How to Practice Golf: The Amount of Hours of Practice You Need to Become a Successful Tour Golfer

There are 365 days in a year and out of all those days you have to spend a high percentage of them practicing and competing at your golf to have any chance of becoming a successful professional golfer. 

How many hours of effort? This is the big question and in today's article I'll share with you the magic number. 

Because we train amateur golfers to become tour golfers we get asked many times how much practice you have to do every day to become a professional golfer. In other words how hard do you really have to work at golf each and every day?

In our opinion and based on our extensive experience and empirical evidence you need to invest a minimum of 1,728 hours per year to give yourself the best chance possible of becoming a successful professional golfer. 

This works out at least 6 hours of practice per day for 6 days per week for 48 weeks per year. 

As you spend around 4.5 to 6 hours on a golf course when you play you need to spend at least the same amount of time on the practice fairway.

And you will need to do this for at least 7 to 10 years if you want to make a good living from playing professional golf. Of course this does not take into account the many variables that influence your level of success such as the quality of practice effort each day, the amount of tournaments you compete in per year and also the quality of the coaching/instruction you receive. 

Can you do it in less time? Yes it is possible, however we find that the hours expressed above are the minimum amount of time required.

If you can currently score close to par or better when you compete in tournaments and you want to become a successful professional golfer you need to know the amount of time and effort you have to commit to the improvement of your game if you want to give yourself a chance of making it.

We have noticed a definite performance shift in competitive golf where the layer of successful golfers is increasing because golf is attracting more serious golfers from more and more countries who are investing the time, effort and financial resources to get onto a professional golf tour.

What this means is that your decision to become a professional golfer in the 21st century is a huge commitment of time, effort and money. It’s conceivable that you will invest many thousands of dollars to get to the standard that allows you to qualify and play on a professional golf tour.

Do you practice and compete at least 6 days per week. If you don’t but you want to become a professional golfer then you need to start thinking about how you will invest your time each day in an effort to lower your competitive scoring average.

By the time you get to tour school you will have to be able to consistently shoot scores under par 60 percent or more of the time and your high score average will not be higher than 2 or 3 over par.

Now this is great news for many of the golfers who read our articles because if you are already doing this then great, and if you are not, then you can quickly change this situation.

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So your time and effort commitment is 6 hours per day multiplied by 6 days per week multiplied by a 48 weeks per year multiplied by a minimum of 10 years.

Here’s the magic number… 17,280 hours.

Do not be deceived into thinking that to become a successful professional golfer is easy, or takes less time, it-does-not! 

Tour professionals are the product of thousands of hours of effort to hone their skills to the level that allows them to compete successfully.

Plan your practice each day so that you spend your time up-skilling your critical to performance skills so that you get yourself on the pathway to lower golf scores. 

Every stroke of improvement will equal a minimum of one thousand hours of deliberate practice effort to continually improve. 

One thousand hours is about 30 weeks of practice.

Start today, and expect your journey to be long and hard. The only advantages are practicing with a well-designed plan and a commitment to focusing on your goals despite the many distractions that will try to tempt you away from your daily commitment.

But stay the course and never look back. In the hours, weeks, months and years ahead you will move ever closer to your dream of competing successfully on a professional golf tour.


Lawrie Montague and David Milne - Pro Tour Golf College

Your Success On Tour is Our Business

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