8-Time Canadian Long Drive Champion Lisa “Longball” Vlooswyk shares her tips to improve your golf game this winter.

It’s been a long cold winter for Canadian golfers. In most of the country, snow is still piled up on city streets and local golf courses will not open their doors until April. By this point, golfers are itching to swing their sticks and hit the range.

Now you can cure your winter blues with Practice Time at Golf Town!  This new program allows you to rent range time in Golf Town’s simulators. Golfers can sign up for a 55 minute session for $24.99 to hit unlimited balls in their own private bay. This is the perfect way to get your swing in shape and be ready for the golf season once the snow melts.

Here are a few of my tips to help you get the most out of your indoor range time.

1. Check out your Numbers

When using the driving range feature on the simulator, you will receive a variety of statistics on the screen after each shot.  There are three numbers you’ll want to focus on: Club Head Speed, Efficiency and Offline.

Clubhead Speed leads to distance.  If you can increase your club head speed you will start to hit the ball longer.  The hitting bay is the ideal place to practice a variety of swing techniques to try to help you improve your club head speed. Experiment with a looser grip, a bigger turn, a more complete finish and see if your numbers go up.

Efficiency is a number that indicates if you are achieving ideal contact and compressing the ball.  Focus on trying to get your efficiency number as high as possible.  For driver, you are working towards an efficiency number of 1.45.

Offline is a number to tell you how many yards off the centre of the grid/middle of the fairway you are.  You want to strive for as tight a dispersion as possible.  Ideally you would like to keep this number in the single digits.

2. Focus on Club Face Contact

When you are hitting indoors it is the perfect time to focus on where the ball is contacting the club face.  Hitting the “sweet spot” of your club face can make the difference of 20+ more yards and whether you hit the fairway or are out of bounds. Club face contact is often overlooked yet is a key piece to improving your accuracy and your distance.

Apply impact tape to the face of your club.  Proceed to hit a shot.  After each shot, look at where the impact mark of the ball is located on the face.

You will get tremendous feedback!  You will see if you are hitting too low or too high on the club face.  You will see if you are consistently hitting it off the toe or heel.  It will give you immediate feedback about your swing.  You may be standing too close to the ball, too far away, coming out of your golf posture too quickly, or a variety of other swing faults that can cause you to miss the center of the club face.

Drill: To practice making contact in the center of the clubface, set up three golf balls in a line perpendicular to your target, with a 2-3 inch gap between each ball.  Set up to the middle golf ball and hit it without contacting the ball in front or behind it.

3. Find Your Distance

If you have dedicated indoor practice time this winter, PGA of Canada Class A Professional Scott MacLeod recommends you work on your gapping.  The first step is knowing how far you hit each of your clubs.

There should be approximately a 10 yard gap between each club.  This is a perfect time to see if you need to add any clubs to your bag before the season starts.

4. Gapping Your Wedges

The next step is gapping your wedges.  MacLeod recommends that golfers focus on their shots 120 yards and less.  He suggests that golfers need to practice and learn how far each of their wedges go with a variety of swings.

MacLeod says, “Use the clock method.  Picture a clock.  If you were standing straight, your head would be at 12:00 and your feet at 6:00.  Hit each wedge with a full swing, a ¾ swing (stop your backswing at 10:30) and a half swing (stop your back swing at 9:00).  Record the distances you hit each club in each of those 3 positions.  This will add a variety of shots to your game that players do not often practice and will point out and glaring distance gaps you may have between clubs.”

Start working on these great tips today!    

Lisa “Longball” Vlooswyk is the reigning 8-time Canadian Long Drive Champion for Women.  She is a Keynote Speaker, Golf Journalist, Golf Entertainer and just launched a new Instructional Video.  Lisa can be reached through her website www.lisalongball.com or through Twitter @LisaLongball.