We've all experienced frustration on the golf course, questioning our skills and wondering why we can't seem to perform at our best. Often, we focus on improving our physical abilities, overlooking the power of our mindset. But the truth is, our mental game is where we can find significant improvements in our performance. In this article, we'll explore the best ways to enhance your mental game for golf and introduce the top five apps that can help you achieve a calm, confident mind.
You're a passionate golfer, doing everything you can to improve, but you're struggling. Your performance impacts your mood. Your mood impacts your performance. You get frustrated and upset, and you know you’re wasting strokes every time you play. You want to save at least two or three shots every round, but you're busy, so how are you going to do it?
The Golf Guru App has over 30 hours of audio content from top psychologists. They teach tools and techniques that immediately start saving you shots.
The content fits around your schedule, while comprehensively covering the mental game. It's like having a top psychologist in your pocket, guiding you 24/7
For example, you might listen to:
- a guided lesson at the driving range
- a practice session on the practice green
- a series of relaxing mindfulness sessions for golf, at home
- a pre-round pep talk from a top golfer, in the car
Built by a team of elite coaches, including the legendary Dr Joe Parent, the app culminates years of experience at the top level of golf psychology. The variety of content on offer means you soon find your favourites. New content every week means you’re always learning.
Where the Golf Guru app stands alone is through its guided audio lessons. You learn in real-time, as you hit balls on the range or at the short game area. This speeds up the learning process and means you know how to put what you practice into play on the course.
But it's not only for practice. The app has a tracking function to help you understand how your mind influences the scores you shoot. A quick and effective process, it helps you zero in on what's costing you shots on the course.
It’s the only app to provide you with content designed for every situation. You could be driving to the golf course, relaxing at home, or walking to the 1st tee. There are audio sessions on offer that guarantee a stronger mindset.
That’s the most exciting part about Golf Guru – it’s proven to work. Tracking the handicap data of its golfers, they saw that they came down by an average of 2.9 shots in the first 3 months.
The Golf Guru app is the best solution if you're looking for mental game techniques you can turn into rapid results. There’s enough advice and instruction to get your mind calm and focused from day 1. Longer term, the app helps you maintain a confident and strong mindset as you track your game. Continued use of the app saves you shots every time you play.
Golf Guru’s 7 day free trial removes any barriers to getting started. You can test the app in full without having to commit.
Focused on quick tips for mental mastery. Imagine Golf offers bite-sized audio sessions featuring insights from legendary golf books such as Dr. Bob Rotella's "Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect" and Tiger Woods' "Golf My Way." By spending just three minutes a day listening to these quick tips, you can enhance your thinking and playing abilities.
But if you want to go a bit deeper, Imagine offers that too. They’ve worked with some of the legends of the game to create 7 day courses you can follow. For example both Gary Player and Colin Montgomerie have produced masterclasses for the app, sharing stories from their playing careers that can help you improve your golf.
There’s also regular Zoom calls that Imagine members can take advantage of, giving you the chance to chat to the main narrator on the app or a PGA pro. This is a great free resource where you can ask questions and get answers from fellow app users too.
Imagine Golf is a brilliant sidekick for golfers looking for regular, quick tips that will help their mental game. By focusing on the best well known golf instruction books, they’re saving golfers a lot of time and money by extracting key bits of information that’ll undoubtedly help them to think better and play better.
Though the commentary style may not be for everyone, there’s such a wide variety of golf books and additional content on there, that’s there bound to be something you’ll enjoy.
There's no tracking function, so it'll be up to you to determine whether it's working or not. But from looking at user testimonials it seems that after a month or two you should be able to see a positive impact on your mental game.
Waking Up is a meditation app that deepens your levels of attentional focus, benefiting your overall mental state on and off the golf course.
Though not golf-specific, Waking Up is a meditation app that has become the preferred partner of the extremely popular Decade Golf platform. A big part of Decade is thinking and strategizing clearly before and during your rounds of golf, so by using the Waking Up app to meditate daily, you could expect to deepen your levels of attentional focus and therefore improve your game.
In fact, the concept of going deeper is prevalent throughout Waking Up, even though this is an app aimed at new and experienced meditation practitioners alike, it doesn’t just focus on the practice, it also gets you to look at why you’re meditating, by delving into the theory of mindfulness so you become more invested in your practice.
With content from a range of top experts and world class meditation teachers, the Waking Up is a brilliant solution if you’re looking to become more calm and focused, and trusts that through using the app you will see an improvement in how you think and feel on the golf course.
If you haven’t heard of Headspace by now, where have you been? Alongside its main rival ‘Calm’, Headspace has popularised the practice of meditation, making it easy to get stuck in and build a daily habit.
The Headspace app has a large amount of content that will improve your overall mental wellbeing, plus some content focused specifically at ‘athletes’, mainly around the themes of competition but not focused on any one sport.
Though clearly the app can work for golfers, as Headspace partnered with the LPGA back in 2019 to provide all its members with free access to the platform.
The Verdict
Headspace is a great app to try if you’re new to meditation, looking to get stuck in, and wanting to improve your mental wellbeing in your life more generally.
Though not golf specific, similarly to the Waking Up app, you can expect to see an improved mental game on the course if you commit to regular meditation practice by using Headspace.
A new app backed by top UK based golf psychologist, Karl Morris, this is an app focused on improving your mental game, teaching you to control your mind for more consistent golf.
Backed by his work on Tour over the last 20 years, the app provides access to many of the ideas, tools and techniques that Karl has taught to players such as 2010 Open Champion Louis Oosthuizen.
The Mind Caddie app has audio sessions you listen to before or after a round of golf, as well as a journal feature to encourage you to write down your thoughts and feelings about different areas of your game as you practice them. This is great as according to Mind Caddie, journaling can speed up your learning process by x4.
Mind Caddie is well worth a go if you’re looking to work at your mental game in a more engaging way than just reading one of Karl Morris' popular golf psychology books.
Having worked with top players including Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood, you can be confident that Karl Morris’ methods work.
By investing the time to use the app, you’re likely to see an improvement in your golf scores thanks to more consistent thinking, and therefore consistent shotmaking.
The interface is a little glitchy, and we found the sign in to be quite complicated, but if you can get past some UX issues then Mind Caddie is a great resource that goes one step further than reading one of Karl Morris' books.
