Product Review – CHAMPKEY Golf Practice Mat

Practicing golf = getting better at golf. This is fact. Accept it.

Golf is Hard and Requires Practice

For decades I refused to practice. To be clear, playing golf on an actual golf course is nothing like the range. The ball is never on a perfectly flat surface. Experience with hitting uphill, downhill, with the ball above our feet, below our feet, can only come with actually hitting different shots and different clubs on actual grass. The type of grass, the thickness, grain, and how wet or dry the ground is are all factors that again only come with on-course experience. Golf is hard. Around here, for a few bucks more, instead of hitting buckets of range balls, I can play a real round of golf. Thus, I never spent any time practicing.

What About Practicing at Home?

Arguably even worse than hitting on the practice range, is hitting into a net. The argument reasons that without a coach or launch monitor, hitting balls into a net can engrain faults into your swing that you otherwise would not if you could see the ball flight (which is cut off when hitting into a net).

I’ve been a mediocre golfer for over 20 years. I’m tired of playing bad. Golf for me seemed to always come and go. One day the driver is pure, but irons at terrible. Another day, I’m striping my irons, but can’t hit the driver. And so on and on and on for years. I just kept telling myself, “that’s just golf.”

My Basement Practice Set Up

This past winter, I bought a generic sports net from Amazon. Hung it up in my basement. No kit. No frame. Just literally hung the net from the support beams in my unfinished basement. At first the goal was to get my driver under control. Since the ball sits on a tee when hitting the driver on a real golf course, I figured the practice mat should be a pretty good way to get real world improvements.

Low and behold, my driver did indeed come back.

Based on Tiger’s 1000 touches theory, I started hitting balls every day. Not Tiger’s 1000, maybe 3 balls for each club. I rolled out an old area rug. Started practicing hitting the putter in the center. Chipping different distances with different wedges. My golf game was now noticeably better.

Grooving the Proper Swing.

I set up video filming to avoid grooving bad swing habits. But I don’t really use it. I know what the fundamentals are. Consciously building muscle memory for a good grip, stance, backswing, and follow through. After 20 years, I know what a proper shot sounds like and what a center of the face, properly timed shot feels like – so even without being able to see the ball fly, the basement practice is actually paying off (literally in skins).

Iron Practice Mat

So the next purchase was focused on practicing my irons. I ordered the CHAMPKEY Replaceable Impact Golf Mat from Amazon. The mat has a thick durable rubber base, so it does not move around, and I don’t feel any serious harm is done when slamming an iron down too steeply.

The surface has what feels like velvet. When brushed in one direction the color is uniform, and when the club hits the surface, the color gets lighter or darker as the velvet hairs are pushed in another direction. The idea is to see whether you are hitting behind the ball (bad) or hitting the ball then ground like the pros.

The color shifting velvet also helps identify swing path by the “divot” shape and direction.

After a while, the surface does gets shredded.

The entire velvety top surface attaches to the rubber base with velcro. The practice mat comes with three replacement surfaces that are easy to remove and replace.

The mat comes in three sizes. I got the M (13″ x 17″) which is okay for me.

Here is the mat with a golf ball, putter, and iron for size reference.

After wear starts setting in, the impact direction really doesn’t work.

The surface is very flat (compared to the longer synthetic grass mats, and even compared to typical home carpeting). Not sure if it’s got me hitting the ball first yet, but it has helped me get better at hitting balls off of tight lies.

T-Nice Rating: 4-STARS