The simple—yet critical—lesson to learn from Charley Hull’s range session

Over the holidays, Charley Hull didn’t miss any range time. Bundled up in layers and a knit hat, Hull hit balls on a dreary-looking day. She posted a brief video of her range session on her Instagram story with the caption, “Little insight to how I work with my drills & normal swings …” She hit a few balls with her normal swing, and then slid a band over her right arm—a teaching aid that commonly is used to keep the right arm tight to the torso, promoting a bigger upper body turn in the backswing. She hit a few balls with the band around her upper body and then slid the band off, going back to hitting a few balls without any training aids.

The video is short, but within it is a lesson all golfers should know when using training aids.

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“Sometimes when someone’s using a teaching aid, they have to have the aid all the time,” Jason Guss, Golf Digest Best Teacher in the state of Illinois, says. “Teaching aids are great to create feels. But they can also make you reliant on the aid. If you do one or two swings and then remove the aid and recreate the feel with a few of your own swings, you have a better chance of owning the feel without the aid.”

If you’ve found a swing aid that really works, it can be tempting to overuse it. But you’re not going to have the training aid with you on the golf course. So you need to be able to create the move the training aid is teaching you, without using the training aid. That’s what Hull is doing by rotating between hitting shots with and without her band. She’s using the aid to create the feel, but she’s avoiding reliance on the aid by removing it every few swings. She’s creating the feel on her own.

To further simulate the feeling of being on the golf course, Guss says to hit two shots with the swing aid, hit two without it, wait two minutes, and then hit two more. “See if you can create the feel with some space in between, because on the golf course there’s time in between shots,” Guss says.

It’s easier to repeat shots in rhythm on the range than it is to hit shots with different clubs, spaced out, on the golf course. If you add in gaps of time like Guss advises, you’re constructing a scenario on the range that’s more realistic to what you’ll encounter on the course. It’ll help you take the feel from the range to the golf course.