Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

A straight-Back-Straight-Through Putting Stroke really will give you a lot of consistency, get you holding a lot more Putts and taking fewer shots when you’re out on the golf course. The absolute key to a Straight-Back-Straight-Through Putting Stroke is how you hold the club and the grip that you use. So initially let’s just look at what Straight-Back-Straight-Through means; and it literally does mean that the Putter is just moving straight back along the target line and straight through along the target line. So there’s no deviation of it. If you keep the Putter Face square to the target line or aiming down the line as you do that you’re going to have a really repetitive consistent stroke, because the ball will just travel down the target line and travel out nice and straight from the swing. So you’re going to hold a lot more porches in this method. It’s really important though to create that Straight-Back and straight-Through stroke and to maintain the square clubface that you’re holding correctly.

If you tend to hold the club with your hands in correctly, it will generate a lot of rotation in your forearms and a lot of rotation in the clubface as you’re making the stroke and if you start to get rotation in your forearms the Putter Head won’t stay on the target line as you swing back so you’ll lose this straight back stroke, you’ll tend to arc the Putter more. So to create the right grip here the wrists have to be very passive and we really have to maintain the correct wrist angle and it’s really important that we lock the wrists into position. So have a go at doing this to create this correct grip to promote the Straight-Back-Straight-Through stroke.

Well all you need to do is with your left hand if you’re a right handed golfer is hold your arm out shoulder high, and then create a pistol or a gun shape as you would if you were little kids. So the index finger extended out and the thumb pointing directly up. Okay, so we’re going to maintain this position and we’re just going to point the index finger down at the ground and this is now the position we want to maintain in the left wrist. So we’re going o take that position down, so we’ve got the gun pointing at the floor and we’re just going to wrap the fingers around the back of the handle and then place the film and the index finger around, but we’re really working on maintaining that left wrist position there.

It feels awkward to start but, it really locks the left wrist into position and it’s going to prevent any rotation in the forearms during the swing, so you’re going to get that really nice Straight-Back-Straight-Through movement. Check that your eyes adjust inside the ball, the ball’s center in the in the feet and the stand where this is about shoulder width apart and then just place your right hand down. So the palms are much facing each other and now we’re in a position where we can just swing the Putter straight-back, straight-through and we’ll keep the Putter Face pointing at the target, down the target line. That will really give you a repetitive and very consistent Putting Stroke; you’ll hold a lot more Putts.