Luke Benoit, PGA,Director of Instruction,Interlachen Country Club,Edina, Minnesota
For years, many golfers have been told that effective practice means slowing down, carefully following a pre-shot routine and treating every range ball like it’s being struck on the course.
While there’s certainly value in that approach, PGA of America Professional Luke Benoit believes it’s only part of the equation.
“We often hear ‘don’t just pound balls,’” says Benoit, the Director of Instruction at Interlachen Country Club in Edina, Minnesota, who holds his PhD in kinesiology. “But from what I’ve learned in motor learning research, sometimes doing one shot after another is actually the best way to learn.”
The Minnesota PGA Section’s 2017 Teacher & Coach of the Year and 2024 Professional Development Award winner, Benoit (pictured with a student) spent years studying how golfers acquire and retain skills. He says one of the biggest misconceptions he encounters is that every practice session should look the same.
Instead, he encourages golfers to learn at different speeds and under different conditions.
“Especially in the short game, more trials can lead to more learning,” explains Benoit. “Sometimes hitting one chip or putt after another to different targets is exactly what a player needs.”
The concept is rooted in motor learning principles and what educators call “contextual interference” — introducing variation into practice to challenge the brain and improve long-term retention.
Rather than creating perfect repetition, Benoit believes golfers should gradually learn to adapt. That may mean changing targets, altering the environment, increasing pressure or simply varying the pace at which they practice.
“Golfers struggle with knowing when they should be thinking about their swing and when they should just be playing,” he says. “Teaching them how to practice is often just as important as teaching them how to swing.”
Benoit’s instructional framework reflects that philosophy. Players begin by learning movement patterns without a golf ball before progressing to skill-specific training. Only after those foundations are established do they move into more challenging environments with increased variability.
That structured approach has produced tangible results. Students become more efficient with their practice time, improve their ability to transfer skills to the course and gain a clearer understanding of how improvement actually happens. Benoit has seen stronger in-person results and continued growth in his online coaching platform.
“Understanding all the different levers that influence learning can completely change how golfers improve,” he says. “When you teach players how to learn, not just what to do, everything gets better.”
