There’s a lovely practice drill that you can work on to encourage you to get back at your distance control. I’ve taken five balls here and what I’m really after now is good, consistent putting. I would like to be able to go on a golf course, have a little bit of a practice stroke and then exactly how far that stroke is going to go. And then repeat that stroke when I actually want take my putt. I don’t want to be out there at the golf course, having a practice stroke and think that perfect distance that I have got and then not be able to recreate that by having a little dodgy flick in the stroke. So I have lined five golf balls up here, what I would do now is find a decent patch of carpet at home, maybe in the hallway or a decent flat patch of carpet of green, sorry, on the putting green. And just start the roll, put the stand down there, not really aiming for a particular target or specific hole, more importantly, just hit the first putt and feel exactly how hard you hit that. Then walk to the next one and try and feel exactly the same stroke again. Forwards, forwards and forwards, see, you got five balls rolling down the hallway at home, rolling down the putting green on the golf course. And all five balls should be as closest possible to gather, always trying to recreate the first putt.

If you can get four or five balls to finishing one particular area within a putt’s length of each other, so measure from the first ball to the last ball or the worst ball to the best ball and see if you can get all five balls within the length of the putter. If you cannot, I would suggest that decent result, you could then bring the five balls back and try them over a long distance and see again if you can keep all five balls within one putt’s length. The next thing that I would do is sort of rev this exercise up a little bit to make this exercise a little bit harder. You set-up the first ball again, five in a line. Shut your eyes this time. Close your eyes make your stroke. Quite importantly, don’t look when the ball is finish. You can open your eyes but not look up. You set yourself to the next ball, you shut your eyes again, you make the same stroke, you don’t look up. Open your eyes, set the next one. Shut your eyes, hit it. Each time, hitting five balls with your eyes closed each time, never looking up. Then have after the last one, look up and check your results and again try and get all five balls within one putt’s length. There is also a nice exercise here that you got actually lumber the golf balls or have different numbered balls or even different color golf balls so you can work out. If number two felt particular hard, did number two go further? If number three fall and exaggerated the deceleration, did number three come up short? It gives you much better feel and because we take away the visual of watching the club and seeing how far it goes, it helps you focus much more on the feel of your putting the stroke.

So next time you go out on a golf course and you sort of looking at the hole, you rely a lot more on the feel of your stroke rather than physically watching the putt ahead which is not a good aspect of putting. Feel the putt better by doing a lot of putting exercises with your eyes closed. If you can get them all within one putt’s length, that’s a really good exercise, really good practice. Try that drill next time you’re on a putting green. Don’t focus on the hole, focus on distance control, much better, more consistent putting from that drill.