June 2, 2026
Performance coach Karl Morris — who has worked with 6 Major Champions — reveals why most golf warm up routines fail from the start, and the simple physical and mental preparation that makes a genuine difference to how you play.
By Karl Morris — performance coach to 6 Major Champions and 2 Ryder Cup teams
How many times have you driven to the golf club, parked with minutes to spare, jogged to the first tee still pulling on your glove — and then wondered why the opening holes felt like you were playing in someone else's body?
It happens to almost every golfer at some point. The swing feels stiff. The rhythm isn't there. The mind is still somewhere between the office and the car park. By the time you've found your game, you've already surrendered three or four shots you'll never get back.
Most golfers accept this as the natural cost of the first few holes. I'd like to suggest it doesn't have to be — and that the real problem isn't what happens on the first tee, but what happens in the hour before it.
One of the questions I ask golfers I work with is: where does your strategy for the round begin? For most, the honest answer is somewhere around the third hole, once they've settled in and found their feet.
But consider what that means in practice. You're effectively donating the opening holes to the process of warming up — running up doubles, missing the short ones, playing approach shots with a body that hasn't properly woken up yet. By the time your strategy kicks in, the scorecard is already damaged.
The best players I've worked with understand that preparation is itself a form of performance. What you do in the time before the first tee shot doesn't just affect your physical readiness — it sets the mental conditions for how the entire round unfolds. Justin Rose, who has won around the world including a US Open title, puts it simply: 'Preparation quietens the mind.' That phrase has always stayed with me. Because a quiet mind and a ready body on the first tee are worth more strokes than most golfers ever realise.
When golfers think about warming up, they think about the physical side — hitting a few balls, loosening the body, finding a rhythm. That matters. But it's only half of what a genuinely useful warm up involves.
The other half is mental preparation. And for the 45-minute golfer who arrives with fifteen minutes to change shoes and find a parking space, it's usually the half that gets skipped entirely.
Let me take you through both — what each one involves, and why each one is worth the time.
Here's something worth acknowledging. We may think of our bodies as reasonably consistent from day to day, but they're not. The ebb and flow of sleep, what we've eaten, how much we've moved, the stress of the week — all of it means we arrive at the course in a different physical state every single time. A warm up isn't just a ritual; it's a process of finding out where your body actually is today, rather than assuming it will behave the way it did last Saturday.
Even fifteen or twenty minutes makes a meaningful difference. After nine holes on the course, most golfers feel physically ready to play the back nine — but nine holes represents only around twenty full swings. Twenty balls on the range, or even twenty minutes of purposeful movement, is enough to give the body what it needs before you start.
But here's the key word: purposeful. There's a version of the range warm up that's a waste of time, and most golfers have experienced it. Standing on the range mindlessly hitting driver after driver, watching balls disappear into the distance, catching nothing in particular because your attention isn't attached to anything. That isn't warming up. That's filling time.
A better approach is to use your warm up range time the same way the best players do: playing the golf course before you play it.
This is a technique I've used with weekend golfers and tour professionals alike, and the results are consistently striking. Rather than working through your clubs in order or bashing balls at a general target, you play an imaginary round of the course you're about to play — hole by hole, on the range.
Visualise the first hole. Pick the club you'd use off the tee. Go through your full pre-shot routine — the same one you'll use on the course in thirty minutes. See the shot. Create the picture. Then hit it. Now you're in the right half of the fairway, 165 yards out, slight wind off the left. What's the shot? Play it.
You don't need to do all eighteen holes. Even three or four is enough to shift your mind from 'hitting balls on the range' to 'playing golf'. The difference in mental state is significant. You arrive at the first tee having already been in playing mode — already engaged with the specific demands of the course, already practised your routine, already begun to tune into what today might ask of you.
Butch Harmon, one of the most influential coaches in the history of the game, had a saying he came back to often: 'If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time.' Most warm ups aim at nothing. Playing the course on the range gives you something real to aim at.
Now for the part that requires the least time and tends to have the most impact.
Think about the mental state most of us arrive at the course in. We've sorted out a problem from this morning, finished a piece of work we were supposed to finish yesterday, had the conversation we'd been putting off, grabbed a sandwich in the car, and driven to the club with one eye on the clock. Our feet have barely touched the ground. And then we expect to step onto the first tee with a calm, clear, focused mind.
