Iron Play Tips - How To Practice

In this video Honma Custom Fitting Specialist and PGA Pro Luke Peterken gives his best practice tips.

Iron Play Tips - How To Practice

In the video above, we're joined by Honma Custom Fitting Specialist and PGA Pro Luke Peterken at North Hants Golf Club for some iron play tips so you can make your practice more efficient and post better scores.

We start by discussing the right amount of balls to take or hit in a range session. What is the best piece of advice for this?

"Well I think the main thing would be to have a definitive plan of what you want to achieve from that practice session," Luke said. "So I think many of us would be guilty of going to the range and using a full bucket of golf balls when actually you could have been just as productive using half that amount.

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Another issue for many of us is that we want to try and achieve or work on several different things in our practice whether it be warming-up, target practice, or more technical sides of the game.

Luke responded to this concern by saying, "well I have mixed that up in my past so I would have a practice session where I would think okay, I would use maybe 5-10 balls to warm up and get nice and loose. Then the remainder will be just to work on that technical piece. But then on the other hand say I've got a big tournament for medal coming up, I would distribute a few of those golf balls for the technical side, then move on working on different targets then back to the technical just so I mix it up a little."

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So what's a good way to work on your swing path?

"So if your tendency is out to in I would place a couple of head covers, because something physical is good to force you to change something in your technique. So the basic idea here is to try and hit your golf ball to your target but avoiding these head covers on the way down. Once you start to feel more and more confident, you can start to edge these head covers nearer and nearer so it makes it a lot harder.

"You can also swap it around so if you are someone who comes too much from the inside and you have blocks or hooks, you could swap those head covers around."

Next we discuss rhythm, not rushing, and making sure every ball is as valuable as the one before.

"This is going to sound simple, but doing something like grouping your balls together. Rather than have a big bucket sitting there, group them in a line so once you've finished with one group you bring on your next group. And in each group you've got a definitive idea what you want to achieve with those golf balls. I think that gets you away from the pull-hit-pull-hit."

Finally, it makes sense to make the last part of your practice more target orientated.

Luke went on to discuss the importance of target orientated practice because that is whats its all about. Playing fun games with targets and improving your thought process by taking positives from your practice are huge to allow you to improve.

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