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.

I went in for my first lesson in about a month and was pleased to find out I could move on from a total focus on the backswing.  This time, we focused on getting my swing properly loaded up on my right heel on the backswing and then shifting weight to the left foot and ending facing the target after hitting the ball.

I told my instructor that if I picked a spot on the ground to aim at for my practice swing, the club head would consistently come through inside that mark.  I’ve had problems with lifting my upper body as I swing, so I thought that might be the cause.

Instead of upper body, my instructor had me work on this weight shifting issue because I was coming up artificially high on the backswing with my arms, not really putting my weight on my back (right) foot.  This caused my swing to kind chop down too far inside, on too vertical a plane.  What I should have been doing was shifting my weight straight down into my right heel, creating more of a wind up, so that my swing followed the natural arc through where the ball was with a weight shift to the left through the ball.

My instructor gave me a few drills to work on this:

•    Do the whole swing with feet completely together. To maintain your balance, you’ll have to do the weight shift and this will give you a feel for how it should be in your regular swing.

•    Do the backswing standing on only your right foot, and switch to only your left as you transfer your weight through the swing.

•    Use a chair to mark how far back to go on the backswing and how far forward to go on the follow-through.  Your body should be perpendicular to the ground on both the back swing and the finish, not leaning too far in either direction.

Working on this has noticeably improved my swing, particularly with irons.  The next time I went out to play, I hit the ball much more solidly and consistently with the irons.  That’s about all that improved, but I’ll take it.

My first putting lesson resulted in a totally new grip. I had been using a conventional grip with my left index finger and right pinkie interlaced. I was struggling to keep my wrists stable and had way too much wiggle in my stroke. My instructor tried out various grips with me and settled on a modified “claw” grip. My left hand goes in the club as usual, but the right hand comes in from behind the club so that the club rests in the “V” between the thumb and index finger, with the thumb and fingers all extended forward. Some claw grips have the thumb and fingers pointing towards the hole (see this Sports Illustrated story), or coming from behind but wrapped around the grip. The modification my instructor gave me seemed to provide the most stable movement for me. My instructor had me adjust my stance so that the ball was closer to my front foot, rather than in the center of my stance. He also had me get closer to the ball so that when I looked down at it, my head was basically over the ball. I have seen improvements from the increased stability of this grip. On the long road ahead, at least this is a start.