Green Grass Golf Shop

Hello friends, welcome to our first and, well, maybe our only episode of: Putting the “putting” in “Indoor Winter Putting Practice,” not sponsored by Wellputt. But I’m not saying I’m opposed to that, balls in your court, Wellputt. Today I have a few drills and some great ways to improve the most important part of your game while the courses aren’t available. Even if you aren’t snowed in like we are here, these are great ways to improve your consistency, make yourself a better putter, and lower those scores for the most of us the quickest way possible. Without further ado, let’s just dive right in.

First and foremost, we need to talk about the setup. Now, the most important part of the setup is that you should only be changing or adjusting your setup if you really, really struggle with your putting, especially if you struggle with these drills that we’re going to go over in a minute here. If you regularly manage 30 putts or less in an 18-hole round, if you’re able to look at, consistently start your ball on your intended line, and that’s more often than not the right line from the way you read the green, you have no reason to change your putting stance, and I can say that with 100% confidence without seeing it. If you can roll the rock and your body can handle it, you can set up just about any way you want. Some of the best putters in history have had their own very unique way of setting up, and had they changed, may not have had near the impact on the game that they did. Someone came to me for a putting lesson, set up like this, and averaged one 3-putt every three rounds, drained everything within five feet, putted 27 times per round. I’d ask him what else he wanted to work on, because I’m not messing with that. I’d be changing one of the greats. That was the way Arnold Palmer* set up. (*spoiler alert I’m not great at imitating putting stances) and putt his entire career, and we should all be very, very happy that wasn’t ever changed. However, if you do struggle with your putting, this setup, which I was lucky enough to learn from Todd Sones, one of the best short game instructors in our modern era here, is a great one to nail down, make yourself more consistent. It’s called Rotate, Tuck, and Tilt. It’s very easy to let your body teach you how it wants to set up like this. We’re going to start standing here nice and relaxed. I’m going to set my putter against my leg, let my arms hang in their natural position. We should have our hands hanging not pointed right at our legs, but a little behind you when I’m thinking like a 45 degree angle or so. This is key that they need to hang naturally. Wherever your palms want to point when they’re hanging dead by your side. Then we’re going to swing those hands up until they’re parallel with the ground. Straight out and again, we’re not twisting those arms or hands from where they’re naturally hanging down. This should point your palms somewhere between pointing at the ground and pointing at each other, right? But this is where the rotate, tuck, and tilt starts. We’re going to rotate our arms, in one piece, this is very important, from your elbows, meaning we’re not just rotating our wrists we’re rotating our entire arm until our palms are pointed directly at each other. Bring them that last little bit together. This rotation should have moved our palms a little closer to one another, if not then we didn’t rotate from the right place. Go back and start again to get the full feeling. Then we can move on to tuck, so we’re going to tuck our elbows here nice and gently into our rib cage in front of our torso. It’s very important not to get yourself stranded behind your body and then finally we can tilt. Just like our full swing and other setups, making sure we’re tilting from our hips and our pelvis rather than just bending our waist and curling our spine like that. Shoulders back, spine straight. It can even help to take a golf club and lay it across your hips here, giving ourselves a fulcrum point to create that lever. Chest should be pointing down towards the golf ball rather than at your feet. Finally, on the grip here, there are more than a lot of acceptable ways to hold the club, whether that be traditional, left hand low, claw, many more other, but these all have one big thing in common. They start in your palms, opposite of your full swing grip in the fingers. We actually want the grip and the shaft (giggity) to be an extension of our forearms, on the same angle as our forearms here. As you can see, with the grip in the palms less in the fingers, the closer the shaft is to the angle of my forearms. This is in the fingers, you see, creating this obtuse angle here. And then as we get more in the palms, we get closer to that flat 180 degree line like we want. Unlike the full swing, where we want as much range of motion as we can manage in our fast switch hands and wrist muscles, we want the exact opposite with our putting stroke. I like to think of it like we’re using a broom. Everybody has swept their floor, used a broom. You don’t want to rotate all that dust and dirt around when you’re guiding it along the ground. You don’t want the angle of those bristles to change when you’re moving that dirt. Same applies when you’re putting, your putting stroke. The more you have that grip in the palms, the easier it is to feel that grip, forearm, shoulders, chest, all moving in one piece the way we want with our putting motion, the harder it will be to rotate that putter face with your grip in the palms as well. So just to summarize again, now that we have our grip down, start in a standing position with your arms hanging relaxed, swing up to parallel, Rotate the elbows until our palms are facing each other, bring those hands together, Tuck our elbows gently in front of our rib cage, and Tilt from the hips until those forearms hang down about six inches in front of your belt buckle here. Grab that putter, grip in the palms so that our forearms line up with our putter shaft. We’re ready for the drills!

