Are you suffering from a nasty case of the yips? Or, maybe double bogeys, shanks, hooks or worm burners are your problem?
No other sport has such a broad glossary to describe a terrible shot, or bad play, like golf does. Thankfully no other sport has such a broad range of training and practice aids to help you fix the problem.
Tools that will help you minimise the time you spend in bunkers, in the rough, or wanting to run over your putter with the golf cart.
However, there are more gadgets and gizmos available to today’s amateur golfer than there are balls at the bottom of the local golf club lake, so you need a targeted approach which should begin with asking the question: “What areas of my game need the most work?”
For example, if you regularly let fly off the tee, only to end up in the right-hand rough, there will be a specific aid to help you improve. Or, if you’re currently spending more time in bunkers than on the green stuff there will undoubtedly be another tool out there that will claim to be able to keep the sand permanently out of your golf shoes.
Whatever the challenge is, the best training aids work by establishing a muscle memory connection after repeated use and will allow you to learn through feel and touch, so that good form and technique are encouraged, established and feel natural the next time you play a shot in anger.
With that in mind, we called in a broad range of products to see which ones were worth your money, with the final edit comprising the tools that delivered tangible fixes or improvements on the common golfing problems that occur from tee to green.
Best golf training and practice aids at a glance
- Best overall: Premium Pressure Putt Trainer - £22.49, Amazon
- Best for hitting further from the tee: Home Series V2 - £695, Golf Bays
- Best for feel: G-Force driver NXT-GEN - £99.99, Amazon
- Best for improving your swing path: Eyeline Golf Speed Trap 2.0 - £94.50, Amazon
- Best for beginners: Callaway Chipstix golf training aid - £14.95, Amazon
- Best for sorting out your face angle: PuttOUT devil ball - £19.99, Amazon
- Best for reading the greens: The Breaking Ball Putting Mat - £100, Very
- Best for improving your transition: Sure Set Golf Training Aid - £89.99, Amazon
- Best for getting out of bunkers: Pocket Bunker - £26.80, Amazon
- Best value for money: Mini-Max Training Mirrors - £17.09, Amazon
- Best for finding out your weaknesses: Arccos Starter Bundle - £143.95, Amazon
- Best for recording your swing: Live View Pro 2 Swing Mirror - £439.51, Amazon
- Best launch monitor: Garmin Approach R10 Portable Golf Launch Monitor - £479.99, American Golf
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PuttOut Premium Pressure Putt Trainer
Best: Overall
Putting trainers don’t have to be overly complicated to be effective. However, if you want to go a step further than putting into a cup on the living room carpet then this is an inexpensive but brilliant aid that’s so simple but so effective. A rubberised base the size of a golf hole and a ramp with a micro target means that you can get tonnes of feedback about your puts without any electronics.
Any putt that rolls up and back down the ramp is a made putt with the ramp returning the ball the distance it would have rolled past the hole, so you can judge exactly how you’re doing for pace. If the ball goes over the edge of the ramp it means the putt would have hit the lip of the hole. Only a ball hit on the perfect line with perfect pace will stop in the micro target and that is so hard to achieve you will find yourself needing to draw on all your golf zen to stay calm for the next attempt.
It’s portable, folding in half so that you can keep practicing even when you’re away from home.
Buy now £22.49, Amazon
The Net Return Home Series V2
Best for: hitting further from the tee
It might seem like a first world problem, but if your current golf net doesn’t return your ball to you then you might as well be practicing in the dark ages. The first thing we really liked about the Net Return Pro series is that it’s supremely easy to set up, which is a real bonus as we ended up getting all tangled up while trying to set up plenty of other nets during testing. The quality of all the components is very good and the net itself is guaranteed for 250,000 shots and can handle drives up to 220mph - if you’re lucky enough to be able to hit that hard!
Buy now £695.00, Golf Bays
GForce Driver Nxt-Gen
Best for: feel
On first impressions, this looks just like a regular club but pick it up and it has a comically wobbly shaft, which is what makes it such a must for any golfer’s bag.
Remember we said that a good training aid will allow you to feel when you’re hitting with the correct technique, well, that’s where the swing trainer excels as it allows you to feel the weight of the club head throughout so you feel more connected and can make adjustments accordingly.
We found that it really helped with our tempo and timing and it comes in driver, 7-iron, wedge and putter incarnations so you can take advantage of the real-time feedback you get from the shaft no matter what aspect of your game you’re working on.
Buy now £99.99, Amazon
EyeLine Golf Speed Trap 2.0
Best for: improving your swing path
It's likely one of the most comical-looking contraptions around but it has a serious purpose if you’re looking to work on swing path, which determines the direction the ball travels off the club head and whether you hit the ball straight or with draw or fade. If you want to hit longer and straighter, this aid can help.
Firstly, it’s well made, which it needs to be because the plastic base will take a lot of punishment and will soon let you know if you’re hitting “fat”, when you hit the ground before the ball, as the club head will clatter into the base and will prevent clean contact with the ball.
Correct that and you’ll need to negotiate the four red speed rods which will help guide your clubface in so that if you end up missing them all you can be guaranteed that the ball will be leaving the tee much straighter than it was before.
Hit enough shots with the speed trap and muscle memory will hopefully begin to take over when you transfer to the course.
Buy now £94.50, Amazon
Callaway Chip Stix
Best for: beginners
When you’re new to the game one of the best ways to learn the fundamental lesson of golf – getting the club face to the golf ball correctly – is to begin by practicing chip shots.
This very simple aid attaches to the end of your wedge or iron and allows you to be much more aware of where the club is in relation to your body during the backswing and helps you smarten up your finishing position too.
