How Often Should a Junior Golfer Practice?

How often a junior golfer should practise by age, what should go in a session, and the signs that the schedule needs to come down.

There is no single right answer to how often a junior golfer should practise, and any article that gives you a fixed hours-per-week number is guessing about your child. Age, attention span, what else is in their week and - above all - whether they are enjoying it should drive the schedule.

What can be said usefully is how to structure whatever time there is, so that it produces improvement rather than just tired arms.

Shorter and more frequent beats long and rare

For most junior golfers, two or three short sessions a week will build more consistent progress than one long weekend session. Golf asks a lot of fine motor control and focus, both of which fade quickly in children. A tired, distracted 90-minute session often teaches worse habits than a focused 25-minute one, because the last half hour is spent grooving a fatigued swing.

Mix skills instead of only hitting balls

A practice session does not have to mean standing on a range hitting driver. Putting and chipping in the backyard, working on grip and stance without a ball, or simply throwing and catching to build hand-eye coordination all count as useful golf practice for a young player - and they are far more accessible day to day than getting to a range or a course.

The usual mistake is the reverse of what scoring rewards. Most shots in a round are taken from inside 100 metres, and almost half of them are putts, yet most junior practice time goes on full swings because that is what a range is set up for.

A workable 30-minute session

• 5 minutes: movement and a few slow swings to warm up
• 10 minutes: putting, with a game and a score
• 10 minutes: chipping to a target
• 5 minutes: full swings, quality over quantity - ten good ones beats forty tired ones

The warm-up part matters more than it looks, especially before a round - see our pre-round warm-up for junior golfers.

Practice with a purpose beats hitting balls

Two children can hit the same number of balls in an hour and get completely different value from it. The difference is whether each shot had a target, a specific intention, and some feedback afterwards.

• Give every shot a target, even on a range - a flag, a distance marker, a mown strip
• Play games with a score rather than raking another ball over
• Change the club and the target regularly instead of hitting twenty in a row with the same club
• Finish on something they can succeed at, so the session ends well

The last point is not sentimentality. A session that ends in frustration is the one a child remembers when you next suggest going to the range.

On-course time is practice too

Nine holes teaches things a bucket of balls cannot: club selection, judging distance, recovering from a bad shot, playing from an awkward lie, and managing the emotional swings of a round. For juniors who already have a functioning swing, on-course time is usually the highest-value hour in the week.

Making the step from the range to the course is its own transition - see from the range to the course.

Let enjoyment set the pace

The single biggest risk with junior golf practice is not doing too little - it is turning practice into a chore that kills a child's interest in the game. If a scheduled session is met with reluctance most weeks, that is a signal to scale back or change the activity, not to push through it.

Junior golf pathways are deliberately built around games and fun rather than drilling for exactly this reason.

The national entry-level program is a good illustration - see MyGolf explained.

Warning signs that the load is too high

• Reluctance to go, most weeks, when they used to ask
• Physical complaints - especially wrists, lower back and shoulders
• Emotional flatness after sessions, or unusual anger at bad shots
• Performance going backwards despite more practice
• Dropping other sports and friendships to fit golf in

These are covered in more detail in recognising burnout in junior golfers.

Rest, growth and other sports

Rest is part of the schedule, not the absence of one. Children in a growth spurt are often temporarily less coordinated and more injury-prone, and a heavy repetition load through that period is the wrong call even for a keen player.

Playing other sports alongside golf is a strength rather than a distraction at young ages - see why multi-sport kids often make better golfers.

And for a longer view of how load should change across the years, see long-term athlete development in junior golf.

How to tell whether practice is working

Improvement in golf is slow and uneven, which makes it easy for a keen junior to feel they are going nowhere. Simple repeatable tests give them something honest to look at, and they take five minutes.

• Ten putts from two metres: how many go in? Repeat monthly
• Nine chips from off the green: how many finish within a club length?
• Ten 7 irons: how many are struck cleanly, judged by the child, not by distance
• Nine holes, same course, same tees: the score over time is the honest measure

Write the numbers down. A child who can see that their two-metre putting has gone from three out of ten to six out of ten has evidence that the boring part is working, which is exactly when most juniors are tempted to stop doing it.

What a lesson changes about the schedule

A coaching session is worth far more when the week after it contains some practice of the specific thing that was worked on. That does not mean more practice - it means one of the existing sessions has a defined job.

A reasonable pattern for a junior having regular lessons: one session on the lesson content, one session on short game, and one session that is just playing. If there is only time for one, make it the one that keeps them enjoying it.

How to choose the coach in the first place is covered in choosing a junior golf coach.

School terms, holidays and the off-season

A realistic schedule flexes with the year. School terms with heavy assessment periods are a good time to drop to one short session; holidays are when a keen junior can play nine holes twice a week without anything else moving.

Ideas for keeping skills ticking over when the weather or the calendar is against you are in off-season training ideas for junior golfers.