So I have my Wellputt mat here. Most of these drills we go over in the series, you can do with just about any putting mat or low pile carpet, but this Wellputt surface is the best in the game that I’ve used indoors for reasons I’ll go over as these drills progress here. The only thing I’m really going to do for these drills here, the only thing I’m going to use are these Wellputt Indoor Tees, but again, you can use just about anything for what we’re doing today. First thing I’ll do with these, I’m going to set my putter head down on the ground right where I’m going to be setting up my golf ball, and I’m going to put one of these on each side of my putter head here to act as a gate. Putting is simply a combination of two things. You’re rolling the ball in a certain direction at a certain speed. Speed and direction, that’s it. The absolute most important part of those two is having proper speed control. If you think about it for a second, it’s much, much easier to mishit and miss putts 10 feet short or long than it is to miss them 10 feet left or right. This first gate drill here trains you to strike your putter more consistently in the sweet spot to give you a consistent speed with each stroke you take. This is really when it gets easy to mishit a putt by a mile short or long (by missing the sweet spot by too wide a margin). So having a consistent center contact, transferring the same energy into the ball stroke after stroke at the same speed is immensely important being a consistent putter with a good speed control. To start, I might give myself a little more room on each side of my putter head until I can do that easily, then narrow as I go along and improve my stroke, until I have to take the same stroke in the same spot every time to miss those obstacles, just like Tiger. (This is “his” famous tee drill after all!) I have a sleeve of balls that I’m using, so I’m going to hit those three down towards the illustration hole there. My favorite part of the Wellputt mat is after I’m done with my drills, you have two very realistic, very different green speeds. Towards the hole, it rolls about 11.5 (on the stimpmeter), but hitting the balls back towards where you’re hitting from, it’ll roll about a 10, allowing you to practice different green speeds. I think that’s great, especially for most of us public course players, rolling on different surfaces every round. When I’m hitting balls back to my drill area, I’m practicing my speed just as well, trying to hit it into these squares, working on my speed control as I’d experience it on the course. Each ball with a different target, different distance, bringing in a great opportunity to practice in what I think is the most effective way possible: the way we play. (s/o Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson) We should never have the same exact putt twice in a row unless we’re practicing, right? So giving yourself a different target for each practice shot, both putting and your full swing is a great way to simulate that little extra pressure you feel on the golf course where those strokes really count. And that’s really it for the first drill, so let’s move on to our next gate drill.

Now something that’s harder than I bet most golfers realize is actually starting that putt on your intended line where you think you’re aiming. Some are certainly more naturally gifted to this than others, but if you’re like me and most out there, you don’t keep your putting stroke exactly the same arc with your face perfectly square to your path at impact every single putt, you’re probably making more of your putts by mishitting them than you are actually hitting them perfectly both where you’re aimed and where you read. That’s where our second gate drill comes in here. We’re just going to move those two obstacles about two feet or so in front of our putting position here on our intended line, make it a little wider than our golf ball instead of our putter head. As I said earlier, direction is not quite as important as your speed control, but that doesn’t make it wholly unimportant, right? Being able to hit the ball where you’re aimed is a great way to be a more consistent putter, obviously. You can even teach yourself how to read greens more consistently as well. If you’re never hitting the ball on your intended line and you’re unaware of that, it’s inevitable that you can’t be as good of a green reader as someone who knows exactly where they are starting the ball every time. If you’re consistently pushing or pulling, and you’re not realizing that, you’re instead thinking you’re over-reading, under-reading the break. It’s impossible to learn how to consistently pass the test when you don’t even know if you’re starting with the proper equations. What this drill helps you practice is your directional control. If your putter and your path aren’t square, you aren’t hitting the ball through that gate, In addition to that, if you’re getting the ball through that gate but noticing it’s veering to one side or the other when you know it shouldn’t, you know your path was inside to out, out to in, your face was shut or open to the perfect angle as you start that putt on the right path, but put spin on your ball you never realized you were putting on the ball. Understanding your putting stroke and how to consistently start the ball on the right line without putting any side spin on the ball, as most of you will find out these drills, is much harder than you might realize. But understanding your stroke and how to mitigate those errors will make you a much more consistent putter on the course.

But finally here, the most effective way to perform these two drills, the true purpose for this video, is to do them together. Setting up a putter head gate and a gate to hit the ball through is absolutely one of the most effective ways to improve your putting. Being able to start the ball not only on the correct line, but with a consistent speed hitting the center of the face every time will always lead to better putting, teach you much more quickly and consistently how to read those greens, make more putts, and most importantly, mitigate the 3-putts. Now I promise for most of us out there, this is way harder than you realize. But if you can get yourself to a point where you’re setting up those gates with absolutely no margin for error, miss those both with your putter head and the ball, without a shadow of a doubt you’re setting up an incredibly consistent putting stroke. Having both perfectly center contact each time and a square putting face will make putting so much easier than you realize. I promise you’ll understand much better when you set up that first drill and learn just how much you might be opening closing the face. In my opinion, these two drills when used together, a drill I like to call The Gates of Hell because of how hard most find it at first, is one of, if not the best way to practice your putting most effectively. With the combination of distance and direction practice that you’re getting, then again with the well putt mat here allowing you to practice your direction (distance!!**) on the way back, you’re getting a hell of a lot of effective practice from just a short daily session. Again, this is not a sponsored video, but I do have an affiliate link with Wellputt that you’ll find in the comments. Nobody asked me to make this video or paid me to do it, is what I’m saying here, but for my money, and as little as $59 for their most simple dual speed putting mat, it’s the best value and the most effective practice you can get when a true putting green isn’t available to you. So please, if you want to check them out, there will be an affiliate link down in the comments. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

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