So, your putting is pretty good. What? Really? Is that what you actually tell people? Well, that means that you must be averaging in the high 20’s for putts per round, because that’s what the leaders on tour are doing. At the time of this writing the leader on the PGA Tour is averaging 27.36 putts per round and the worst putter on tour is averaging 30.88 putts per round. Now that’s “good” putting!

Having taught players of all skill levels for 20 years I have come to two conclusions about putting:

1. Way more people come to the lesson tee and say that they are good putters than say they are bad putters.
2. Just about zero of them are actually “good.”

The perception of what it means to be a good putter is strongly skewed. I believe that’s because even skilled players feel if they avoid three putting and average less than two putts per hole they must be doing pretty well. This logic, however, would make a tour player vomit.

So when I was asked to write a script for our putting video (read till the end of the article to get your free copy) on MyGolfInstructor.com I encountered a huge challenge. First of all, the script needed to apply to all players of all skill levels. Second of all, the truth of the matter is there is no one way to putt well. So if there is no one way, then how do you write a script that applies to everyone?

The answer was simple really. Stick to the basics and teach only sound fundamentals. The short game as most of you know is approximately 65 percent of a golfer’s score. Within that, putting is generally 40 percent or more! Just like with the full swing, in putting, there really aren’t “groundbreaking new” methods that pop up from time to time. Rather, it is someone different saying the same thing that someone else said long ago, but in a unique way. It is important therefore, that you stop looking for the miracle fix because there never is a “one size fits all” approach that works.

Whether you find yourself a scratch golfer or a beginner, there are simply a handful of things that you must do to putt well. I broke these items down and titled them “The 5 Principles of Putting.” This article breaks down the five principles for you in five easy steps. While it might seem like a lot of information for one article, I have bullet pointed most of it for easy reading. Hopefully, you will join me on all five principles, pick up some tips, refresh some old ones and systematically improve your putting this year one simple step after the other.

When it comes to putting there are things that you can control and things that you cannot. What type of putter you use, the type of path or stroke you make, how hard you hit the putt and how you address the ball are all things within your control. Bumps in the green, spike marks and wind are examples of things that are out of your control. In other words, making good decisions, having a well fit putter and establishing solid, simple mechanics are what you need to focus on to be a better and more consistent player because these are things you can change. Putting is the easiest part of the game for someone with less talent to be able to perform close to the level of a tour player. It doesn’t require pure talent on your part, it just requires that you do the same thing every time.

Principle 1: Having a Solid Set Up

A solid setup includes a good grip, posture and ball position, each of which is covered in detail in the sections below.

The Grip

You have heard over and over that the grip is your only connection with the club.  How you hold the club influences and controls everything about your stroke including:

• Face position
• Speed
• Path
• Tempo

I always say, to be a fantastic putter you absolutely must have great touch, so pay close attention to how you touch your club. Characteristics of a solid grip include:

• Holding the handle in the palms of your hands.
• Holding it with your palms facing each other.
• Having your thumbs pointing down the grip.
• Holding with a light pressure.

This palm hold allows for a higher wrist position. Having the wrists set higher keeps them quiet and less active during the stroke. Holding it in the palms will also align the shaft with your forearms, helping to eliminate a lot of small muscles and activate the larger muscles of your back, shoulders and abdominals for a one-piece stroke.

The list of putting grip styles is endless. The most common grip is the reverse overlap where you overlap the index finger of your left hand over the space between your pinky finger and ring finger of your right hand. As long as the placement of the hands is consistent and in the palms with the palms facing each other, you will be fine. Pick a grip that feels comfortable to you and gives YOU success.

Posture

Paying particular attention to your set up is so important because your set up helps to:

• Get your eyes and arms in the right position.
• Get comfortable.
• Get in balance.
• Establish stability.

The first thing I teach my students when it comes to posture is the acronym “BFD.” Bend from the hips, then flex the knees, then drop the arms. I feel this order is crucial because too many players squat from the knees first and then slump from the waist with poor posture instead of keeping their spine straight. Once we get into a good posture, other checkpoints to follow are:

• Stand a comfortable width for stability.
• Keep your weight centered between your left and right foot so that you don’t have to use your hands to add or decrease loft during the stroke.
• Align your forearms with the shaft to help make a one-piece pendulum stroke with minimal wrist action.
• Keep your feet, hips, knees, forearms and shoulders square to the target line.
• Let your arms hang relaxed from your shoulders with your elbows relatively close to your body.
• Align your eyes over and just behind the ball if you move the putter on a straight path. If you move the putter on an arc, align them over the inside of the ball and just behind the ball.
• Keep the ball in the same position every time so that you strike it consistently in the same point in the arc.
• Align your eyes parallel to target line and even with the ground. If they set up high and you are looking down your nose, you will tend to look to the right of your target.  If they are tucked too much, you will lose your peripheral vision.

