Putt From Home...

Take a break from working at home and get some muscles moving with these quick tips to get you rolling the ball better.  

 

The circuit breaker has just been extended in Singapore.  That means more working from home, less golf, or any other activity we're used to for that matter.

 

We thought that giving you some drills to keep your golf muscles moving was a good idea, and we did that last week...

 

But then we thought...

 

How much better would it be if you could actually hit a ball (and not get into trouble)...

 

So with that in mind, we give you...

 

...Still putting

 

What do we need to putt our best? 

 

Stillness.

 

Stillness, which comes with our legs and our head.  Everything else needs to be free.

 

So let's get started with the first part of this drill.

 

Roll up a towel, and stand on it as you’re addressing the ball (with your shoes on of course).  Stand on the towel such that the mid-section of your shoes are on the towel with your toes and heels on either side of the towel. 

 

Keep an even pressure between your heels and toes.  Don’t have too much weight on the toes such that your heels come off the towel, and vice versa.

 

What you want to do initially is to start putting some golf balls, and get that sensation of being able to keep still.  After putting, hold your finish and see if your weight’s nice and even across those feet.

 

Once you’ve practised that, say with 5 golf balls, introduce this second element.

 

Too many of us tend to move our heads when playing.  This will affect the ability for us to set the ball off on line, which will in turn affect our strike.  What we want is to strike the ball out in the middle of the face consistently.

 

What we can do, which is very difficult sometimes, is not look where the ball’s going – kidding – but only look with your eyes, and not with your head.  Have your eyes follow the ball, but don’t allow your head to turn to follow the ball.

 

So in combining keeping our legs and head still – we get ourselves set, feel our weight distributed nicely across the toes and heels over the towel, and allow our eyes to look at the ball forwards and backwards down our imaginary line, then put. 

 

Hold our finish position and see if our weight’s still even or if we’ve moved – that will give us feedback on how much we need to work on stillness, or not.

 

... More Putting - Putt in Line

 

If we can get the ball consistently starting on the line we want to, then we’ve got a much better chance of it going in.

 

What we need to do is to practise returning the clubface back to our intended target line.

 

Get an alignment stick (or something similar that works for you), and put 2 extra golf balls about 30cm in front of your golf ball. 

 

Leave a little bit of a gap between the 2 extra golf balls so the ball (that you are going to put) can actually pass through the gap.  You can be as hard or as easy as you want on yourself!

 

The objective here is to do a good job of returning the club back to square.  This drill will show up our tendencies. 

 

If we consistently hit the extra golf ball on the right hand side, we know that our clubface is coming back open i.e. clubface is open at impact. 

 

If we consistently hit the extra golf ball on the left hand side, then we know our club face is closed at impact.

 

We can also introduce another element here – draw a line on your golf ball (you can use the golf hack on how to do this, from our blog last week). 

 

And as you put this ball, the line will help you see if you’re consistently aiming your putter to be able to start that golf ball more on line.

 

We hope these putting tips takes some boredom out of your week.  As always, let us know how it went, and please feel free to share the ones you have with the rest of us!

 

Till next week - Stay home and keep safe.