Hitting balls should be one of the simplest ways to improve at golf. Yet after the first few minutes, how many golfers start paying more attention to how many balls are left in the basket than to the flight of the ball they have just hit? In a recent National Club Golfer article, British golf journalist Matt Chivers admitted that he gets bored at the range after about 20 minutes. His experience is particularly interesting because he is no beginner: Chivers plays off 4.6 and has been playing golf since his teens.
His admission raises a more interesting question than whether he simply lacks motivation. What if the problem is not that some golfers dislike practising, but rather the way we use the driving range?
I often experience exactly the same thing. These days, when I go to practise, I rarely buy more than one basket. At Golf de Saint-Cyprien, where I regularly play, a basket currently contains 35 balls. Even with such a modest number, I generally stop there. Most of the time, I go to the range to loosen up, rediscover a few sensations and make sure my swing is functioning reasonably well before heading onto the course. Then, fairly quickly, the exercise becomes repetitive.
The paradox is that I have spent a significant part of my golfing life hitting thousands of range balls. When I used to test equipment with TrackMan, I could spend two or three hours in front of the launch monitor without really noticing the time passing. The difference was simple: every ball answered a question. What does this shaft produce? What happens with this loft? Does this clubhead really generate less spin? What is the average difference between two configurations? I wasn’t hitting balls simply for the sake of hitting them. I was conducting a test.
Perhaps that is where the problem with the traditional driving range begins.
Buying a quantity, not an objective
When we buy a basket of range balls, we are buying a quantity. Thirty-five, fifty or a hundred balls that somehow have to be hit before we leave. It is actually a rather strange way to organise a training session. We do not necessarily give ourselves a task to complete or a question to answer. We simply place a stock of balls in front of us and gradually make them disappear.
For someone learning golf, that repetition can be fascinating. Almost every strike represents a discovery. Getting the ball properly airborne, finally finding the centre of the clubface or hitting a drive with a satisfying flight provides immediate information and reward. A few years later, things are different. An experienced golfer may already have hit tens of thousands of balls. Striking another decent 7-iron from a perfectly flat mat does not necessarily teach them anything new.
This is precisely what makes Chivers’ account interesting. He says he struggles to tolerate more than about 20 minutes on the range, yet in the same article describes how much he enjoys diagnosing his own problems and finding solutions while playing. He is clearly not bored by problem-solving. He appears to be bored by repetition. At a 4.6 handicap, however, he acknowledges that his reluctance to practise may now be preventing him from improving further.
Some of the comments beneath his article reinforce the point. One reader describes using only a small number of balls while working through a specific progression with an 8-iron, while another says that much of what he sees at driving ranges is golfers repeatedly rehearsing the same poor swing. Both observations lead to a simple question: what is the value of repeating a movement when we do not know precisely what we are repeating?
A bad shot shows the result, rarely the cause
I experienced this recently with my 5-wood. During a range session, some shots were producing nothing like the result I expected. I could obviously see the ball flight and try to infer what had happened, as all golfers do. It was only after the session, when looking at a photograph taken by a friend, that I noticed a position involving my left shoulder that I had been completely unaware of while hitting the shots.
A single photograph clearly cannot provide a biomechanical diagnosis, let alone prove that this position was responsible for the poor shots. That is precisely what makes the experience interesting. During the session, I could have blamed my hands, club path, balance or any number of other factors without even having identified this particular element. I still do not know whether that shoulder position caused the problem, but I now know it is something worth observing during a future session.
That is one of the fundamental limitations of the driving range. It provides a huge number of outcomes but relatively few diagnoses. The ball goes left, right, too low or too high. We can see what it does. We are much less certain about why it does it.
Even technology does not completely solve the problem. A launch monitor can measure the behaviour of the club and ball with remarkable precision: speed, launch angle, spin, trajectory, dispersion and distance. That information can be extremely valuable, but measuring something is not necessarily the same as explaining it. Data may tell us that the club path or face angle changed without telling us why our body produced that change. A launch monitor considerably improves feedback; it does not automatically turn every ball into a golf lesson.
Why is the golf course so much less boring?
The comparison with playing on the course is revealing. We can spend four hours playing 18 holes without experiencing the monotony that some golfers feel after 20 minutes on the range. Yet we hit far fewer shots.
