Summary

 

Dr. B’s Portable Golf Mat addresses two of the principal problems with practicing your golf swing on artificial golf mats.  

 

Golfer’s Elbow

When you practice on a normal golf mat, your wrists and elbows suffer from the impact of the contact.  Most golfers that practice regularly get a little bit of tendinitis that gets aggravated every time they hit on the mats.  Dr. B’s Portable Golf Mat, the PGM for short,  eliminates this and allows you to practice without pain.

 

False Feedback on “Fat” Hits

When you hit the ball “fat” on a regular mat, the club bounces into the ball and fools you into thinking you’ve hit the ball well.  When you get to the real fairway, you pay a stiff price for this false feedback.  The PGM gives you the correct feedback when you hit it fat and you get better results on the course.

 

Who is Dr B’s Portable Golf Mat for?

  Anyone who hits balls on an artificial surface other than good grass will benefit from practicing on the PGM

 

Positioning and Using the PGM

The PGM is just 9 ounces and fits in the side pocket of a light carry bag.  Just place it next to the regular range mat and tie off the shock cord on a chair or the bag stand or even the bottom of your bag so it doesn’t fly away and you are ready to go.  Put the ball tray on the opposite side of the PGM and roll the ball out of the tray to the front edge of the PGM and you are ready to go.  The idea is to hit hit the ball first and go down through the air in front of the top piece of the PGM so you experience even less impact than you get hitting off a nice country club fairway.

 

​

Year-End Low Price and 60 Day Money Back Guarantee

  List price is $39.95 but until the end of 2020 just $38 including shipping.  If you are not satisfied, send it back in 60 days and I’ll refund your $38.  That’s going to work out to a fraction of a penny per ball to get rid of the pain of practicing on mats and significantly improve the effectiveness of your work at the driving range.  If you want to save a little more, order direct from Amazon.  They have a 30 day full refund policy and they can deliver without any charge for shipping.  Hit the button below on the left to go to the Amazon listing.

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

For a fuller description of Dr. B’s Portable Golf Mat, 

please read the full explanation of the above points, in the following:

​

Dr. B’s Portable Golf Mat addresses two of the principal problems with practicing your golf swing on artificial golf mats.

 

Golfer’s Elbow

First of all, when you hit a good shot on a nice fairway, you take a thin dollar-bill sized divot that weighs just a few ounces and feels like it adds almost no resistance to your club as it descends down through the ball and into the ground, preferably descending little more than 4 degrees and leaving the roots of the grass intact.  Good driving range mats are designed to absorb and soften the impact of the club on the ground and dissipate the trauma transmitted back into your body, but they can’t move like that little divot.  They may replace the trauma of impact with the resistance the club experiences as it slides through some of the material that comprises some of the better artificial hitting mats.  But ultimately, that law of equal and opposite forces says that strike will deliver some trauma to your body.  Most golfers who have tried to hone their games on driving range mats have experienced the sore elbows and wrists that come from absorbing that impact.

 

Dr. B’s Portable Golf Mat (we’ll call it DB’s PGM from now on) takes a different approach.  By using two pieces of artificial turf that can hold the ball on the edge of the free upper piece  of turf, the golfer is able to hit the ball without incurring any impact with the ground as he strikes down through the 5/8” space created in front of the top piece and above the bottom piece of the mat.  A good ball strike should hit the ball first and descend at about 4 degrees through the ground in front of the ball creating that thin dollar-bill sized divot.  Well, a dollar bill is 6 1/8 inches long.  A strike of 4 degrees down over that length would descend less than 1/2 an inch.  That means you would barely touch the bottom piece of DB’s PGM, each piece of which is 5/8” thick.  You will catch a few bristles of the top piece and this will give you a little of the feeling of hitting a good shot off a nice fairway, but little or no resistance from the ground will be transmitted back into your wrists and elbows.  There is, of course, the impact with the ball, but that’s not the usual cause of the tendinitis that driving range practicers develop hitting off mats.

