Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

I think one of the – the basic keys to being an excellent putter is to have really good tempo. So if we are looking at the question of whether you should have a long swing when you hit your putt or whether it should be more of a short pop. The issue is more to do with tempo and having constant tempo. And so looking at tempo and what that means, if you can imagine a metronome swinging back and forth and making a tip top noise or if you imagine a clock and the ticking noise of that clock, it has a very constant tempo. Whether your tempo is slightly quicker than that or slightly slower than that, it doesn’t really matter. You need to control your distance by shortening the stroke or by lengthening the stroke. So if the question is should you have a long swing for your putting stride or a short pop, I think the longer swing is better if the tempo is constant. What you don’t want to do is shorten the swing down and a have a really quick tempo unless your tempo is always quick.

So decide what you feel is comfortable with that tempo, and then work on this drill. Setup as you usually would, so think shoulder with the putt; eyes should be over the ball just on the inside bull centered and the arms are nice and relaxed and long. And we are just going to work on touching either head cover that I have setup here, to sit – sort of simulate the length of the swinger. So with equal distance to the right and to the left and we are just going to work on tempo now with touch and touch. Touch and touch. And it doesn’t matter how wide or how narrow we put those head covers, the key is to keep that tempo really constant. What we don’t want to do is have a really long swing, with a quite slow tempo and then move down to a short pop.

It won’t work so if your tempo is quick, keep it constantly quick whether you’re short or long with the stroke. If your tempo is slow again it’s constantly slow whether you’re short or long with the stroke. And then you just adjust the stroke length to the length of putt that you have. So great drill to be practice for this when you’re out on the green, is take three golf balls. Just hit one golf ball out across the green not towards the target. Just with a particular swing length that you’re comfortable with and tempo and then repeat that with the second ball. And then repeat it again with the third ball.

And you should notice that all three balls go exactly the same distance and they all finish really close together. You’re aiming to look that there is no more than two foot gap between all three balls. And if you can do that, you’re showing you can really replicate that tempo. Now what you want to do with those three balls is hit one ball short, one ball sort of medium distance and then one ball along the distance keeping the tempo exactly the same on all three putts but just lengthening the swing as you go through. So the shortest swing for the shorter putt, a medium swing for the medium length putt and a larger swing for the longer putt. If you work on doing that, you’ll become a much more consistent putter.