You're Correct!

One of the most overlooked areas of your putt is how the ball has rolled from impact to its final resting place. Possibly the only time you ever pay any attention to this is when you see your ball jump up off the green and bounce towards the hole.

Most of you will instantly look at the area of the green where the ball first jumped and blame an imperfection in the green, but what if the ball was already bouncing before it hit a poorly repaired pitch mark or a spike mark. What if it was a result of a poor impact position?

The first area you need to look at is your ball position at set up. If you have the ball in the correct position for your set up, the ball will be slightly in front of the lowest point of your stroke. This will see you strike the ball ever so slightly on the up, encouraging the ball to roll earlier rather than skid and bounce immediately after impact.

The second area you should check is to see whether or not youre hitting down on the ball at impact. This may sound like a difficult area for you to check, but the reality is that you only need to get a friend, colleague or partner to record you hitting a couple of putts from the face on position. Just make sure that the camera or your cell phone is as close to the ground as possible.

Take a look at the footage and you should be looking to see if your putter head is travelling into impact from a position that is too high off the ground. If this is the case then you will see your putter moving down towards the ball as it approaches impact.

If your ball is too far back in your stance then at impact your putter will not have reached the bottom of the swing arc. This will create two big issues. Firstly, you will have too steep an attack angle, and secondly, your putter face will be looking towards the high side of your putt. The result is putts that bounce off line.

The problem with a forward press is that the moment your hands move in front of the golf ball, your putter face will lose loft. Then you throw into the mix an increase in the downward angle of your impact and the result is a bouncing ball. For a forward press to work correctly, you need to change both the loft on your putter and your set up.

Playing the ball further forward actually means you will create back spin on your ball when it is hit on the up too much. This will only encourage your ball to bounce quite a bit before it grips the grass and starts to roll towards the hole. Speed control now becomes a big issue due to the inconsistent nature of the bouncing from putt to putt.