Beating balls at the range is making you worse

I spent about two years hitting a large bucket twice a week with my handicap glued to 16, convinced I was putting in the work. Mostly I was rehearsing a swing I only owned on the range.

If you watch what a majority of folks do on a range mat it follows a pattern. Same club, forty balls, same flag out at 150, and they're raking the next one over before the last one has even landed. It feels productive, and by ball fifteen you're flushing it and starting to think you've found something. Then Saturday rolls around, you're standing on the first tee with one ball and a swing that actually counts, "FOREEE", you cold-shank it into the trees.

That gap has a name, and about fifty years of research behind it.

Why the range lies to you

In 1979 two researchers, Shea and Morgan, had people practice a set of motor tasks either blocked (i.e. serialized, all of task A, then all of B) or random (mixed up). The blocked group looked much sharper during practice. Then everyone got tested later and it flipped. The random group, the ones who looked worse and more annoyed while they were practicing, held onto more of it and carried it better into new situations.

That is in essence the trap of a range bucket. Hitting the same club at the same target over and over is blocked practice, the kind that makes you look good for the next twenty minutes and abandons you by the weekend. You're grooving a swing for a situation you never actually face on a course, which is standing on a flat mat hitting your ninth straight 7-iron with nothing riding on it.

The golf-specific work lines up with the old lab stuff. Studies on chipping and putting keep landing in the same place, that varied and randomized practice gives you worse numbers on the day and better numbers on the retention test a week later.

So the practice that feels the most satisfying, that tight little groove where every ball flies the same, barely does a thing for the golf you actually play on Saturday.

Where it gets shaky

I'll be straight about this part, because the people selling you on "randomized practice" usually skip it. The contextual-interference effect is not a settled law. A 2023 meta-analysis pooled a big stack of sport studies and found the benefit often doesn't show up once you leave the lab, and the authors came right out and called it a myth in general sport settings.

So I can't tell you that shuffling your clubs around turns you into a plus handicap. However, practicing in a way that resembles the thing you're trying to get good at, beats grooving one swing at one target on autopilot.

What I'd do with a bucket

The range near me has one grass tee and it's roped off most days, so I end up doing most of this off a mat, which I know isn't ideal. Doesn't change much. This is about how you use the balls, not what you're standing on.

The thing that seemingly worked for me was almost annoyingly simple. Instead of a club, a flag, and forty balls, I hit one ball at a time and made each one a real shot. Pick a target, run your standard routine you would on the course, hit it, then step off and reset before the next one like you're walking to a new lie. It's slow, it feels a bit precious, and you'll hit way fewer balls in an hour, which is the whole reason it works, because now every swing has a decision sitting in front of it.

The other half is to stop repeating yourself. Change the club or the target on every ball so you're never grooving the same motion twice in a row, and if you want to get real about it, play imaginary holes: driver off the mat, wedge in, hole out in your head, move on. Call the shot out loud before you hit it, an actual result and not just "a good one," and keep a rough count of how many you pull off. Six out of twenty is a number you can check again next week. "I hit it well" isn't, and I say that as a guy who spent years lying to himself with it.

And write it down, even just a note on your phone. If you can't remember what last week looked like, you've got no way of knowing whether any of this is doing anything, and that boring little bit of bookkeeping ends up mattering more than any swing tip you'll read.

Where OpenCaddie fits

This is a big reason the app hands you one named drill for the day instead of a bucket to rake through. You run the session, you tell it whether the work clicked or you struggled, and the next day's Practice Station shifts off that. It was the closest I could get to putting "practice like you play, then measure it" on rails, because left to my own devices I will absolutely wander back over to beating 7-irons at the 150 flag.

I still wander over and rake a bucket at the 150 flag sometimes, because it's fun and my hands know exactly what to do out there. That's kind of the whole problem with it.