Most golfers who want to get better struggle in one area. And it isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of time.
Eighteen holes is the best part of four hours. Add the drive there and back. Add the bit at the bar afterwards that you can’t really leave early. That’s a Saturday gone, and most weeks a job, a family or a list of other things has a claim on it. So the round gets pushed back, then pushed back again, and the practice that would actually move your game never happens at all.
This is where most people get indoor golf wrong. They treat it as the round they couldn’t fit in, shrunk down to an hour. Something to settle for.
It’s a different activity with a different job. A round is a test. You get one go at each shot and find out how your game holds up. An hour indoors is practice. It’s where you build the thing the round tests.
Confuse the two and indoor golf looks second best. See it for what it is and it stops being the consolation prize. Nobody thinks the gym is a lesser version of the match.
Think about where the time goes on a course. Walking to your ball. Waiting on the group ahead. Looking for it in the trees. The golf itself is a small part of the afternoon.
Indoors, all of that disappears. You hit, you reset, you hit again. No walking, no searching, no fourball in front. Sixty minutes in a bay is sixty minutes of swinging a club, and that adds up to more real shots than a full round ever gives you.
If you’re wondering how to practise golf with no time, that’s most of the answer. You don’t need more hours. You need more of the hours you’ve got to be spent hitting balls.
The obvious comparison is the driving range, and on reps alone the range does fine. But a range gives you a bucket and a rough idea of where each one went. You hit a poor one and you guess. Fat, maybe. Open face, possibly. You pick a theory and hope it’s the right one.
A Trackman simulator doesn’t leave you guessing. It measures carry, ball speed, launch and spin on every shot. You hit it, and the numbers are right there in front of you.
That’s the real answer to golf simulator vs driving range. One gives you reps. The other gives you reps and tells you what happened on each of them. It’s also why indoor golf improves your real game. You end up practising the right thing instead of grooving the wrong one.
You don’t need to understand launch monitors to use one. Four numbers do most of the work.
None of these elements exist independently. What they give you is a reason. A miss stops being a mystery and becomes something with a cause you can work on.
An hour after work. No booking out a whole morning, no daylight needed, no checking the forecast. Through the winter, when the course is dark before you’ve left the office, it’s the difference between practising and not. (More on that in what winter practice actually does to your game.)
Nineteen is in Oadby, on the edge of Leicester, so for plenty of people it’s on the way home rather than a trip out. Warm and dry, whatever the weather.
If you’d like someone to look at the numbers with you and tell you which one to fix first, that’s what our coaching is for. Otherwise, the bay and the data are yours for the hour.
Sixty focused minutes with data will do more for your game than a distracted four hours. It isn’t a compromise. It’s a better use of the time you’ve actually got.
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