Do you practice golf or play golf. If on the course all you can think about is how to swing the club no matter how long or short your shot – you do not play golf. Besides a flawed technique, not playing the game is the number one reason for bad scores. If your focus is not on the target, you are gonna run into a problem.
Working on your swing must end on the range. If you are not sure enough to react to the ball on the course you will have a malfunction of some kind. To play golf, just as in any sport, you cannot be thinking about how to do it. You have to react to the situation. No one ever thinks about how to throw a ball, they just do it. They do not break down every position of the throwing motion and think about that when they are trying to throw to 1st base. This is harder in golf because the ball is not moving and so there is all this time to pull the trigger. In that space, all manner of thoughts can creep in.
The reason you find yourself working on swing instead of score on the course is that is all you do on the range. A range session must have some gameplay to truly be productive. More importantly, you must end your session with gameplay to be able to get to scoring on the course. The process of how to create the shot you need to execute must happen before you get set up to the ball so that all that is left is pulling the trigger. Separate your practice swings, swings that are meant to ingrain a certain motion, and actual shots where you forget the technique and just hit the shot.
When practicing on the range, hit no more than 5 shots of practice and then hit 1 shot to a target with the same club you practiced with, then move to another club and target and keep going until you miss the target. One shot each time. After you miss one then go back to practice the move you are trying to ingrain.
At the end of each sesson use the targets on the range to play a golf hole.
First decide if you are going to play a par 5, 4, or 3. Pick a target that allows you to easily judge the quality of the shot. Each shot has to have a target and a grade of how well it turned out. Include chips and pitches. Assume 2 putts on the imaginary green.
In addition to the stroke score grade how well you executed the each shot. Did you hit your target? Was the tee shot offline? Was the shot shape what you wanted? Was I thinking swing or target?
The goal is to walk away from your range session with pars and strait A’s. Add this to your range work and the golf course will a llot easier to handle.