One difference is the variety of problems we have to solve. One ball sits slightly below our feet; the next is in the rough. The wind changes. The flag is tucked behind a bunker. We have to choose between two clubs, alter a trajectory, accept playing 20 yards away from trouble or attempt a more aggressive approach. Most importantly, every shot has a consequence. There is no second ball automatically waiting for us three seconds after a mistake.
The range often provides almost the exact opposite environment. Same mat, same lie, same direction, the same club for ten or fifteen consecutive shots, with the possibility of immediately trying again after an error. This repetition can be useful when working on a specific technical change. But it can also create a misleading impression of improvement: after repeatedly hitting the same club towards the same target, golfers generally become better at performing that particular task. The more important question is what remains when they have to reproduce the shot once, 20 minutes later, on the course.
What does the research actually tell us?
The distinction between performing well during practice and learning something that lasts has long been studied in motor learning. Researchers often discuss the concept of “contextual interference”, comparing blocked practice — repeating the same task several times before moving on — with practice in which different tasks are alternated more frequently.
A 2024 meta-analysis by Stanisław H. Czyż, Aleksandra M. Wójcik and Petra Solarská quantitatively analysed 34 studies involving 1,421 participants. Overall, the authors found an advantage for random practice when measuring transfer of learning. However, that advantage was much less convincing in applied studies, where the effect was small and statistically non-significant. In other words, laboratory results do not justify the simple claim that constantly alternating shots will always produce better learning in a real sporting environment.
Golf-specific research requires similar caution. In 2024, Philipp Barzyk and Markus Gruber published a systematic review of 52 randomised controlled trials investigating different motor-learning approaches in golf. The review identified potentially beneficial effects from increased contextual interference and from distributed or variable practice, but the authors also highlighted substantial limitations in the evidence. More than half of the studies were statistically underpowered, and much of the research involved beginners performing relatively simple putting tasks. The evidence therefore does not support precise universal prescriptions, particularly for experienced golfers.
A 2018 experiment involving 24 participants provides a useful golf-specific illustration. Participants practised three variations of a 5.5-metre chip from different lies, either in blocks or by alternating the conditions. Random practice produced greater accuracy in a random retention test, but there was no significant difference when retention was tested in blocked conditions.
It would therefore be an exaggeration to conclude that 35 varied shots are necessarily better than 100 repeated ones. The research suggests something more interesting for our purposes: getting progressively better during a practice session does not necessarily mean that we are learning more for the next round.
What if the number of balls isn’t really the problem?
Repetition is obviously necessary in some situations. A golfer working on a specific technical change may need to reproduce the same movement many times. Tour professionals sometimes spend hours on the range doing exactly that. The essential difference is that they generally know what they are trying to accomplish.
For an amateur arriving at the range alone, the first question might therefore be less “How many balls am I going to hit?” and more “What do I want to know when I leave?” That single change can completely alter the way we use a basket of balls.
35 balls, 35 missions
5 balls to warm up. Forget technique for a moment. Rediscover contact and observe the initial ball flights.
10 balls for one problem. Choose a specific question rather than simply deciding to “work on the swing”: contact, starting direction, trajectory, dispersion or a particular sensation.
5 balls to observe. Record a few swings from face-on or down the line, compare feel with reality, then identify one element to test rather than accumulating corrections.
5 balls to experiment. Change one parameter and observe what happens. If nothing changes, or the result gets worse, return to the starting point.
10 balls to play golf. Change club and target after every shot. Imagine several holes: driver, approach shot, wedge, then begin another imaginary hole. One ball for each shot, just as on the course.
This is not a universal training method, nor is it presented as a scientifically validated prescription. It is simply a way of giving every ball a purpose. And there is no rule saying that we must finish the basket. If the question that brought us to the range has been answered after 25 balls, does mechanically hitting the remaining ten necessarily achieve anything?
Getting bored at the range may not be a lack of motivation
Matt Chivers believes he will probably never become as good as he could because he no longer has the patience to practise for long enough. He may well be right about his own limitations. The best golfers devote enormous amounts of time to practice, and there is no shortcut that completely replaces that work.
But his own experience also suggests something else. He enjoys looking for solutions and understanding what is going wrong. I can now become bored after a few dozen balls myself, despite once spending hours on the range when every shot was answering a specific question. Perhaps the issue is not simply the length of our attention span. It may also be the purpose we give to repetition.
The driving range remains a tremendous training tool. But perhaps we should stop confusing the number of balls we hit with the amount we actually learn.
A basket of range balls gives us a quantity. Practice should give us an objective.