Putting Fundamentals

Putting I feel is a lot like being an artist. There are certain fundamentals that must be followed and that are common with all artists, but after that than the artistic flair unfolds.

So when I work with you on your putting I will want you to follow five fundamentals, then after that, as long as theses fundamentals are not compromised, your personal touches and preferences can take over.

The First Fundamental: The Grip. The ways in which you place your hands on the club are very important. We want to establish a relationship between your right and left hand that encourages each to be equal, to the point that the hands become a non-factor in your stroke.

A)

B)

A) To do this all I want you to do is have your thumbs and your thumb pads on the top or flat surface of the putter grip. Almost all putters will have this type of grip on them, making it easy to repeat the placement of our hands on the club.

B) By doing this it puts our hands on the club in such a way that our palms are facing one another and the back of our leading hand (the one closest to the hole) is facing the hole. This accomplishes the purpose of making our hands a non-factor.

Your artistic flair, once this is established and not compromised, may now take over. Examples of the artistic or personal preferences with the grip might be, interlocking grip, overlapping grip, cross handed, ten finger or baseball grip or even the use of a long putter.

The Second Fundamental: The Eyes. They eyes play a very important role. They gather and send information back to our brain to make calculations and decisions. I want my students to make sure the information they are using to make decisions is as pure and accurate as possible. So I want the relationship between your eyes and the target line the ball is resting on at address to be as close to one as possible. Clearly put, lets make sure our eyes are over the ball!

To insure this is happening you take your address position, then hold your putter between your thumb and index finger and let it hang freely directly below your eye. This will let you know what line your eyes are actually seeing. Now you can, if needed make adjustments to get your eyes over the ball.

Far too many times students will make adjustments to their strokes because putts are being missed, when the information we are gathering is inaccurate, causing us to compensate. When the core problem is not seeing the true line. The artistic flair again might be to line up open, closed, stand tall or bend over. Maybe you address the ball like Jack Nicklaus, very open and crouched, while keeping your eyes over the ball. Our only rule, do not comprise our fundamentals!

The Third Fundamental: Path. This fundamental is more of an obvious, but often a misunderstood fact. If the path of the club at impact is not traveling down your intended target line it greatly reduces the chance of the ball traveling down that line also.

Far too many times students will make adjustments to their strokes because putts are being missed, when the information we are gathering is inaccurate, causing us to compensate. When the core problem is not seeing the true line. The artistic flair again might be to line up open, closed, stand tall or bend over. Maybe you address the ball like Jack Nicklaus, very open and crouched, while keeping your eyes over the ball. Our only rule, do not comprise our fundamentals!

So what we want to remember is, we want our putter to be traveling back and forth down the intended path at impact to get consistent direction results.

The Forth Fundamental: Clubface. This like the path is critical to direction. If the clubface at impact is not square to our target line, then we once again greatly reduce the chances of consistently making the ball go on our target line.

The clubface is something we want to make sure at address is square to the line we want the ball to initially begin. There are many references that we can use to insure this is happening, maybe the easiest is to hold the putter straight out in front of you, parallel to the ground, after you have taken the proper grip. At this point you will be looking for the face of the putter to be straight up at a 90-degree angle. This will help overcome the doubts that creep into our minds eye when we put it back down behind the ball. This is only one of many. The key here is we want the clubface square to the target line!

The Fifth Fundamental: Establish a Power Source
Establishing a power source is critical for consistent repetition. I will ask my new students what their power source is, what makes their stroke work? Many times the answer is ³I don¹t know². I think this is like getting into your car and every time you begin to start it, the ignition is in a different spot and the accelerator has been moved. So what happens, after you start your car and get comfortable with how to make it go faster or slower, then next time you use your car theses things have once again changed. Making it difficult to be confident and relaxed about the whole process of driving.

I want you to establish what makes your stroke go. This can be your hands, arms shoulders or a combination of the three. The only thing I want you to take into consideration is, as we move from our hands up the arms to our shoulders, these muscle groups get larger. The larger the muscles the more consistent the action, plus with the shoulders being attached to our spine it is easier to create a repetitive pendulum motion.

This is just a recommendation, not a requirement.

The power source, once established controls the speed of our stroke. At this point let me emphasize, the speed of your power source controls how far the ball rolls, not the length of your stroke. The length of your stroke is a by-product of the speed of your power source. So if you want the ball to roll more you simply speed up the power source and vice versa when you want to shorten the distance. If we try to use length of stroke to control distance, even for a highly skilled player, we often tend to affect the clubface and path.

An example might be when we decelerate through putts. I usually see this when someone has taken too long of a backswing, no matter the speed at which it was taken back, and instinctually will slow the speed down of the forward stroke to compensate for the extended backstroke, changing not only the distance, but possibly the path and clubface.

I want my students to think of a pendulum. A pendulum has four very important factors that are equally important in become a successful consistent putter; the first would be, the pendulum when we look at it would go back and through the same speed. So when we putt we want our stroke to go back and through the speed. Now when this happens the fastest part of the pendulum is at the bottom, or impact. Secondly, the distance it travels back and through is also the same. So when we putt, we want our stroke to travel past the ball roughly the same distance it traveled on our backstroke.
This will greatly eliminate the deceleration, which will greatly reduce the clubface and path from also being altered.

The third element of a pendulum is as we look at it from down the line we see it travels back and forth on a very consistent path, and unless we interrupt the motion we can now rely on the path to be fairly consistent.

The fourth element of the pendulum is as we speed up the power source the first two grow. So this is where the length of the stroke, I feel is misinterpreted. As we speed up the power source the length and speed of our pendulum also grow. Causing the balls to travel further along our target line.

So, in conclusion, once we decide on our grip, get our eyes over the ball establish a power source then depend on it for distance control based on speed, not length and create a pendulum like motion with this power source we can now refer back to it over and over, building a stroke that creates a consistent path and square clubface at impact, giving us consistent direction.

I have highlighted distance and direction because when it is all said and done these are the only two factors we need to be consistent with when putting.


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