 

False Feedback on “Fat” Hits

The second major problem with practicing on range mats is that it gives you false feedback on “fat” hits.  If you hit the ball just a little behind the ball on a mat, the club bounces into the ball and delivers a pretty good result.  When you make the same strike on the fairway, the club takes a divot behind the ball, the ball moves before impact and is struck high up on the club face and... well, the result is not good!  If you hit the ball a little fat on the DB’s PGM, the whole mat will move enough to give you a poor result.  If you completely miss the ball and hit one or two inches behind the ball, you are probably better off with a conventional golf mat until you develop a little more profiency.  But if you are close and having a little trouble with fat hits on the fairway that aren’t as evident on the practice tee, DB’s PGM may help you correct that “fat” hit and improve the overall 

effectiveness of your driving range practice sessions.

 

Who is Dr B’s Portable Golf Mat for?

I read recently that there are over 3,000,000 golfers in the USA that play most of their golf at a driving range.  There are, of course, millions more who play at real courses and get some of their golf time at driving ranges.  Only a small portion of those golfers get to play at nice country clubs that have excellent grass practice ranges or have access to a public practice range with great grass hitting areas.  The rest of us, if we practice, have to hit at least part of the time off range mats.  Then there are people hitting into nets in their back yard or even in their basements.  In my view, they all should try Dr. B’s Portable Golf Mat.  It spares the body the trauma of hitting on most artificial surfaces and gives you the proper feedback to develop good habits that will transfer to better play when you get to the golf course.  

 

If you are an absolute beginner, stick with the big rubber mats for a while until you develop a little bit of proficiency at hitting the “little ball” before you hit the “big ball” (the earth).  Then the PGM will be good for you too.  And be sure to spend some time in the chipping and putting practice areas before you head to the golf course.

 

Positioning the PGM

DB’s PGM is designed to fit into the side pocket of a light stand bag and including the shock cord it weighs less than 9 ounces. It’s about 12 inches long and 7 inches wide and about 1 1/4” thick.  (I like to carry my bag and try to keep it as light as possible.)  The upper piece of the PGM weighs just 3 ounces (probably about the same as a dollar bill divot) and as it is the only thing that moves much on a good hit (please see the 1000 fps videos), that’s one of the reasons there is so little force transmitted back into your wrists and elbows.  Take it out of your bag and lay it on the ground next to the normal range mat.  If you have particularly thick range mats at your range, you may want to lay a towel or a rag down under the PGM to bring the surface of the PGM level with the position of the bottom of your feet on the range mat; usually that is not necessary.  

 

If there is some grass close behind your driving range station, just hold the shock cord with a tee in the ground.  You can also tie it to the bottom of your bag or a chair. (Don’t tie it to the legs of your stand bag.  I snapped one on a particularly bad “fat” hit.)  You will occasionally hit a little too much of the PGM and it would fly off a few feet if it were not attached.  I find that when I practice, the PGM moves little more than an inch or two on most good hits and it’s quite easy to readjust it with the club and pull the next ball on to the PGM from an adjacent ball tray.  (See the video.)

 

If you are one of those people practicing in your back yard, but don’t want to destroy your lawn, just stand on a door mat that has the thickness of the PGM (1 1/4”).  Alternatively, you could stand on your own grass if you just dig our a small recess 1 1/4” below the level of your lawn, just 7” wide and a little more than 12” long.  You can hold the PGM in place with a golf tee and have a great practice area right on your lawn.  You will have that recess area to deal with, but you can create some kind of insert for when it isn’t holding the PGM and you’ll preserve the rest of your lawn.  (I wouldn’t leave the PGM out in the elements. You’ll want to try to keep the elastic and the shock cord dry if possible.)

