Why you should absolutely be copying Tiger Woods' warm-up routine

While we all tend to make a big song and dance about the carefully choreographed warm-ups most pros embark on before playing a tour round, it's one of the few rituals that seems not to have bled into the routine of the everyday golfer. 

If your so called 'warm-up' involves stepping onto the first tee, swinging your driver a couple of times and immediately proceeding to rip a breakfast ball into the trees, you're not alone.

This, of course, isn't helped by the fact that most golfers have neither the time nor the facilities to warm up like the pros do. Only a fraction of public courses even have driving ranges attached, and whacking balls into a net without any real feedback gets tiresome pretty quickly.

There is, however, plenty of merit to getting those swing reps in where you can—even if you might not be able to access the feedback you'd normally get at a driving range. The problem most golfers tend to experience is a lack of structure in their warm-up, with things quickly devolving into a pattern of bashing balls, picking up swing faults in the process, and arriving on the first tee with less confidence than when you arrived.

And while experts have varying opinions on exactly how many balls you should be hitting to prepare for the perfect round, as good a place to start as any is with the warm-up of the GOAT himself.

Tiger hits 68 shots (we're sure it's no co-incidence this equals an under-par round of golf)—in addition to putting and short game practice—before taking to the tee, carefully structured to help warm in to an array of swing types and clubs without inducing fatigue.

There are a few interesting quirks to Woods' warm-up that seem odd at first glance, but make sense in practice. Like most pros recommend, he cycles through clubs pretty quickly—not just because this keeps things interesting, but to keep the brain guessing and get the body prepared to pivot quickly between swing types. 

He also puts more of an initial focus on the shorter end of the bag, hitting almost 30 shots before bringing driver, wood and his longer irons into play, with the prime focus being on delivering confident ball striking and practicing shaping shots.

Woods has also spoken at length about his habit of carrying out a 'dress rehearsal' of his opening tee-shot at any tournament, saying it stems from his days struggling to hit opening fairways as a junior. Naturally, we'd recommend saving this for the very end of your warm-up routine as well.

There's no denying that by any measure, a 70-shot warm-up is still quite long for the time-poor golfer—particularly with some plenty of pros recommending the average player hit around 40 or 50 shots to get properly loosened without picking up any annoying last habits. Of course, there are ways of condensing this warm-up into a shorter routine as well if time is an issue. But if you have the time and don't want to reduce yourself to just mashing a bucket of balls, try it out. The results out on the course might just surprise you.