New study shows this 20-minute meditation exercise could help you play better golf

We all want to play better golf. The extent to which some golfers know no bounds. They’ll wire themselves into radical training aids, purchase libraries of instruction books, and spend all their down time practicing. But what if I told you improving your golf game could be as easy as listening to a 20-minute meditation session?

That’s according to the results of a new study from Michigan State: “On Variation in Mindfulness Training: A Multimodal Study of Brief Open Monitoring Meditation on Error Monitoring.”

Now before we go any further, we should note that the results of the study aren’t directly related to golf, but they are directly related to a variety of qualities that we universally accept are important to playing better golf: better concentration, and an ability to learn from mistakes.

According to the press release, researches recruited 200 participants that had never meditated before and placed them in a 20 minute guided mediation exercise (that you can try yourself below). Participants had their brain waves measured via electroencephalography and afterwards, took a quiz that was intentionally designed to distract them.

And what did they find? Improved focus and, crucially, a better ability to recognize a mistakes when they did make them, learn from them, which in turn helps prevent the same mistakes next time around.

While the research is still in its early days, it’s easy to see how something like this could benefit golfers.

Golfers constantly make mental mistakes on the golf course: mis-reads, missed putts, wrong club selection, a poor swing or tempo. Ideally, we’d love to avoid them altogether, but that’s impossible. The most we can do is learn from our mistakes, and not make them again.

So take 20 minutes and give it a try below. See if it helps your game.