Two hours a week is enough to get better at golf

You can get meaningfully better at golf on two hours a week. I’m Ed, one of the founders of Grady, and I have a full-time job and kids, so I understand what it costs to find even that. There’s work, there’s family, there are friends. Signing up for a lesson is a lot on its own. So let me take on the myth that getting better needs a ton of time on top of that. You don’t need hours at the range every week. You don’t need a lesson every week. And you don’t need hours on the course. That part is the reward. A whole afternoon away from work and responsibility is something you earn, and it comes later, after you’ve found your swing.

I’m not a coach, and how much time you have is yours to know. But you’ve had your first lesson now. You’ve learnt the basics and put some work in, which tells me you’re willing to do the rest. The question is how to do it smartly, and that’s what this is.

Thirty to forty-five minutes at the range, once a week. That’s fifty or sixty balls and a drill or two, and it’s for the part only a ball can teach you, which is contact and the muscle memory that comes with it. Then fifteen minutes a day, five days if you can, on small drills at home or at the office, without a ball. That’s the whole two hours. It doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t. Done that way, it’s a massive amount of improvement for the time, and most of it fits into the gaps you already have.

Before the breakdown, the condition. If the only golf you do is the lesson and the odd round, you won’t get better. This is something I stress with my son. If you’re going to get better at anything, you have to want to get better, and that shows up in what you do between the sessions. You don’t only turn up to football practice and play football there. You do drills at home, you practise, you play. Golf is no different. The lesson hands you the thing to work on. The improving happens on your own, in between, and nobody can do that part for you.

The thing to leave a lesson with is one or two things to go and work on. Not the whole swing. The one or two drills that will move you to the next stage, in the coach’s words, so you know exactly what you’re practising and why. I wrote about this in the lessons story, and it matters even more when your time is short, because it’s what makes the two hours count. Swinging blindly for two hours does very little. The same two hours on the right thing is progression, and that’s the part that makes this fun: improving and getting better at a new sport.

More of the swing than you’d think can be built without a ball. The takeaway, the turn to the top of the backswing, and the shift of your weight to the front to start the downswing are all movements you can rehearse in a hallway. A mirror is the tool. Hitting a hundred balls won’t tell you whether your backswing is on plane. One backswing in front of a mirror will, and so will a thirty-second video on your phone.

The Lab has the lessons for exactly this. In Backswing Basics, Aimee’s one job is keeping the spine angle you set up with while your body turns, and she gives three exercises for it you can do without a ball. Hands on your shoulders and turn, control the hips, keep the knees steady. Danny Maude’s takeaway drill in the same chapter, the club against your stomach with your arms in a triangle, needs a mirror more than it needs a ball.

For the whole motion, Danny Maude’s helicopter drill in Swing Basics is the one for the living room. No ball, no club, just your arms, to feel the lower body moving first and what impact is meant to feel like.

And for the weight shift, Rick Shiels in Downswing Fundamentals has the sequence. From the top, a small shift to the front first, then the turn. The chapter’s own advice is to work it one feel at a time, with slow swings and a mirror, which is to say at home.

Fifteen minutes on one of those, on the thing your coach gave you, is a real session. It’s the one most people skip because it doesn’t feel like golf.

Contact needs a ball, and so does finding out whether the move you built at home holds when there’s something to hit. That’s what the range visit is for, and it’s why it comes after the fifteen-minute sessions rather than instead of them. Build the move where you can see it, then go and recreate the same steps with a ball and see the difference. Fifty or sixty balls on the one or two things from your lesson, with the drill in between, is the session. It’s not a big bucket swung at nothing. At-home practice is for the things you can’t fix by hitting a ball. The range is where you connect them.

Everyone is at a different stage, and everyone has a different week. The drills above are a start, because they need the least, but the right ones for you are the one or two your coach gave you. That’s what to practise, in the gaps, on your own schedule, without being beholden to anyone else’s. I said at the start of this series that you can’t buy a golf swing. This is how you earn it.