 

How to Use the PGM

Once you have DB’s PGM in position, just use your club to roll the ball onto the top piece of the PGM.  Position the ball as near to the front edge of that piece as possible.  It doesn’t have to be on the very last row of bristles although that is ideal.  But the ball should not be placed in the middle of the top piece where the ball strike would go down through the top piece.  This would give you an interesting feel of resistance, but it is too much resistance and the PGM is not designed to withstand that kind of impact.  Instead of lasting thousands of hits, it would start to disintegrate in just a few hundred and you would be sending it back to me and asking for a refund.  Instead try to contact the ball first and drive down through the open space just in front of the front edge of the top piece of the PGM.  If you achieve the ideal club head trajectory, the club head will descend through the ball at about 4 degrees downward and will not even touch the bottom piece of the PGM.  If you can just barely touch those bottom bristles, you are creating a good downward strike of the ball and you will get good results when you transfer your skills to the course.  Don’t try to just pick the ball; the top piece should move a little bit, actually because when you hit the ball, the ball pressed down on the top piece and caused it to move, but only a little.  If you really hit the top piece first before you hit the ball, it’s a “fat” hit, and the PGM will move a lot.   Keep working.  When you hit the ball correctly, you will feel almost no resistance; just  a little less than that little bit that you feel when you make a good hit on the fairway and send that dollar-bill divot towards the target.

 

Dr. B’s Story

I’m not a golf pro.  I’m actually a life long tennis teacher and also a chiropractor (Patients who have trouble with my last name just call me Dr. B.)  I’ve played golf for over 50 years, but it is only the last 20 that I played quite a bit.  But I do know a lot about tendinitis and practicing.  I became a chiropractor after a couple of chiropractors cured my tennis elbow tendinitis and enabled me to win Sectional and National championships in the 35 and over division.  I was just a wannabe, but I had a sponsor and had to give up the pursuit of my dream a few years earlier because I couldn’t even open a door with my right hand.   I enjoyed playing competitive senior tennis, but all the years of running around on concrete courts caught up with me and about 20 years ago I started to channel my competitive urges towards the golf course.  I got down to a single digit handicap, posted the low gross in the 50-55 age division in the LA Metropolitan Championships in ’99 and eventually got as low as a “2”, but practicing on public driving range mats was taking a toll on my elbows and I had to find a way to beat tendinitis again.

 

I’ve used my PGM for about 20 years and know that it works and will hold up for 1000’s of hits.  Eventually, the bristles at the front edge of the top piece of the PGM will wear out, but all you have to do is carefully cut off a row of bristles.  Now, you can only do this about 4 times before that piece becomes too short.  I’ve never actually worn out a PGM, but I usually lose it or give it away.  If you are someone who hits 1000’s of balls every month, you will eventually wear the top piece of the PGM out, but it will take an awful lot of abuse to wear out the bottom piece.  But you don’t need to order a whole new PGM.  We’ll offer replacement pieces of the top piece at a very reasonable price if you do wear it out.  If you are that person, I suggest you order multiple top pieces, because the shipping cost will almost equal the cost of that replacement top piece and will probably be almost the same for 1, 2 or 3 pieces.

 

60 Day Money Back Guarantee

This is my own pet project.  I got my US Patent #9,999,824 in June of 2018 and including filing for international rights in Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia and the UK, it has already cost me over $40,000.  Right now I’m the one who actually puts them together.  I’m biased, but I think they are pretty great.  

 

The Friday before  Memorial Day Weekend in 2017, I was upset with my play with a few of my buddies.  I had some spare time that weekend and I put in some time on the driving range.  I hit almost 1000 balls over the next 4 days.  I could never have done that on regular mats.  If I had done that on regular artificial range mats, I would not have been able to pick up a club because of my sore wrists and elbows.  But I had no adverse effects from all those hits; in fact, I scored a 75 the following Friday.  Mission Accomplished!! 

​

​

I want you to be really satisfied if you use it.  I’m hoping you will buy replacements for the top piece for years to come.  And tell your friends.  So I am offering a 60 day full money back guarantee on purchases you make through this site.  If you are not satisfied with your PGM, contact me by email within 60 days of your purchase that you are sending it back and I’ll give you an authorization code for a refund.  You can just put it in a big envelope and mail it back to me.  I will refund the full purchase price.  And if you buy a mat through Amazon, they offer a 30 day satisfaction guarantee and they even provide a free return service.

​

​

​