Category Archives: putting

How to Practice Long Putts at Home

If you practice putting at home, it’s probably confined to short putts–eight feet or so at most.

While those are important putts to practice, longer ones need your attention, too. By that I mean, 20, 30, and 40-foot putts. But who has a living room that is 40 feet long?

You can still get it done. Set up on the carpet with a rubber “hole” about six feet away, and with a backstop behind it.

Instead of making a stroke for a six-foot putt, make a stroke for a 20-foot putt, say.

The putt should roll directly over the center of the hole. A bit off to the side won’t do. Dead center.

This drill teaches you to acquire a long putting stroke that is just as controlled and reliable as your shorter six-foot stroke. That might be an unappreciated skill. It is an important one.

The length of an approach putt stroke can get your putter out of whack directionally, both with its swing path and the orientation of the face.

You should also practice hitting the ball on the putter’s sweet spot, which is key to consistent distance control with long putts.

There’s more.

At the range, do The Number One Approach Putting Drill, and remember what those different distance strokes feel like.

Then you can practice actual distance control at home, even though the ball only goes six feet, by folding those memorized strokes into this drill.

Incremental Putting Drills

I have been doing this new putting drill for the past few days, something that I just fell into doing when I wasn’t paying attention.

In my back room there is an 8′ carpet on the floor. I started putting from two feet, then began moving the ball back a slight bit for each successive putt.

I thought I would formalize the drill, so the ball gets moved back one ball-width each time, out to about 7½ feet. If you measure it strictly, that’s 39 putts.

I doesn’t take too long to complete the drill, and you get a lot of good practice at making the same stroke every time.

Years ago I did a drill going in the other direction. It takes about 20-odd golf balls to do this.

Putt a ball to about six or seven feet a way. It doesn’t matter where it ends up. Putt the next ball so it j-u-u-st touches the ball you just hit. Continue.

What you should end up with is however many balls in a straight line, all touching each other.

This is a great drill for short putt distance control, something that is more important than you might think.

My Putting Stance

Sometimes I fall into something quite by accident and I find out that it works really well. Most of the time these accidents don’t work so well, but here’s one that does, in regard to putting.

When I take my stance, my upper arms arm press lightly against my torso. Don’t worry, this isn’t anchoring. That only applies to fixing the forearm(s) against something.

Try this. Sit in a chair, press your upper arms lightly against your torso, put your forearms straight out (parallel to the floor), and join your hands.

Now swing your arms back and forth, sliding them against your torso. See how your hands return to their exact staring spot?

If you putt using this setup and motion, your putter will moving along the right path when it hits the ball, and the putter face will be as square as it was at address.

What more can you ask for?

For short putts, your torso doesn’t have to turn, but for approach putts it’s O.K. if it does, and it should, actually.

Combine this with spot putting and you’ll be way ahead of the game, in my experience.

Putting? I Don’t Care

When I go to the range, I practice chipping a lot. I am really good at chipping, if I may say so.

I get four golf balls, chip them to a hole, and putt them out. Chipping is the up part. You have to practice the down part, too.

Sometimes I’ll not use a putter to putt out with, though. I’ll just walk up there with my wedge and putt out with it. And you know, they all go in! I even make six-footers by just walking up and knocking the ball in with the leading edge of a wedge.

You know why? Because I don’t care if the ball goes in. I’m just cleaning up. There is no pressure on the “putt” because I don’t put on any.

Maybe that’s the way we should hit short putts on the course. Just walk up, take a quick read, and hit the putt (but with your putter, of course).

But we don’t do it because if we did miss one, we would say. “See? I didn’t take care and look what happened,” forgetting that if you had taken care you might have missed it anyway, not because of your read, or your stroke, but because of your mental approach.

So if you aren’t satisfied with your short putting, try caring bit less. Maybe a lot less. I’ll think you will miss fewer, and make more.

Worth a try.

By the way, short putts never break as much as you think they will if you hit them hard enough. You know, don’t give away the hole?

What I Learned at the Range – 3/24/22

Good day at the range. I used to be very good with a driver, but a few years away from the game was enough for me to forget how to swing it. Or any golf club, for that matter.

I had developed an arms-oriented swing, but it was too much arms. I had forgotten about the lower body, so I added in the hips and knees. Still no good.

You can get away with stuff with irons, but not with the driver. Somehow today, I realized that I had forgotten about my torso on the forward swing. It’s part of the sequence and I had left it out.

The hips turn, the torso turns, the arms swing, in that order. Instant success! Nice, straight fairway-finders. They fly a bit low, though, so I’ll get a lesson to help me with that.

Then there’s putting. When I watch the close-ups on TV of the touring players taking the putter back, it goes back as if it is on a rail. Perfectly straight back. Mine wobbles a bit, and I for the life of me couldn’t figure out how not to have that happen.

And today, for some reason, I gripped down on the handle so I was holding it in the middle, not near to the top. Instant success!

I was now holding the putter at its balance point and it started back with no wobble.

