When you practice it's a good idea to mark a line on the grass, either score a line with a stick or, if you live in a perfect world, take a white spray (the type greenkeepers use for marking GUR).

Whatever you do though please don't even THINK about laying a club down on the ground, you'll break it and probably hurt yourself!

Mark a line a couple of feet long in front of you then place your golf balls on the white line and hit them from the line. Once you have hit 10 then you can move the line backwards a couple of inches and start again... if you are swinging properly you should get something that looks like this...... which is about 30 shots in 3 rows of 10.



As you can see all of my divots are in front of the white line by an inch or so, even though the ball was sitting on the line. The club has hit the ball already before it hits the ground. My hands are forward of the clubhead at impact so the club doesn't 'bottom out' behind the ball at all, no fat shots! I was using a wedge on soft ground so the divots look pretty dramatic

The more accurately your divots line up then the more consistantly you are getting the club to the same impact point everytime. Not something you can see if you are just hitting shots from all over the place on the practice area.

Here's Andy Plummer showing the drill where he has hit 17 shots in a row with the clubhead taking a divot in front of the ball each time.