What tour pros actually do before a major—and why it's the opposite of what most amateurs do

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — There's no busier place than a driving range during major championship weeks. It's teaming with players, coaches, and caddies.

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What are they so busy with? I was curious, so I called an expert to find out.

Stuart Morgan is a golf coach and skill acquisition specialist who has worked with the European Ryder Cup team. His background is in golf instruction, but after recognizing that he can only explain so much, he turned his attention to practice design and performance.

Morgan wants golfers to become what he calls "system thinkers." To break the cycle of chasing quick fixes, which may work briefly before disappearing as quickly as they arrived, and instead build a system for consistent, steady improvement.

Morgan studied this as part of his doctorate in human performance and innovation. He interviewed 18 different professional golfers across various tours to understand how they prepare two weeks before, one week before, and the week of a tournament.

"Not one player did the same as another player. It was very, very individual to them, but there were certain themes that came out for each of them," Morgan says. Look closely on the range at the PGA Championship this week and you can spot them.

1. Play and practice should look like each other

One of Morgan's most surprising learnings was discovering how much pros play on the course leading up to tournaments. But it's not just that. It's how they treated playing.

Amateurs treat the range and the golf course as two entirely separate things. Elite golfers blend the two together—something you often see during practice rounds at majors.

Big chunks of their practice sessions look like how they play golf. That means:

• Doing their pre-shot routine before shots
• Hitting different shots as if they were playing holes
• Rotating between different clubs in their bag

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It also means their rounds mirror elements of practice. They'll drop multiple balls to practice different shots, or experiment with different clubs off tees.

The key takeaway

The idea, Morgan says, is that the more these two things blend together, the better you'll be at both growing your skills, and transferring them to the golf course.

"Don't try and treat the practice range and the golf course as these separate entities. Don't think of it like, 'oh, I train on the practice facility, and then I play on the golf course,'" Morgan says. "Golf is a complex system … we have different lies, we have different winds, we have different flag locations, we have different visual elements from the tee. We have to learn to adapt to that. And if that's not present in our practice, we have a reduction in transfer."

2. Get specific as the tournament approaches

As the tournament gets closer, there's a subtle evolution which happens in players' approach. Morgan says that the overall volume of playing and practice stays high, but things get more specific.

Mainly:

• Players clip into perfecting specific shots they'll have for the week.
• They stop introducing new swing drills; they use old ones to confirm the feels they have, but it's more confirmation than revelation.
• They avoid wholesale changes. Instead of trying to go from a fader into a drawer, a better goal is going from a fader to less of a fader.

The takeaway

As the tournament approaches, players are perfecting specific skills they already have, not trying to acquire new ones. Orient around the task at hand, Morgan says. Use the tools you have right now to do it.

"When a player gets really close to a tournament, they want to be executing shots that they have. I don't want any real interference of trying to change this; going over new stuff," Morgan says. "Golfers need to break that cycle of chasing quick fixes that fail. You need to tackle the whole system."

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