Rookie on the Green

Putting, Before and After

Well, this picture of my horrid “before” putting stance and much-improved “after” says it all. Nothing like seeing a picture of how badly you’re doing to knock some sense into you.

You can see in the “before” that my back is hunched over, my legs are bent too much, and my hands are nearly against my thighs.  Here’s what my instructor taught me to lead to the new, improved “after” photo:

1.  Hips over heels.  This fixed a lot of things, including having my hands too close to my legs and having bent legs and a hunched back.

2.  Eyes over ball.  With hips over heels, you bend at the waist instead of the knees to get your eyes directly above the ball.

3.  Ball forward of center in the stance.

4.  Knees not too bent.  Again, a function of hips over heels.

5.  Change grip to have left hand on the bottom for now. This kept my wrists from breaking through the putt, gave my wrists more stability and aligned my forearms closer to parallel with the club instead of at a sharper angle.  The left-hand-on-bottom grip was also simpler and felt more natural than the modified claw grip I’d tried out last fall.

Here are a couple of the GolfTec drills my instructor gave me to practice what I learned:

-Ladder drill.  Put a line of six golf balls going out from the hole in one-foot increments.  Take a practice swing before hitting each ball.  You can’t move on until you get the balls in consecutively.  For instance, if you get the first ball in, you can move to the second.  You can’t go to the third unless you get in the first and second on the first try, and so on.  Do the drill until you can go through five rotations, making every putt.

-Lag drill.  This drill helps you learn distance control for lag putts (long putts you don’t expect to make but hope to get close to the hole).  Put a club on the ground three feet behind the hole, perpendicular to the line of the putt, such that the club will stop the ball if you hit it too far.  Practice putting five balls each from 20, 30 and 40 feet.  You get no points if the ball hits the club or stops short of the hole.  You get one point if the ball goes into the hole or stops between the hole and the club.  Do the drill until you’re getting at least 12 of 15.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Golf Drills, Golf Instruction, Putting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.