Make sure to get yourself in a relaxed and comfortable position. Don’t contort your body into something that isn’t comfortable. I often see the mistake of golfers tensing their shoulders up around their ears. Take a deep breath and relax if this describes you. Keep your shoulders low and soft.

Ball Position

Ball position isn’t just about hitting the ball high or low as most golfer suspect. Ball position influences among other things:

• The launch.
• The spin.
• The roll.
• Your weight shift (on a full swing).
• The direction of your path at impact.

For putting, I recommend that you play the ball just forward of the center of your stance. This will help ensure that you strike the ball just below the equator of the putter face and with an ascending blow. The result is a good, true, smooth, top spin roll. If you have ever noticed someone playing the ball in the center or back of their stance, you can see the ball sometimes pop up off the putting surface. What’s difficult to see though is when someone puts too much back spin on the ball by hitting down and the ball skids initially coming off the putter face. The initial velocity is seriously compromised when this happens, throwing off the intended speed.

Again, I hope this provides a solid review of your set up positions. Maybe you picked up some new ideas, or maybe you just assured yourself you are doing all you can to set up for success on the greens. Either way, like I said, there is no one way, but having solid set up positions gives you the blueprint for being a skilled putter.

Principle 2: Aiming the Putter Correctly

In order to aim your putter accurately you need to be able to do three things:

• Use a putter that is properly fitted to your stroke and eyes.
• Actually align the face of the putter at your intended target.
• Obtain an accurate read on the green.

Get a Properly Fitted Putter

Before you do anything else, you must get a putter that fits properly and that you can aim properly with your eyes. Different head shapes and different hosel shapes have a huge effect on where you think you are aiming.

Align Face Exactly at Target

Face alignment at impact above and beyond all is the most important factor in determining the direction your ball will go. SAM Putt Lab stats show that face angle at impact accounts for 82 percent of ball direction. On top of that, statistics show that only 3 percent of all amateur golfers are able to aim their putter correctly. David Edel, one of the foremost putter fitters in the world, states that 90 percent of players that he tests can’t aim straight even on a short putt.

“How do people hole putts then?” you ask.

The answer is simple. There are millions of putts holed every year worldwide by accident. SAM Putt Lab stats show that you need a 4-degree compensation in swing path direction to offset a 1-degree face error. You can imagine how difficult it is to make these kind of swing compensations consistently.

Again, my theme here is that there is no one way. When it comes to aiming golfers see their line in different ways. More left brained golfers who like things in order tend to see straight lines. Right brained players who rely more on feel tend to see the ball curving all the way to the hole. Putting instructor Mike Shannon calls these linear or non-linear players.

When lining up you can aim:

• To a spot halfway to the hole along your target line.
• To a spot that is equidistant with the hole, but along your starting line.
• To a spot that lies right in front of your ball, but along your starting line.

Whatever style you choose, the only real way to know if you are aimed correctly or not is to purchase a laser and practice with it routinely. I prefer my students to aim at a spot equidistant with the hole so they won’t throw off their speed, but you can choose whichever way works best for you.

Get an Accurate Read

To get an accurate read on a putt you have to be able to do three things:

• Assess the severity of slope on the green.
• Figure the speed the ball will roll.
• Determine how or if the grain on the green will affect the putt.

Note that controlling the speed is so important that I’ve made it Principle 5 and will cover it there.

To determine the slope (the most difficult step):

• Look at the green’s surrounding terrain as you approach your putt, not just the green itself.  Look for low points like creeks and lakes and high points like hills and mountains, which will give you clues as to how the ball will roll.
• Imagine dumping a bucket of water out and watching the direction the water runs.
• Walk around the cup and back to your ball using your feet to feel the slope as you walk.

To determine the grain:

• Look to see if it is shiny or dull. If the grain is growing away from you it will appear shiny.
• Know that grain on Bermuda grass has more of an effect than Bent grass, which some players don’t even bother considering.
• Know that grain grows toward the setting sun and water sources.
• Know that as the ball loses speed, the grain will have more of an effect.

Principle 3: Making a Pure Path

When it comes to path, you can choose to move the putter on an arc or move it on a straight line. This has been the biggest debate in golf instruction for about the last 15 years or so.  Trying to figure out what way is best for you can be a challenge, because the players you look up to (tour players) are constantly changing their strokes, putters, grip styles, etc. Jack Nicklaus said, “I’ll change my setup or stroke, not only from day to day but from green to green-even from putt to putt.”