When I go to the range, I leave myself open to figuring out new things. I do that by never taking anything for granted. There is another way to do anything, and if you try it, that might be a better way.

To finish my day at the range, I always hit a few approach putts using my TAP method. It’s scary how well that works.

The right way to align your ball on the green

Most professional golfers that I see on television have drawn a line on the ball which they use to align the ball on the green. The golf balls I use already have an arrow printed on it for this purpose. I haven’t checked, but I would suppose lots of other modern balls do, too.

The act of aligning the ball can be a problem, though. The usual procedure is to squat down, try to eye-ball the starting line of the putt, and align the mark on the ball to it.

I see everybody looking at something at or near the hole, which can be a long way off. That, to my mind, seriously calls into question the accuracy of the alignment.

There must be a better way.

It’s a problem and only I can fix it.

You might have heard of spot putting. You pick a spot a few inches in front of the ball on the starting line and roll your putt over that spot. The idea is if you make that three-inch putt, you’ll make the eight-foot putt.

So-o-o, why not take it easy for yourself and set your ball down so it points to that spot three inches in front of the ball instead of something any number of feet away? Three inches is close enough that you can get it exactly right.

(I Photoshopped the yellow dot to make the visual clearer.)

If you trust the spot you have found, you have to trust aligning your ball this way.

Not only do you get a better alignment, you can do this in a matter of seconds. People in your group won’t have to watch you go tweak…tweak…tweak…, for bleeding ever.

You’re welcome!

How I Practice Putting At Home

When I practice putting at home, I usually practice just my stroke. I don’t try to hit the ball at a target. I save that for the practice green at the range.

I’ll putt to a backstop about six feet away, trying to emulate this stroke, because there is so much that is good about it. See it at 0:30.

I concentrate on two things:

1. A gentle swing of the club back and through, keeping the clubhead low going back and going through, swinging the entire club, not just the clubhead. A putt, too, is a swing, not a hit.

2. Contacting the ball on the sweet spot, which I tell by sound. I want to make the right sound every time.

How To Miss a One-Foot Putt

If you have never missed a one-foot putt, you don’t need to read this post. The other 99% of my readers need to pay attention. And I don’t exclude myself.

One-foot putts are so easy. We don’t really have to go through our routine. Just step up the ball in any old way, give the ball a knock and it’s in the hole.

Except sometimes it doesn’t go in the hole and you think, “You’ve got to be kidding!” Or maybe that is a polite way of expressing what you are thinking.

It didn’t go in the hole because you did not give that putt its due. You got sloppy.

You approach this putt differently from every other putt you hit because you don’t think you have to be as careful with it as all the others.

And that is caused, I believe because you don’t have much experience in hitting one-foot putts, or in hitting them the right way.

Tell me. When you go to the practice green, how often do you hit one-foot putts? Or if you hit an approach putt to one foot, how often do you set up to it and hit that one-footer the same way you hit every other putt ? (Probably never.)

Here’s what I want you to do the next time you go to the range. Hit one-foot putts. A lot of them. Twenty is a lot. Set up each time like you always do. Hit the ball into the hole. Even though a putt this short is called a tap-in, you do NOT tap it in. Hit it in.

Don’t just go through the motions. Take each putt seriously. Get experience with these putts going in the hole.

Getting good at golf means getting good at as many things as you can, and taking none of it for granted.

Like one-foot putts.

How to Sink a Certain Kind of Putt

Most of the things I discover about putting come from hours spent on the practice green. Every so often something goes click. This one, however, comes from my back room, where I knock the ball around for a few minutes every night.

It’s about sinking the putts that you just have to sink–short, no break. Just straight in the hole. Yet, those can be the hardest ones, for some reason.

This is what I noticed. I had been imagining a tiny line between the ball and the hole, and hitting the putt so the ball rolls along that line. That’s a lot of pressure

But what popped into my head that night was a band, as wide as the putter, going to the hole.

Not only that, but I saw that if you line up the toe of the putter with the corresponding edge of the hole, so that if the putter could magically slide across the green to the hole, the absolute toe would graze that edge of the hole, which would square up the putterface to roll ball into my rubber “hole” dead center.

In the photo, the thin red line lines up of the toe of the putter with the outside edge of the hole, and the transparent red band is what the putterface stays square to–a much easier image to believe in that a tiny line going from the ball to the hole.

So forget about the hole, forget about the ball, just make your stroke to have the putter face stay square to the band and the ball goes in. Easy!

As for lining up the toe of the putter with the outside edge of the hole, it might seem like this would not be exact. But if you try this out, and the putterface is not square to the hole, you will see clearly that the toe is not “pointing” to the edge.

I think this works because you are squaring up the entire surface of the putterface rather than a small point on the surface. And to tell the truth, I’m not even sure you can square up a point to something.

I tried out this method on a putting green and found it to be reliable up to about 15 feet.

[Update: With practice, you can use this technique on breaking putts, too, by learning how much to line up the tip of the putterface outside (R to L) or inside (L to R) the hole.]