May 26, 2026
Performance coach Karl Morris — who has worked with 6 Major Champions — reveals why most golf practice routines fail to transfer to the course, and the simple principles that make practice actually count.
By Karl Morris — performance coach to 6 Major Champions and 2 Ryder Cup teams
There's a question I ask golfers who come to see me, and the answer is almost always the same.
'How much of your practice time do you spend on the range?'
Most say the majority of it. Some say almost all of it. They'll describe hitting bucket after bucket, working through their clubs, trying to groove a move their coach mentioned, trying to find the feeling they had last time they played well.
And then I ask them how much of that range work they feel is genuinely making them a better golfer on the course. And the hesitation that follows that question is telling.
Here's the cycle I see constantly. You have a lesson. You're told to work on something in your swing. You go to the range and start working on this new move. After a while, the ball starts going a bit better and you feel like you're making progress. All you have to do now is take this swing thought out onto the course and everything will fall into place.
Then you get to the first tee. You try to apply the same thought that worked so well on the range. But somehow the swing doesn't feel the same, and the ball certainly doesn't behave the same way. You start dropping shots. You try harder to make the thought work. Things get worse. So you go back to the range to work on your swing a bit more.
Sound familiar? It might be the most universal complaint in golf. And I've seen it at every level — from club players to tour professionals. The question worth asking is: why?
The key concept that most golf practice routines never address is transferability. Not just whether you're hitting the ball well on the range — but whether what you're doing there actually has a chance of transferring to the golf course when the pressure and the stakes are real.
The range and the course are fundamentally different environments. On the range, you have unlimited balls. If the first one doesn't go well, there's another waiting. And another. And another. Your brain knows this. It registers that there are no real consequences to the shot you're about to hit. And that changes everything about how you approach it.
On the course, there are no second serves in golf. Every shot is accounted for. Every contact with the ball goes on the scorecard — including the air shots, including the penalty strokes, including the three-putt on the 18th you'd rather forget. Golf is the ultimate game of consequence. And yet for most golfers, their practice routine contains almost no consequence whatsoever.
Sian Beilock, from the University of Chicago, has spent much of her academic career studying why we fail to perform under pressure. Her conclusion is that a meaningful portion of our practice needs to 'immunise' us from pressure by simulating the effects of consequence. You have to make it matter.
The simplest way to do that is also the most obvious one, and yet almost no amateur golfer does it. Take a notebook to the range.
Think about it. On every hole on the course, you take a card out of your pocket and write down how many times you hit the ball. You keep score. Yet in practice, you hit ball after ball and keep no record whatsoever of what's happening. No accountability. No evidence of progress. No pressure.
The moment you start recording your results in practice — the moment a number goes on the page — something shifts. You care about the next shot differently. Your attention sharpens. And that shift, however modest, is the beginning of practising like a golfer rather than just hitting balls.
The principle I've come back to throughout my career, and which I've introduced to players at every level, is this: one ball, one unique location, one chance, score it.
That's it. That's the framework that makes practice count. When you hit the same shot from the same spot with a dozen balls in a row, you're not practising golf. You're practising a repetition drill. The game you play on the course never gives you that luxury.
When I work with players, I push them toward a game I created some years ago called Par 18. US Open Champion Graeme McDowell has been kind enough to say it's been one of the most important parts of our work together.
Here's how it works. You go to the short game area with one ball — the same ball you play with in competition. You pick nine different locations around the chipping area: three easy, three medium, three difficult. Each one is a par 2 — a chip and a putt. You go through your full routine on every shot, just as you would on the course. You chip on, hole out, move to the next. At the end of nine holes, you have a score.
The first time most players do this, the score is humbling. But that's exactly the point. It reflects your current short game ability — not your best three shots from the best lie you could find. Play this regularly, keep your scores, and watch what happens. When your Par 18 score comes down from 24 to 21 to 18, you know — based on actual evidence — that your short game is improving. And increasingly, when you miss a green on the course, your brain registers it as an opportunity rather than a disaster, because you've trained for exactly that moment.
