How Does Break X Golf Work?

We all know you need to practice to get better at golf, but you’ll also know that just practising doesn’t guarantee you will shoot lower scores. You can comfortably practice 5 hours a week and not improve, or even get worse!

The reasons golfer’s don’t improve fall into 3 main buckets:

1. Golfers don’t know what to practice.
2. Golf don’t practice these areas effectively.
3. Golfers work on swing changes that don’t positively improve ball flight.

For the last point, we still recommend you find a great local coach, but Break X Golf has you covered for everything else. After 20 years as a golf coach and studying/lecturing in skill acquisition, I developed the following performance cycle to help golfers understand how to get better, quicker. This is the framework we’ve used to build Break X Golf.

How Break X Golf works

Let’s run you through how the app works and how to get up and running with your first personalised practice plan.

Step 1: Enter Your Stats

All Break X Golf plans are built based on how you play golf. The first step is to enter your stats from your last round of golf. We have three options:

1. A ‘Rate Your Game’ ranking input (in testing – coming to the main app in July).
2. Basic stats like fairways/greens in regulation and number of putts.
3. More advanced strokes gained data

The more data you enter, the more focused we can make your practice plans. However, we respect that some golfers don’t have detailed stats, so we are broadening our approach to cater to more golfers.

Step 2: Check Out Your First Plan

Our algorithm takes in this data and how much time you have to practice and builds you a truly personalised practice plan. This is your practice to-do list, with the most important tasks prioritised at the top. Tap on each game to see how to play and see benchmark scores based on your handicap, or the level you want to achieve.

Once you complete a game, just enter your score, and your progress will be automatically updated to show all your completed tasks and those left to complete. The app also tracks your past scores, average scores and PB’s for every practice game, so you have new targets to beat with every attempt.

Step 3: Your Performance Cycle

Once you’ve checked off a few tasks, you’ll start to feel what it is like to practice in this way. The practice plans offer off-course and on-course challenges, based on how much time you want to practice on each. The Break X Golf hub keeps you up to date with the progress you are making, and as you hit good scores in practice challenges, you’ll unlock tougher and tougher tasks to make sure your practice is always optimal.

Step 4: Keep inputting playing stats

As you play more rounds of golf, just enter your data into the app, and the app will keep up to date with all areas of your golf game. When the app detects that there is a smarter way to practice based on your data, The ‘Update Plan’ button will flash on the ‘practice’ screen.

Step 5: Unlock New Challenges

Imagine going to the gym for 2 years and never lifting heavier weights? We’ll you wouldn’t, most people realise you need to progress the level of difficulty as you progress, but few golfers apply this same concept to golf practice. We see golfers practice the same way for year after year and expect improvements to keep coming their way.

In the Break X Golf app, many challenges have levels 1-5 to represent how challenging they are. All new users start on level one, but if you hit close to the maximum score a few times, you’ll unlock level two for a given game. Expect smaller targets, more variability and higher demands on consistency as you unlock tougher challenges.

The beauty of this approach is that it allows us to keep your practice optimally challenging, whilst keeping it personalised. You may be a 10 handicapper, but you may putt like a 5 handicapper and drive the ball like a 15 handicapper. This approach allows us to find a sweet spot for every area of your game.

Step 6: Track your progress

Break X Golf is here to help you shoot lower scores – that is it. We won’t lay out all of the success stories here (check out our homepage for testimonials), this approach still requires you to put in the work and practice, but it works.

Golfers who use Break X Golf learn quickly what areas to focus on, the skills games give them feedback and the practice challenges help them learn how to control the golf ball and shoot lower scores.

There is a free 7-day trial, as we want all golfers to be able to try out this approach before committing.

How is the app developing?

We have a very small team of myself, Adam and Jorge. We want to turn this into a business to help tens of thousands of golfers, and we are working on this full-time to make this happen. This means we read every email, care for every customer and use every piece of feedback to improve the app.

Below are our current projects.

New strokes gained app

Half of our users don’t have a stats app they are happy with, and we want to build a system that helps us take practice and data analysis to the next level. We have a playing stats app (for iOS and Android) in beta testing. We still have improvements we want to make before releasing it, but this is available for free for all Break X Golf members. We just ask for your feedback in return so we can keep improving how it works.

Keeping you motivated

How do we make practice more fun? How can we provide better feedback to golfers who we know are doing the right things? How can we help golfers who are not practising in the right way?

This is our big in-app project. There are multiple stages to this project, but in the coming months, we’ll be updating the ‘Hub’ page, users will be getting personalised messages about their weekly habits, and we’ll make it clearer how you are practising vs players who are seeing big handicap improvements.

The goal is always the same: help you shoot lower scores.

if you would like to learn more about any of these updates, just get in touch. If this sounds like the kind of thing you want to add to your golf game, come sign up, and you can drop us an email anytime if we can help.

Happy golfing – Will @ Break X Golf