Before you hit a ball

Buy the medium bucket. A small is 30 to 50 balls, a medium 70 to 90, a large 100 or more, and prices run from about $8 to $20 depending on where you live. Fifty to seventy balls hit with a purpose is a full session. A hundred and twenty hit quickly is a workout.

Pick a bay with a target at a distance you care about. If there's a flag at 140 and you hit a 7-iron 140, that's your bay. Put an alignment stick or a spare club on the ground pointing at it, and set your feet to the stick on every shot. Most range slices are partly an alignment problem, because a range mat points wherever it points and your feet follow it without you noticing.

Swing a club slowly for a couple of minutes before the first ball. Shoulders, hips, a few half swings. You're not warming up for a marathon, just getting the first ten balls to count.

A session that works

1. Ten wedges, half speed. Pitching wedge or sand wedge, to a target 50 to 80 yards out. You're finding the bottom of the swing and the middle of the face. Nothing else.
2. Twenty mid-irons at a flag. The 7 or the 8. Every ball at the same target, with a full routine: stand behind the ball, pick the line, set up, swing. Count how many finish within fifteen yards of the flag. That number is your real progress meter, and it'll be lower than you'd like.
3. Ten with a longer club. A hybrid or a fairway wood off the mat, at a different target. Still a routine on every one.
4. Ten drivers, maximum. At a target, which on most ranges means a tree or a pole, not the open sky. Ten is plenty. The driver is the club people hit most at the range and least on the course, and it's the one that wrecks your tempo if you hit it for twenty minutes.
5. Finish by playing holes. Picture the first three holes of your course. Driver, then whatever you'd have in, then a wedge. Change clubs on every ball. This is the part that transfers to the course, because on the course you never hit the same club twice in a row.

That's about sixty balls. If you've got more, use them on whatever club embarrassed you most, with a target, slowly.

Range balls and mats lie

Range balls are built to survive, not to fly. Most go 5 to 10% shorter than the ball you play on the course and curve less, so your range 7-iron at 135 might be 145 on the course and your slight fade might be a real slice. Mats hide fat shots, because the club bounces along the rubber instead of digging, so a shot you'd have chunked thirty yards short on grass looks fine on a mat. Judge your shots by the flight and the strike, not the yardage. If the range has grass tees open, use them.

Read the ball flight

Each shot tells you two things. Where it starts is mostly where the club face was pointing at impact. Which way it curves is the face compared with the direction the club was moving. A ball that starts right and curves farther right means an open face and a path going left of it. A ball that starts at the target and curves left means the face was square to the target but closed to a path going right. Once you can read those two things, the range becomes a feedback machine rather than a place to hit balls. The full explanation, with a diagram, is in club face to path, and if the answer is always "right and more right," why you slice the golf ball is the next thing to read.

One thing at a time

Pick one thing to work on per session and ignore everything else. Grip pressure. Ball position. Finishing the swing with your chest at the target. If you try to fix three things on one swing, you'll fix none and hit the ball worse than when you started. Write the one thing on your hand if it helps. A bad session where you only worked on the one thing is still a good session.

Film it

What a swing feels like and what it looks like are two different things, and the gap is bigger than anyone believes until they see themselves on video. The grip you'd swear was neutral is a knuckle weak. The posture you thought was athletic is a slump. Ball position that felt centered is off your front toe. Ten seconds of video shows you all of that at once.

Put your phone on a tripod behind you, on the line from the ball to your target, at about hand height and ten to fifteen feet back, which is about the depth of most range bays. Record the whole session rather than individual swings, so you're not walking back to the phone every ball. The exact setup and camera settings are in how to film your golf swing with an iPhone, and down the line vs face-on covers which angle to use for what you're working on.

Then look for patterns rather than single swings. One swing can be anything. Ten swings with the same miss is a diagnosis. That's the problem Impact Reel was built for: it listens for each strike in your range video and cuts a clip around every swing, so you get the whole bucket as a grid of clips instead of twenty minutes of footage to scrub through. Add a shaft line at address and watch where the club comes down against it across ten swings, in slow motion. It won't measure anything for you. It shows you what happened.

Heat, water and the Arizona summer

If you practice somewhere hot, go early or go at dusk, drink more water than you think you need, and keep the phone out of direct sun if you're filming. A phone on a tripod in 110-degree sunshine will shut itself down inside twenty minutes. A towel over it between shots helps. So does a bay with shade.

Range etiquette

Stay in your bay and hit from the mat or the spot you were given. Don't rake balls across your neighbor's hitting line or walk in front of the mats. Keep the music to yourself. And don't film other people. Your phone behind your own mat, pointed at your own ball, bothers nobody. The rest of what people expect on the course is in golf etiquette.

Questions

How often should I go?

Two short sessions a week beat one long one. The swing is a motor skill and motor skills like frequent, short practice with sleep in between.

How many balls is enough?

Fifty to seventy with a target and a routine on each. If you're hitting more than that, you've stopped practicing and started exercising.

Should I practice with the driver at all?

Yes, a little, and last. Ten balls at a target. If your driver is the club costing you strokes on the course, the fix is more likely in your setup than in volume, and that's something video will show you faster than another hundred balls will.

Mats or grass?

Grass if you can get it, because it tells you the truth about fat shots. Mats are fine for everything else, and they're what most of us have.

Is the range good practice for the course?

Partly. The range builds the swing. The course is about choosing shots and dealing with lies you didn't pick. The "play holes" part at the end of the session is the bridge between them. If you want to see where your strokes actually go on the course, how to break 100 has a way to track it.