Lesson #4

Here’s your putting stroke before the lesson. You can see its mostly hands and arms with a little yip at the end. Toe of the putter is slightly above the ground and shoulders very rounded. You can also notice how little arc there is to the path of your putter.

The 2nd step to eliminating 3 putts is to be able to hit your putts on your intended line. You must take extra care and precision when aiming your putter face. Always set the putter head first and then build your stance and grip around that without letting it move from its position.

12 feet and in we want a “make” mentality like we see in this video. This simply means, we want to hit all our putts from this distance so that even if they miss they will stop anywhere between 1 foot and 3 feet past the hole.

We finished off with a good drill that helps you get in tune with your touch and feel. You hit a few putts to either a hole or the edge of the fringe or even a tee in the ground (I prefer anything other than a hole to keep expectations in check) and you’re not allowed to look at the result until you guess to yourself whether it was too short, too long, or good speed. After guessing 3-5 times in a row correctly this assures you that you are in tune with your feel. This also gets you in the mode to keep your head and posture maintained longer and makes you putt to a picture in your mind rather than a physical focus.

From this view you can see how much you “hit” the ball with your wrists, which can be very inconsistent for proper distance control. The length and tempo of the stroke is also inconsistent. Again, the first step to eliminating 3 putts is to be able to control your distance from all lengths. You can’t control distance if your putting stroke rolls the ball with any amount of side spin or excessive skidding/air time.

We got some reps in with the Gravity T-Fit device to help you feel and understand how pulling the shoulders back enables your thoracic spine (under shoulder blades) to be the engine of the stroke so that there are no fast twitch muscle errors when the pressure is high. This also enables your hands and arms to stay very passive to keep the face nice and square and produces a very natural arc to the putter’s path.

Putts rolling much nicer here after some work with the T-Fit. Remember eyes should always be over the ball or just inside of it with the putter soled to the ground and aimed correctly. From there its just moving the putter back and through even distance with consistent tempo via the thoracic spine.

15 feet and out we want to have a “Lag” putting mentality. At these distances, even if we hit a perfectly on line, perfect speed, perfectly read putt, there’s so many outside factors that could happen to make it miss. So we want to leave ourselves 3 feet or less on our next putt to eliminate the 3 putts. Using tee’s or your feet, control the length of your back stroke and forward stroke to be equal on both sides. This will create the environment necessary for good, consistent, tempo.