Why Great Range Swings Fail on the Course: Rethinking Golf Practice
What a Mind Caddie conversation revealed about context, adaptability, and why “flat” learning slows transfer
Golf has never had more coaching information.
More launch monitors. More numbers. More video. More “models”.
And yet, a familiar frustration keeps showing up every spring:
“I hit it great on the range… but it doesn’t show up on the course.”
In my recent conversation with Dr Karl Morris on the Mind Caddie podcast, we explored why that gap persists, and what must change if practice is going to transfer.
The short version:
Most golfers are not failing because they lack effort or information.
They’re failing because they practice in environments that remove the very experiences that shape real performance.
To listen to the full conversation, follow along on:
Written by: Will Stubbs, Head of Education, Zen Golf
Last Updated: 17/02/2025
The Surfboard on Sand Problem
Karl asked a simple question:
Where do we go wrong in golf learning environments?
Here’s the analogy I used.
Imagine trying to learn to surf by:
- Putting your surfboard on the sand
- Practising the “pop up” repeatedly
- Getting technical feedback on stance and hand placement
- Then being sent into the ocean and told to perform
It’s obviously flawed.
The ocean is the teacher, and each wave is a new puzzle to solve.
Balance, timing, fear, and perception cannot be “installed” on the beach.
Yet golf practice has normalized the equivalent:
- Flat mats
- Neutral lies
- Repetitive blocked reps
- Minimal variability
- High amounts of verbal instruction to fill the information gap
Then we expect performance under:
- Slopes
- Wind
- Uneven lies
- Visual intimidation
- Pressure and consequence
That isn’t “transfer difficulty”, but a practice design problem.
Golf is Not One Skill. It’s 60–100 Puzzles
One of the strongest shared themes in the conversation was this:
A round of golf is not one task. It’s a series of unique problems to solve.
For most players, that’s 60 to 100 distinct puzzles (or shots) per round:
- Different distances
- Different lies
- Different slope gradients
- Different visual frames
- Different risk profiles
- Different emotional stakes
Now the question becomes:
“Are you practicing in a way that prepares you for puzzles… or in a way that prepares you for repetition?”
People love puzzles. That’s why games work, and that’s why golf endures.
Most practice environments strip the puzzle away, so it’s clear why motivation fails on the range.
The Shift: From Reductionism to Representative Practice
Modern coaching often defaults to reductionism:
“Let’s isolate the movement and measure it.”
“Let’s reduce the swing into different positions.”
This can be useful when reviewing, but it becomes a trap when it’s the only method.
That’s because golf is not performed in isolation, and a swing on the range will look very different to one on the course.
Instead, we argued for shifting towards representative learning:
- Create a hole
- Create a shot problem
- Create a decision
- Let the player interact with the environment
- Use data as feedback for exploration, not prescription
This is why the Trackman x Zen integration is so powerful when used correctly:
It doesn’t just show you what happened.
It gives the body information that changes what can happen.
Less balls. More meaning.
The Most Important Question in Putting
Karl referenced a central idea from The Lost Art of Putting:
- Is it possible to hole this putt?
- What does the ball have to do to go in?
That second question is the key.
When the brain is given a clear, external problem:
Movement self-organizes around a task outcome, which is how humans have solved movement problems forever.
You don’t calculate joint angles when someone throws you an object.
You perceive information and organize action, and putting is the same.
What My Masters Research Found
In my MSc thesis (2012), I tested putting strokes on:
- Flat baseline
- 1% and 2% left-to-right
- 1% and 2% right-to-left
- Up and down gradients
What we saw was consistent with ecological dynamics:
Every slope produced a different stroke pattern.
But crucially:
Each golfer was highly consistent within each slope.
In other words:
Your stroke isn’t one “baseline”, but a set of stable solutions shaped by context that are unique to you.
When we assess someone’s stroke exclusively on flat ground and call it “the baseline”, we risk measuring something that doesn’t exist in the game.
A False Promise: “First Competence, Then Confidence”
We also challenged a widely held belief:
“Get competent first, then you’ll get confident.”
It’s a neat story, but golf exposes the flaw.
A golfer can become “competent” at a flat, predictable task and still fall apart under pressure, slope, or uncertainty.
Because confidence is not installed after competence.
Confidence emerges through exposure to variability with psychological safety.
This is why games and on-course simulations work:
- Failure has less social cost
- The player can explore
- The environment teaches
- Repetition occurs without boredom
Does the Swing Create the Shot, or Does the Shot Create the Swing?
This is the dividing line.
Traditional instruction implies:
Perfect the swing → the shots will follow.
A more ecological view suggests:
Define the shot → the swing self-organises to solve it.
That’s why great players don’t hit “lasers” for hours.
They hit:
- draws, fades
- high, low
- big shapes, small shapes
- functional misses
- creative trajectories
They are building bandwidth of shot shapes, not “repeatability” of a straight shot.
Practical Applications: How to Train Adaptability this Week
You don’t need a Zen Swing Stage to begin changing your practice.
You need better practice design.
1) One Ball Practice
On the range:
- Hit one drive
- Walk forward mentally: “Where did it go?”
- Choose the next club based on the consequence
- Hit the next shot as if it’s the approach
This turns the range into the course, and every swing has its own decision behind it.
2) Shape On Purpose
If you miss with a fade:
Don’t try to “fix” it immediately.
Instead, try to hit:
- A bigger fade
- A smaller fade
- A straight ball
- A draw
You build control by exploring boundaries. This type of practice we call differential, and has shown to increase skill acquisition through developing greater awareness.
3) Find Slope Constraints
On your club’s practice area:
- Find ball-above-feet lies
- Find downhill lies
- Find awkward stances
Hit multiple balls from the same constraint and observe:
- Contact
- Start line
- Curve tendency
- Distance shifts
Stop using generic rules and start building your swing map.
4) Tiger’s 9 Window Challenge
Practice hitting:
- Low draw
- Low straight
- Low fade
- Mid draw
- Mid straight
- Mid Fade
- High draw
- High Straight
- High fade
To amp up the realism, start randomising the shot shapes you hit in sequence. Use Siri on your iPhone to give you a random number or ask a friend to give you a shot set.
If you did this before a round, it opens another level…
Which ones you consistently hit well, you keep for the course.
The ones you struggled with, leave on the range.
That way you’re taking confidence and competence together on to the course.
The Core Takeaway
Golf isn’t a baseline sport; it’s an adaptability one.
The goal of practice is not perfect reps, it’s to create functional skills that deliver in context.
It’s learning to solve different puzzles with the same tools.
It’s accepting the human variability you bring to the course each day:
- Sleep
- Stress
- Fatigue
- Confidence
- Expectation
Therefore, designing practice that respects that reality rather than pretending it doesn’t exist become a priority.
As I said in the podcast:
The swing came before the book.
The environment is the teacher.
Our job is to learn how to listen.
