You're Correct!

One of the biggest challenges in putting is to continually maintain your feel for the speed of a putt. Some days your speed control is amazing and yet on other days, you feel like youre never going to get the ball up to the hole.

One of the best ways to not only develop your feel for the length of your stroke, tempo and ultimately your speed, is to practise putting with your eyes closed.

If you close your eyes, you take your initial focus away from the outcome or result of your putt and just focus fully on the feeling you are trying to achieve with the length of your stroke in both directions and the tempo. If you practise this two step drill, you will see a huge improvement in the consistency of your feel and judgement of distance every round you play.

Step 1

Take a piece of A4 paper or card and place it on the ground. If youre at home, place a coin in each corner or on the practise green place a tee peg in each corner to keep it down. Take your set up, and when you feel ready to putt, close your eyes and focus on the length of stroke you think you need to hit your putt to the paper. Youre looking to feel the stroke just flow back and through, making sure you dont try to influence the putt with your hands and wrists around impact. Open your eyes and see the result before repeating five or six times and pay attention to how your putts are grouped.

Step 2

Hit more putts from the same start point but this time keeping your eyes open. Try and replicate the stroke you made with your eyes closed by the feel rather than the way you would usually make your putting stroke. Pay attention to how your putts are grouped and compare that to the way your putts were grouped before.

The more you repeat this drill, the closer the grouping of putts will be with both eyes open and eyes shut due to the improvement you have made in your feel.

The position of your impact on the putter face is determined by not only how well your putter moves around the arc of your stroke, but also how good and constant your set up position is. If you set up too close to the ball or too far away then you could make a great feeling throughout your stroke and still impact the ball with either the heel or the toe of your putter.

Closing your eyes will have little effect on your putter head wobbling about if the path of your stroke is inconsistent. You would need to spend some time practising your stroke with a putting rail to help you maintain a more consistent path, helping you to keep more control over the head of your putter.

If your hands are flicking the putter head towards the ball, rather than your arms swinging the putter, you will always struggle with your feel. Whether you practise with your eyes closed or not, you need to learn how to reduce your hand and wrist movement first before you can start working on your feel.