App Review: Pre Shot Club Golfer App:
While there are many different golf apps available, there are relatively few that concern themselves with one of the most important aspects of the game; the mental side of golf. The Pre Shot Club Golfer app (and it’s successor the Golf Pre Shot Pro app) are two golf apps for iPhone and iPad that break that trend.
Priced at £4.99 each, we’ll examine the first of these apps in a little more detail and examine if they are worth the investment and for which type of player they are most suited, high, mid or low handicapper.
What is Pre Shot Club Golfer?
In essence, Pre Shot Club Golfer is an app which focuses on the golf game that is fought mentally on each shot of every round. The software is based upon the teachings and beliefs of the great Jack Nicklaus, who claimed that the correct make up for any great golf shot was; 10% swing, 40% stance and 50% mental.
While there are countless apps available that help a golfer focus on their swing and stance, there are considerably fewer for what Nicklaus maintains is the crucial aspect of golf. Pre Shot Club Golfer is one of them.
The aim of the app is to engender positive mental thoughts and processes within the golfer when they are out on the course so that they have a much sharper, more focused and more positive mental attitude when playing. The belief being that this mental positivity will translate itself into better shots and lower scores.
Certainly there are quotes from PGA Professionals and satisfied customers that attest to the effectiveness of the app and the fact that they have brought out another app aimed at players who want to think like tour profesionals, certainly suggests that there is merit within these claims. So let’s examine the positive aspects in a bit more detail.
The Positive aspects?
The first and most obvious positive aspect is simply the fact that this app introduces a key element of successful golf to beginner golfers. It is very easy when learning the game and trying to lower your handicap to focus solely on your stance and swing. Yet how many times do players attempt to improve with negative thoughts playing constantly on their mind?
What the Pre Shot Club Golfer app does particularly well is empower the user to recognise these negative thoughts and attempt to banish them and instead replace them with more positive thoughts. It does this without going too psychoanalytical and overly-complex and as a result, it is easy to see why beginner players can get benefit from the app.
Another positive aspect is the focus on ‘visualisation’. It is becoming widely accepted across sport now that positive mental rehearsal, or visualisation, before you perform a sporting activity can have a very positive effect on performance. The section of the app dealing with this is particularly good if you are new to these techniques and will help put you in the right frame of mind before you play a shot.
The Negative aspects?
So is this all worth £4.99? The answer is that it very much depends. If you are a novice golfer and have very little understanding of the mental aspects of the game, then I would say that the app is good value for money. There is certainly enough within it to help you knock shots off your game from improving the number of positive thoughts and developing helpful shot routines alone.
However, if you already do have a rudimentary understanding of the psychology of golf then really there is nothing new here to justify paying £5. The concepts and methodologies explained within are aimed at the novice golfer, or a golfer new to the mental side of the game, and if you have experience of this already, it is unlikely you’ll learn anything new to help you on the course.
Conclusion
To conclude, the Pre Shot Club Golfer app would work well for golfers with a limited understanding of the mental side of the game and it does attempt to give these players not just a better understanding of the mental side of golf, but also how to develop positive shot routines and thoughts and also how to visualise the perfect shot to help you become a better and more positive player.
However, it does have limited appeal as there is nothing really ground-breaking in the information contained within and many golfers will have already been exposed to these ideas and may already use them as part of their approach to the game. In which case, the second app Golf Pre Shot Pro, may be more beneficial (and we’ll review that at a later date).
Overall 7/10 – Good but only for certain golfers and only until you are used to the simple processes explained within.
Images and Video courtesy of the Pre Shot Golf Apps website
(Via Gorilla Golf Blog)