Driving Range Practice: How to Actually Improve Your Golf Instead of Just Hitting 100 Balls

You arrive at the driving range, grab a bucket of balls, pull out your driver and start hitting.
One ball becomes ten. Ten becomes 50. Before you know it, the bucket is empty.
It might have been enjoyable – and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with hitting golf balls simply because you enjoy it – but if your goal was to improve your golf, how much did you actually achieve?

Good driving range practice isn’t necessarily about hitting more balls. It’s about making the balls you hit count.
Whether you’re completely new to golf or trying to knock a few shots off your handicap, a little structure can make your next range session far more useful.

Is hitting 100 balls at the driving range good practice?
It can be, but the number isn’t particularly important.
Hitting 100 balls with no target and repeating the same club over and over can reinforce bad habits just as easily as good ones.
Meanwhile, 50 carefully considered shots with a clear objective could be much more useful.
Think quality rather than quantity.
Before every shot, know:
What club you’re hitting
What your target is
What type of shot you’re trying to play
What a successful result looks like
That immediately makes practice more deliberate.
What should you practise at the driving range?
That depends on your game.
If you regularly hit fairways but struggle from 80 yards, spending an hour with your driver probably isn’t the best use of your time.

Start by thinking about your recent rounds.
Where are the shots disappearing?
Are you constantly in trouble from the tee? Do your approach shots finish short? Are you uncomfortable with your longer irons? Do you struggle when you have less than a full wedge into the green?

Pick an area and build your session around it.
Better still, speak to a coach. A PGA Professional can help identify where your technique or practice could improve rather than leaving you to diagnose everything yourself.

How should you structure a driving range session?
There is no single perfect routine, but here’s a simple approach that works well for many golfers.

Start with a proper warm-up
Don’t walk into a bay and immediately start swinging your driver as hard as you can.
Take a few minutes to loosen up, then begin with shorter clubs and comfortable swings.

The first few balls aren’t about distance. Get moving, find your rhythm and pay attention to your strike.

Spend time on technique

Next, work on the specific thing you’ve come to practise.
This might be something your coach has given you, or it could simply be working on alignment, strike or distance control.

The important thing is not to rush.
Hitting another ball immediately after a poor shot might feel productive, but you’re not giving yourself much time to understand what happened.

Reset.
Pick your target again.
Go through your routine.
Then hit the next one.
Introduce targets
Golf isn’t played into an enormous empty field, so your practice shouldn’t be either.

Choose targets.
If you’re working with a 7-iron, decide where you want the ball to finish. If you’re hitting driver, create an imaginary fairway.
Toptracer technology on every range bay at Leeds Golf Centre makes this easier because you can receive instant feedback on your shots, including distance and accuracy.
You can start turning practice into measurable challenges rather than judging everything purely by feel.

Finish with pressure
This is the bit golfers often miss.
Give yourself one chance.
Imagine you need to hit a fairway on the 18th hole to win a match.
Go through your full routine and hit one driver.
Did you do it?
Or give yourself ten approach shots and set a score depending on how close each finishes to the target.\|
Adding consequences – even imaginary ones – makes practice feel more like playing.

How many balls should you hit at the driving range?
There isn’t a magic number.
A shorter, focused session can be far more productive than racing through a huge bucket.
If you’ve only got 30 minutes, that’s fine.
Break the time into sections.
You could spend around ten minutes warming up and working on technique, ten minutes on a specific skill and ten minutes on targets or pressure practice.

If you’ve got longer, spend more time in each area rather than simply speeding up the rate at which you hit balls.
When technique starts deteriorating because you’re tired, hitting another 50 balls is unlikely to achieve much.

Should you use every club at the driving range?
Not necessarily every time.
Some sessions might focus heavily on wedges. Others could be about your longer clubs.
But it’s worth occasionally working through the bag.
This is particularly useful if you’re trying to understand your distances.

Knowing how far each club reliably carries is much more useful on the golf course than knowing the absolute maximum distance you have ever hit it.
And pay attention to the gaps.
If your 7-iron and 8-iron are travelling almost exactly the same distance, that’s useful information.

Make your range practice more like a round of golf
Here’s one of our favourite ways to practise.
Play Wike Ridge in your head.
Take the first hole and hit the club you’d use from the tee.
Look at the result.
Now choose the club you’d realistically need for your next shot.
Continue until you would have reached the green, then move to the next hole.

The important rule is that you don’t get to hit the same shot again just because you didn’t like the first one.
On the golf course, there are no instant replays.
This style of practice forces you to change clubs, change targets and think about each shot individually.

Toptracer’s virtual golf options can take this even further, allowing you to play virtual courses and use your range session in a much more varied way.

Should beginners use the driving range?
Definitely.
The driving range is one of the easiest places to start playing golf because there is no pressure to keep up with a group behind you or worry about completing a hole.

At Leeds Golf Centre, we want golf to feel welcoming whether you’ve played for 20 years or have never held a club before.
You don’t need to be a member to use our range and you don’t need to arrive with a perfect swing.
Nobody has one anyway.

Start at your own pace, focus on making contact and enjoy hitting the ball.
If you decide you’d like some guidance, Leeds Golf Academy offers coaching for players of all abilities.

How often should you go to the driving range to improve?
Consistency is generally more useful than occasional bursts of practice.
One focused session each week can give you the opportunity to work on something, take it onto the course and then return to your next session with some feedback.
But your practice needs to fit your life.

That’s one reason we’ve made our range as flexible as possible.
Leeds Golf Centre’s driving range has 19 covered, floodlit bays and is open seven days a week until 10pm, so darker evenings don’t have to mean the end of midweek golf.

There’s no need to pre-book either. You can simply turn up and practise.

Make every ball count
The next time you arrive at the driving range, resist the temptation to immediately reach for the driver.

Choose a goal first.
Warm up.
Pick targets.
Change clubs.
Use the information available to you.
Put yourself under a little pressure.
And most importantly, take your time.

If you want to hit 100 balls because you love hitting golf balls, go for it.

But if you’re there to improve, make sure those 100 balls have a purpose.

Our covered, floodlit Toptracer driving range at Leeds Golf Centre is open seven days a week until 10pm. No pre-booking is required – just turn up, grab a bay and get practising.