Robert Caplin for The New York Times

I have seen you at the driving range. Wherever you play, I have seen you.

You always buy the biggest bucket available. The heft of the pail gives you confidence. Is there any swing flaw that 100 balls can’t fix?

You walk past the short-game area and the practice green and think, “I’ll finish up there on my way out.” And you mean it.

At your hitting station, you grab a 9-iron and launch five or six balls. They don’t fly straight, but they are in the air. Good enough.

You reach for the driver. You hit a couple dead straight, then a third. But they’re not as far as you would like. You remember a tip you saw on TV while watching the Masters — something about “firing your left hip.” You try that.

The ball rockets off the club face, 20 yards farther. You keep doing this — it’s like magic! Several shots in a row disappear toward the horizon like missiles. You start looking around: Hey, does anybody see how good I’m hitting it over here?

Then one shot goes left. You quickly tee up another. Another ball to the left. You reach for another ball and think about more left hip turn. Oh, no, that’s more left. Tee up another. Man, that’s left of left. Another ball. You almost hit the guy next to you.

You hastily tee another ball. Wow, that one is way right.

What follows next are the fastest 50 balls you’ve ever hit. When you finally stop, you are sweating and exasperated. You give up on firing your left hip. You just want to hit it straight again without a thought about the distance. But the ball is going left, then right, and once, you almost missed it. Your hands hurt and your back is getting sore. You look down at your bucket; only 10 balls left.



Ten balls left to fix my driver! What happened? You take a deep breath and try to relax. You slow your pace and leisurely hit the last 10 balls more or less straight, the way you did when you arrived.

You look at your watch. You’re late for meeting your spouse. You pack up, passing the practice green in a hustling walk to your car.

“How did the range go?” you are asked later.

“Got my swings in,” you say. “It was O.K. in the end.”

Yes, I have seen you before.

In the mirror.

Why do our practice sessions at the range seem so unproductive?

“Because at the driving range, people hit golf balls,” said Laird Small, the 2003 PGA teacher of the year and the director of the Pebble Beach Golf Academy. “On the golf course, we have to hit golf shots.”

That’s more than a cute turn of phrase.

“It would do the amateur player a lot of good to attend a pro tournament so they could go to the range and watch the way the pros practice,” said Butch Harmon,

Phil Mickelson’s coach, who is frequently named the nation’s top teaching professional. “The pros never beat balls. They’ll hit about 25 or 30 balls in an hour. They are simulating real golf where you have to wait between shots.

“Who plays golf by raking one ball after another into the same place while hitting the same club? Nobody, right? So why do people practice like that?”

Every teaching pro I talked to on the subject said recreational golfers should hit only a small bucket of balls, about 30 minutes’ worth, at the range. In that time, they should be working on improving just one thing: staying in balance, staying in tempo or hitting the ball first rather than the ground. It can be anything, but stick to a small, specific goal.

“You have to have a specific full-swing practice goal, because that practice session goes by very fast,” said Mike Bender, listed in the top 10 of Golf Digest’s teachers nationwide. “It takes about 1.5 seconds to hit a shot. Even if you hit 100 balls, that’s only two and one-half minutes of swinging. So you better have a specific goal if you’re going to get something out of two and one-half minutes of practice.”

Some golf pros suggested that golfers go to the short-game practice area first to be sure to fit that into their session. At the least, they said, set a time limit for full-swing practice regardless of how things are going.

“People should spend no more than one-third of their time at the range,” said Bender, whose academy is in Lake Mary, Fla. “It could be as high as 50 percent, but only if they just took a lesson and are working on a new swing technique.”

Now I know what you’re thinking: Putting and chipping is boring. Seeing good shots soar off your driver is a rush.

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“That’s part of the love-hate thing in golf,” Bender said. “They love to practice their driver. They hate it when they can’t break 100.

“Here’s what people have to understand: the full swing is 80 percent technique and 20 percent feel, and the short game is 80 percent feel and 20 percent technique. Improving your short-game feel is much easier and will make your scores drop right away. On the range, people often aren’t sure what’s going on. Even a bad swing produces good results a few times. Then people try to recapture that moment for the next hour or more. They’re spinning their wheels.”

Bender and Laird suggested making short-game practice fun by playing games with yourself or a buddy. Try to see, for example, how many 5-foot putts in a row you can make. Have a competition to see who can hit the most chips within 3 feet of the hole. Loser buys the drinks afterward.

That indignity shouldn’t hurt. Think of all the money you’re saving buying small practice buckets instead of jumbo ones.