing your round in this way at home is a great way to help build confidence and improve your game. If you’ve played the course before, try to remember the best shots you’ve made on each hole, what club you took, how it felt, and what was going through your mind at the time.
This builds overall confidence in your game, and no matter where you’re playing, these little mind tricks will go a long way to helping you stay calm, positive, and energized on your round, and more importantly, on your next. threw.
Conclusion
So there you have it. Not being able to make it to the golf course or driving range is simply not an excuse when it comes to improving your golf game.
Hopefully, we’ve provided you with several interesting ways to practice golf at home, whether you’re stuck there due to the weather or have 15 minutes to spare each night before bed.
The idea is to make the practice fun and just as useful. Swinging the club aimlessly without realizing how the body and club are moving in relation to the swing will get you nowhere.
Effective practice at home is not about spending your money on the most expensive devices, it is about ensuring that the devices and exercises you use have a positive impact on your game.
