It happens to us all as golfers. We book an hour in the sim bay with every intention of doing serious practice on the virtual range. But within five minutes, the destinations win us over, and we’re teeing it up in St Andrews or Cabot Cape Breton..
Fighting the instinct to play a virtual course is a losing battle. The heart wants what the heart wants sometimes. The lust is insatiable.
The problem isn't playing a virtual course; the problem is playing it with complete disregard. When you take zero pre-shot routine, and hammer a driver every eight seconds without consequence, your indoor session flatters your ego but destroys your real-world results.
If you want your indoor sessions to transfer to Saturday morning, you have to weaponise those virtual rounds.
What Are the Best Golf Simulator Drills for Practice?
To bridge the gap between digital golf and grass, you should split your indoor sessions to a 20/40 split per hour Twenty minutes of practice and 40 minutes of on-course action putting those very areas of potential that you’ve just worked on under pressure. Here are three of the best golf simulator drills for structured practice:
The Wedge Ladder: Hit 50, 65, and 80-yard targets on the virtual range to dial in carry distances before loading up a course.
The Fairway Finder (Directional Control): A scored 10-drive test that measures real-world dispersion and penalises costly misses.
The 20-Second Rule: Step entirely off the artificial mat between every shot to reset your routine and kill the "sim rush" habit.
Here is how to deploy them into a 60-minute session.
Phase 1: The 20-Minute Calibration
Before you load up Le Golf National, you need to check your baseline. As we covered in our breakdown of why simulator practice fails on the course, hitting off perfect artificial mats creates a false sense of security.
Spend the first 10 minutes running The Wedge Ladder. Hit five balls each at 50, 65, 80, and 95 yards. This strips away distance blindness and forces you to marry your physical feel to the launch monitor's carry data.
Next, here’s a great example of using our drills in practice and on the course! Spend 10 minutes running The Fairway Finder. Instead of mindlessly blasting drivers, pick a specific fairway corridor on the simulator range and hit 10 drives with an objective scoring system:
3 Points: Finding the fairway
1 Point: Playable light rough
0 Points: Heavy rough, trees, or out of bounds
A perfect set is 30 points. If you walk away with 16, you know exactly what your dispersion pattern is doing.
This is where the Potentially Golf app steps in: by logging your tendencies, the AI Coach identifies the underlying cause of your misses, whether you're over-hooking the ball, or letting swing tempo fall apart as fatigue creeps in. You leave practice with a clear swing thought, not a head full of TrackMan data.
(Tip: Our test putting vintage 90s blades on a TrackMan proved that modern high-MOI clubs mask bad strikes. Make sure you are actually finding the middle of the face before heading to the course).
Phase 2: The 40-Minute Pressure Test (Course Mode)
Now, load up 9 holes on your favourite championship layout. To make sure this session actually sharpens your scoring ‘on the course’, carry your Fairway Finder rules directly into the round:
1. Score the Tee Shots
When you tee off on the 1st hole, don't just ask if the ball went 280 yards. Apply the same 3-1-0 scoring rule from your range drill to every drive you hit. Run another set in the Drill to score it and reflect on that so Coach knows!
If the hole demands a tight landing area, and you know from your range session that you're battling an aggressive ’fade’, take the AI Coach's advice: adjust your start line, manage the curve, or pull a 3/5-wood to keep the ball in the 3-point zone.
2. The 20-Second Rule (Killing Sim Rush)
Other than thinking you can hit the swing speeds of Bryson instead of your usual 90mph, the most destructive habit built in an indoor bay is swing cadence. Outdoors, you walk 200 yards between shots, allowing your heart rate to settle and your brain to process the next target. Indoors, we can routinely hit four shots in 90 seconds.
Stick to a strict 20-second rule: After every shot on the virtual course, step completely off the mat. Look at the yardage on the screen, pick a visual target line, take a practice swing behind the ball, and execute your routine before addressing it.
Bringing Deliberate Practice to the Bay
You don't need complicated desktop software setups to practice properly. You just need a companion tool, a golf sim phone app you can open in any bay to give your session a clear goal.
If you are currently evaluating your setup and looking for the right golf practice software to lower your scores, remember: hardware measures the swing, but structured habits build the golfer.
Don't spend £80 just to slap balls in mood lighting. Bring a plan, practice it first and then put it into practice ‘on the course’.
Download Potentially Golf to start tracking your drills and bridging the gap between simulator data and on-course performance.