It doesn't work that way. The mind doesn't switch modes at the click of a finger. If you arrive at the first tee with your attention scattered across three different things that happened before you left the house, that scattered attention will follow you around the course. The opening holes become a process of mentally arriving at the game you've already physically started. And that costs strokes.
One of the simplest and most underrated things you can do before a round is take a ten-minute walk before you even get to the club. Not a fitness walk — a thinking walk. Or rather, a not-thinking walk.
Walk at a comfortable pace. Let your breathing slow down. Notice what's around you — the light, the air, the sounds. If a thought about work or home arrives, let it pass rather than following it. You're not suppressing anything; you're just allowing the mind to settle before you ask it to perform.
This sounds modest. It is modest. But the difference between arriving at the first tee with a mind that has had ten minutes to slow down versus one that went straight from the car to the bag on the trolley is greater than most golfers expect. It's the difference between being genuinely present and playing from somewhere slightly behind yourself.
Once your mind has had a moment to settle, the next step is to give it something clear to hold onto during the round. Not a target score, not a swing thought — an intention about how you want to be as a player today.
This could be as simple as: I'm going to commit fully to every shot and then let it go. Or: today I'm going to stay with my process regardless of what the scorecard says. Or: I'm going to enjoy the game today and not take a single shot too seriously.
Write it down. A scorecard-sized card in your back pocket will do. Before every round for the next ten rounds, write out your one commitment for that day. Then score yourself on it at the end — not on how well you struck the ball, but on how faithfully you held to your intention.
When we commit to something in writing, we take it more seriously. And when we're measuring our success by something within our control — the quality of our attention and attitude — rather than something that isn't, like the score, we give ourselves a much more useful relationship with the game.
One of the pre-round rituals I've found most valuable — and introduced to players at every level — is remarkably simple. Before you go out to play, sit down for a moment with your golf journal and ask yourself one question: what am I grateful for today?
It doesn't have to be elaborate. The course you're about to play and the people who maintain it. The fact that your body is fit and able. The people you're playing with. The weather, even if it's imperfect. The simple pleasure of getting to play a game you love.
When you answer that question honestly, something shifts in the brain's chemistry. Gratitude has a measurable physiological effect — it genuinely changes how you feel. You're also doing something subtler: programming in the golfer you intend to be today, rather than drifting into whoever you happened to be last time things went badly. You're setting the tone before the first shot is hit.
It takes two minutes. I cannot recommend it too highly.
Let me bring this into something practical. This doesn't require arriving two hours before your tee time. Even forty-five minutes, used well, changes the quality of how you start.
If you have time before you leave home, take ten minutes to walk, let the mind settle, and write down your one intention for the round. Take a moment with your journal if you use one.
When you arrive at the club, go to the range with a plan. Spend the first few minutes with short irons, not to work on positions, but simply to find the rhythm and feel of the swing today. Then spend the bulk of your time playing the course — selecting shots you'll actually face, going through your full routine, creating pictures before you hit. You're not warming up your swing; you're warming up your decision-making, your visualisation, your mental engagement with the game.
Finish on the putting green. Not hitting the same putt from the same spot repeatedly, but reading and rolling putts from different distances and directions, tuning your feel to the pace of the greens today.
Then walk to the first tee having already been playing golf for thirty minutes. That is a fundamentally different state to arrive in than the one most golfers bring to the opening hole.
The first tee shot is not the beginning of the round. The round begins in how you choose to prepare — in whether you give your body the time to wake up and your mind the space to settle and focus.
Every player I've worked with who has taken this seriously has noticed the difference. Not just in how they start, but in how the whole round feels — more present, more engaged, more able to deal with the inevitable setbacks without letting them compound into something larger.
Preparation, done properly, doesn't just improve the first few holes. It creates the foundation for the kind of golf you're actually capable of playing.
The Mind Caddie app includes audio lessons on pre-round preparation, building the right mental routines, and arriving at the first tee in the right state of mind. Start your free 7-day trial at mindcaddie.golf.
The Mind Caddie app puts Karl's complete framework into structured audio programmes, daily lessons, and AI coaching. Built for the golfer who knows their game is being held back by what's happening between the ears, not what's happening at the range.
No commitment. Money-back guarantee if you don't see improvement within 3 months.
You've had lessons. Maybe new clubs. The swing is there on the range — but under pressure, something gets in the way. The Mind Caddie shows you what that something is, and exactly how to fix it.