To help you determine what is best ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do you naturally rock your shoulders and move the putter on a straighter path? This is very difficult to do and you can test it by placing the toe of your putter along the baseboard of your floor. Try keeping the toe attached to the wall as you move the putter back and forth.
2. Do you naturally see a curve to the hole or do you see a straight line out to your aiming point?
3. Is your putter designed for an arc stroke or for more of a straight line stroke?

Putter path accounts for 18 percent of the direction of the ball according to SAM Putt Lab stats, so you can see how important it is to develop a consistent path. Make sure to stick with whatever style you choose and don’t switch around. There are many great training aids out there for both an arc path and a straight path to help you keep your stroke in a groove.

Principle 4: Hitting It in the Center

Missing the center of the face affects the direction your putts roll and throws off the intended speed. SAM Putt Lab stats show that missing the sweet spot accounts for 5 percent of the direction the ball goes. For instance, contacting the ball on the toe causes weaker strikes as well as an open face, which pushes the ball to the right. Contacting the ball on the heel also makes for a weaker strike, but it makes the putter face swing closed, causing putts to be missed left. Stats show that you lose up to 15 percent of your energy when you miss the sweet spot. Many great teachers feel that learning to hit the ball in the center is the most important factor in all of putting.

Principle No. 5: Control Your Speed

Every good instructor will tell you that working on speed control is under practiced by their students and that the importance of speed control is grossly underestimated. Students come to lessons complaining about missing to the right, to the left or possibly miss reading, but I’ve hardly ever and I mean ever had a student come out for a lesson and say they need help controlling their distance. It never crosses their minds that the reason they are missing to the right or left is because they are hitting the putt too soft or too hard, which causes it to drop off the break line or run right through it.

Tour players, however, practice their touch incessantly. Every tour player knows about the magic 3-foot circle from which tour players will make 97 percent of their putts. At 6 feet, the make percentage drops down to only 55 percent! That means that if the average player would spend more time on distance control, especially with their first putt, three putts would be scarce.

Four important variables control your speed:

• The length of your backstroke.
• The amount of effort you put on the putt.
• How you read the putt.
• Ball position.

Monitor Your Length and Effort

To control the length of your backswing you need visual markers. Some players have a lot of success using their feet as a gauge. I like to practice with a taped yardstick. Color code it every 2 inches (2 inches forward of center and 2 inches back would be red, at 4 inches put blue, etc.) With this tool, you can simply swing back and forth finishing even and on the same color.

For most players, their forward swing will be longer than their backswing. It’s important to let this happen and that you don’t try to forcefully stop your stroke. It will help you prevent deceleration and will also help prevent you from stopping short and flipping your hands through the putt, which causes over acceleration. A consistent tempo is mandatory for good speed control. For tempo, I have all of my students practice continuously with a metronome. The average tempo on the PGA Tour is 84 bpm, so you can start with that and work faster or slower to find your tempo. Remember a 3 foot putt has the same tempo as a 30 foot putt.

SAM Puttlab stats show that for tour players the backswing time is 600-to-700 ms and the forward swing time is 700-to-900 ms. This is important because it shows the forward swing does in fact take a bit longer than the backswing because it is longer overall.

Get a Good Read

The line you decide to play will have a significant affect on the speed of the putt. It’s really your decision whether you go more straight at a hole and play it aggressively with less break or lag it up and let it die into the hole with more break.

Play a Correct and Consistent Ball Position

Playing the ball forward of the center of your stance and in the same spot every time helps control the spin on the ball. A forward position will help the ball roll out by giving you a better chance to apply top spin. SAM Putt Lab stats show you should have a 3-to-4 degree rise at impact for optimum roll. If you have only a little rise, but a lot of loft, you will impart backspin. Playing it back lessens your rise and in turn puts more backspin on the putt and will tend to slow the speed down.

Thanks for joining me on the 5 Principles of Putting. As I said earlier, if you are a skilled player hopefully you picked up some tips or refreshed some old ones. For those of you needing serious improvement, you can now use this guide to systematically improve your putting this year one simple step after the other.

Get online access to my putting video now for FREE! PGA Tour veteran Jay Delsing and myself teach these five principles of putting and much more in our video Putting Principles. We typically sell the online access plus DVD version of this video for $39.99, but as a special offer, if you join MyGolfInstructor.com now and email me at [email protected] stating you read this article, I will grant you online access to this video for absolutely free.