How to Swing a Golf Club – Putting

Good day, All!

I hope yesterday’s video was helpful to you in some way in learning how to swing a golf club correctly. Today, however, I want to take a step away from swinging a club and address something that is equally as important to developing your golf game: putting. The art of putting can be an extremely annoying and tedious part of golf. And as we hacks sure know, we take many, many strokes trying to putt that stupid ball into the stupid hole! If you’re anything like me, you’d think with the amount of times you putt the ball per round, you should finally be good at it! Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that. You either putt it too hard, too soft, pull it, push it, etc.! The biggest problem I have is what is referred to so lovingly by all my friends and family as the “Manning hook.” About 60-70% of the time, when I bring the putter forward, I am going to end up pulling the ball, thus not giving myself a chance to make the putt. Even worse, during the putt I really try to focus on not making this mistake. That’s when I end up hitting the ball 10 feet past the hole on a 20-foot putt!

Practicing putting for me was an absolute joke. I was about 20 times better there than I was on the course. The problem is that I wasn’t practicing any of the principles that are necessary to have a consistently good putting stroke. The only benefit of me practicing before a round of golf was getting an idea of the speed of the greens. And even then, the practice greens aren’t exactly like the greens on the course. I tried an exercise that I had seen Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh try: place two tees on the green apart from each other enough so as to keep your putter from veering off the correct path. There were two problems for me with this approach: one, I didn’t know exactly how far apart I was supposed to place the tees, and two, I kept hitting the tees and knocking them over.

The biggest thing I needed to remember that was practice makes perfect. For some, a lot more practice is needed to make perfect. The best thing you or anyone else can hope for is a least some small, noticeable improvement. I like to keep track of my putts for each round to see trends and to see if I have improved at all. If I have 45, 42, 46, 43, 40, 48, then I realize that I have made no progress what-so-ever. There’s absolutely no consistency in the amount of putting strokes in those six rounds. However, the last three times I played 18 holes, my strokes were 43, 41, 40. I spent several hours a day on the practice green trying to figure out my darn putting stroke. I may not have improved very much, but I certainly felt better knowing that for three consecutive rounds, my putting strokes decreased! Below is an article that you should take a look at which contains the five most common putting mistakes. The gentleman is not a golf pro, but someone similar to us hack golfers. Therefore, I think he can better identify with our problems. I hope this all helps as you learn how to swing a golf club correctly!

Here is the link to the article I mentioned:

http://pr-gb.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7204&Itemid=9

Let me know some of your putting tips!

Matt