I want to leave you with a question I think is one of the most important a golfer can ask.
If the swing creates the shot, then you need to get your body to make a precise series of predetermined movements to produce the result you want. That's the model most golf instruction is built on — and it's the model that sends millions of golfers back to the range, tinkering endlessly with positions and drills, hoping something will eventually click.
But consider the alternative: the shot creates the swing. If you have a genuinely clear idea of the shot you're about to play — the shape, the trajectory, the landing spot — your body will organise the movements needed to make that happen. Just as it would if you were throwing a ball to someone standing twenty yards away. You don't think about your arm action. You see the target and throw.
This isn't a mystical idea. It's how movement actually works. And it points toward a very different kind of golf practice routine — one built around creating shots, not rehearsing positions.
The science of attention and motor learning has come a long way in the past two decades, and much of it confirms what the best coaches have always known intuitively.
Researcher Gabrielle Wulf has spent her career studying what happens when athletes focus internally — on how their body is moving — versus externally, on the effect of the movement or the target. Her findings are consistent and striking: external focus leads to better performance, faster learning, and more durable skill retention than internal focus. In some of her studies, internal focus fared no better than no focus at all.
In golf terms, an internal focus is 'turn my shoulders', 'keep my elbow in', 'hinge my wrists'. An external focus is 'start the ball just left of that tree', 'land it on the front of the green and let it run', 'swing the club through to the target'.
The implications for your practice routine are straightforward. If you've spent a long time working on positions and swing thoughts with little sense of improvement, this might be why. Shift your attention outward — toward what you want the ball to do — and see what changes.
One thing I've observed over and over again is that when golfers embrace consequence-based practice — when they give every shot a score and a location and make it matter — they often find they need less time practising, not more. The quality of attention goes to a different level.
Hitting two hundred balls in a slightly distracted, consequence-free state does much less for your game than hitting thirty shots where every single one requires your full focus and counts toward a score you're tracking. Volume without intention is just ballstriking. Purposeful practice with consequence is actually training for golf.
If you're serious about improving, I'd suggest starting very simply. Next time you go to the short game area, take one ball. Pick a spot. Go through your routine. Chip and putt out. Write down the score. Move on. Do that nine times and see what your Par 18 number is. Play it again in two weeks. If the number goes down, you're actually getting better. That's evidence. That's progress you can trust.
If I were to summarise what a genuinely effective golf practice routine looks like, it would come down to a few simple principles.
First, make every shot matter. One ball, one location, one chance. Keep the score. Whether you're on the putting green, the chipping area, or the range, find a way to give each shot a consequence.
Second, practise like you play. Go through your routine on every shot in practice. Not a shortened version of it — the real one. If your pre-shot routine on the course involves a specific breath, a specific look at the target, a specific rehearsal move, do all of that in practice. You can't expect to switch it on under pressure if you haven't built the habit in training.
Third, spend time on your short game. The data consistently shows that most shots are dropped within 100 yards of the green. The golfer who can get up and down from anywhere is a dangerous opponent at any level. Par 18 and its variations will give you an honest picture of where your short game actually is — and a clear measure of whether you're improving.
Fourth, notice where your attention is going. When you step onto the range, are you thinking about your body or about the target? Are you working on positions or working on shots? The difference matters more than most golfers realise.
Golf is a deeply satisfying game to improve at. But improvement doesn't come from working harder at the same things that haven't been working. It comes from understanding what practice actually transfers to performance — and then doing that.
The Mind Caddie app includes structured programmes designed around these principles — audio lessons on training effectively, building the right habits, and taking your practice to the course. Start your free 7-day trial at mindcaddie.golf.
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You've had lessons. Maybe new clubs. The swing is there on the range — but under pressure, something gets in the way. The Mind Caddie shows you what that something is, and exactly how to fix it.
