The research that explains it

In 1979, Shea and Morgan published a foundational study in motor learning that has been replicated in every skill sport since. Their finding: blocked practice tends to produce better performance during the practice session — but a greater degree of long-term learning results from random practice. "Learning" here means the ability to reproduce the skill days or weeks later, in a different context. Which, in golf, is exactly what a Saturday competition asks of you after a Thursday range session.

A 1994 study on baseball players throwing at a target found the retention effect was roughly double for random practice compared to blocked practice. The 2014 International Journal of Golf Science paper on optimising practice for performance under pressure concluded plainly: "Repetitive practice will yield good performance on the range but will not transfer well to the course." That's peer-reviewed. That's the science.

Blocked vs. random — and why blocked feels better

Blocked practice is what most golfers do: same club, same target, same lie, ball after ball. It feels productive because you get visibly better within the session. The tenth 7-iron is usually crisper than the first. Blocked practice is not useless — it's genuinely effective for engraining a specific technical change, which is why teachers use it during lessons. But the "better" you feel by the end of the session doesn't survive contact with a live course.

Random practice is what the course demands: different club, different target, different lie, different shot shape, every shot. It feels worse during the session — you hit fewer great shots, you feel less "in the groove." That struggle is the point. Cognitive interference — the mental effort of forgetting and re-loading the motor pattern for each shot — is what builds skill that transfers. Elite instructor Mike Perna's frame: "Random practice with feedback and consequence is the only way a tournament player builds skills that transfer to competition." His approach with 85 D1 scholarship students in seven years is built on this principle.

The practical structure

A better range session isn't longer. It's structured differently. The consensus emerging from PGA of America research (Alpenfels & Dr. Bob Christina) and top teachers: block for technical improvements, random for competitive readiness. If you're working on a specific move, hit ten to twenty blocked balls to engrave it. Then switch to random.

What random looks like in practice: pick a new club, a new target, and go through your full pre-shot routine before every shot. Vary the shot: fade, then draw. Vary the club: driver, then 7-iron, then wedge, then hybrid. Vary the target: fairway bunker at 210, green pin at 155, layup at 90. You'll hit fewer perfect shots. You'll hit far more useful ones. The rule of thumb from applied practice research is a 70% success rate — enough to build confidence, hard enough to build the skill.

The mat problem — briefly

One honest complication with range practice: mats hide flaws. Fat contact on a mat still sends the ball forward with usable ball flight. Fat contact on a fairway ends up six yards short. If your range is mat-only and your rounds are turf, part of the transfer gap is that you're literally practising a different sport. Where possible, practise off turf; if you can't, add on-course practice to your routine and hold yourself to real ball-strike quality on the mat instead of just ball-flight outcomes.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Fifty blocked balls on Thursday feels like practice. It's actually rehearsal — useful for engraining a technical change but poor at building the skill you need on Saturday. If you want your practice to transfer, change what your practice looks like. The science on this has been settled for forty-five years. Only the range habits are stubborn.

Coming next

The Post-Round Audit — Three Questions That Compound

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