It allowed us to work on the all-important club face to golf ball positioning and also it trained us to keep our hands ahead of the ball and introduce spin into our shots, so that when we made it onto the green, we had more chance of staying there.
Buy now £14.95, Amazon
PuttOUT Devil Ball
Best for: sorting out your face angle
When you’re standing over a pressure putt, one of the (many) things that’s playing on your mind will be getting the face of your putter to the ball as squarely as possible, so the ball begins its journey towards the hole straight.
Another brilliantly effective aid with a simple concept at its heart – it’s a regular sized and weighted golf ball with a dimpled flat edge to exaggerate face angle. Too closed or too open on impact and the ball will wobble off and let you know that you got it all wrong.
There are even three levels of practice designed into the ball, with three different impact zones (beginner, intermediate and pro) ranging from the most rounded part of the ball, to a slightly rounded section to the flat edge which will really highlight any imperfect contact.
Buy now £19.99, Amazon
Me and My Golf Breaking Ball Putting Mat
Best for: reading the greens
The ability to read any break that exists on a green is critical for a healthy scorecard. This putting mat comes with three weighted golf balls that simulate three different kinds of break (heavy, medium and slight) and helps you work on where to start your putt depending on how much break you think you’re dealing with.
It does this by having a series of coloured markings on the mat which correspond to where you should be aiming the ball from the start line. This should train you to putt for the perfect amount of break to get you to the marked golf hole and then finish in the blue “landing zone”, which will feedback that you are hitting at perfect pace too. Also, because everything is the actual size (hole and balls) it allows you to easily replicate your new-found skills the next time you’re putting for real.
Available as a 7.5ft and an 11ft matt, depending on your skill level.
Buy now £100.00, Very
Sure Set Golf Training Aid
Best for: improving your transition
The transition is the point at which you begin the downswing and it’s important that you’re set up correctly during this phase, which is what this excellent aid aims to teach. Secure the black ball where your shoulder meets your armpit and grab the golf training grip at the other end of the aid (which teaches you the correct grip positions) and you can swing away, knowing that your left arm is being taught to keep as straight as possible and your wrists are being taught to hinge as they should. All of which, helps you to come down on to the golf ball with a club face that’s square.
This aid is totally portable, very easy to use and provides great real-time feedback. We really liked how it helped us to imprint a correct and simplified swing sensation and is great for just before you play a round to reinforce the correct backswing technique to help you hit straight off the tee. It’s also a useful tool to help you warm up beforehand and extend your range of movement.
Buy now £89.99, Amazon
Pocket bunker
Best for: getting out of bunkers
It’s not easy to practice extricating yourself from the sand unless you repurpose your local playground’s sandpit. However, this aptly-titled aid will definitely help you with your technique the next time you find yourself in a spot of bother on course.
Looking like a golf ball and baby octopus hybrid, the aim is to hit the legs (or should we say tentacles) out from underneath the ball which will give you the feel of the perfect flop or lob shot - a high, soft shot, which is exactly the shot you need to get out of that bunker and back on the grass.
Light, portable and very hard wearing (it needs to be) this really is an aid that will impart the muscle memory for a shot that every golfer needs in their arsenal.
Buy now £26.80, Amazon
Me and My Golf Mini-Max Training Mirrors
Best for: value for money
Just like you would use a mirror to see if you look your best before you go out, you can also use mirrors in golf to check on your swing to check that it’s also looking good. There’s one mirror that is covered in alignment markings and is intended to help improve your putting, by allowing you to check the face angle etc.
There is also a clear mirror that can be used with a multi-angled stand to check on your full swing.
Both mirrors are a very effective way to dial in your set up and face club alignment when it comes to putting and they’re supplemented by a series of training video drills that will help you do things like eliminate hip sway in your backswing to improve the consistency of your chipping.
Buy now £17.09, Amazon
Arccos Sensors Starter Bundle
Best for: finding out your weaknesses
As we mentioned in our intro, in order to improve your game, you need to shine a light on your weak spots, but if you really want to fine tune things then you need data and lots of it. That’s where these sensors come in which screw into the top of each club in your bag and are light and sound activated; and rather smartly, are deactivated when the club is turned upside down again e.g., are back in your bag.
When you’re playing a round they will track every shot with every club and feedback through the app a host of data from your most common misses to when you made 3-putts. All the AI data is then laid out for you on the app to analyse later on.
Buy now £143.95, Amazon
Live View Pro 2 Swing Mirror
Best for: recording your swing
We all have golf swing analysers in our pockets these days, but one thing your smartphone won’t allow you to do is to view what’s going on in real time, which can be really useful when you’re trying to make the connection between a good practice shot and how your swing looked while making that shot. The Pro 2 will stream your swing to your smartphone or tablet, so you can actually watch what’s going on while you’re doing it, rather than having to review it afterwards making that connection much easier. It can also overprint on the video useful training suggestions on techniques which we really found useful.
Buy now £439.51, Amazon
Garmin Approach R10 Launch Monitor
Best: launch monitor
Although it’s still very portable and can be used on the course, we think that the R10 is a very useful driving range companion as it does all the things that you need from a monitor, tracking a vast array of data from distance to launch angle. However, it’s also a good training tool and has a dedicated training mode as it will display your shots on a dispersion chart based on the estimated ball flight.
We tested a lot of launch monitors and this helped us the most in terms of turning its data into practical, on course improvements.
Buy now £479.99, American Golf
Verdict
For sheer ingenuity, portability and playability PuttOUTs Perfect Putt was a very addictive aid while also cementing that all-important muscle memory with every good and bad shot.
Plus, it manages to do something a lot of trainers are unable to do in capturing the maddening and frustrating elements of the game, along with those rare moments of elation when a shot is hit perfectly – which will help you the next time you’re out on the course and feeling the pressure on the greens.
