You're Correct!

For many golfers, taking too many putts per round is all too common. Mis-judging the long ones or missing the short ones, they all generally stem to one area of your putting stroke - too much wrist action.

The more wrist action you have, the less control you have over your putter head. As the putt gets shorter, the need for more control over your putter gets greater. One way to combat the excessive wrist action is to use a long putter.

The idea behind a long putter is to reduce the amount of wrist action in your stroke by anchoring the butt end of the grip to your body. This anchored position helps to eliminate unnecessary wrist action, thus giving you more control over the putter head throughout your stroke. Due to the shaft of a long putter being in the region of 50 inches, you need to make a couple of slight changes to your set up.

The Set Up

The initial part of your set up - feet, knees, hips and shoulders will remain in a parallel position to your aim line. Your ball position will also remain the same, but the way in which you grip the putter is the big difference. With the long putter, your leads hand is placed at the top of the grip, almost like youre holding an umbrella, with your thumb at the back. This is then fixed against your chest either in the sternum or slightly forward of it. Then your trail hand can be placed almost in its usual place on the grip, but using either the claw or pencil style hand positions. It really is a matter of preference for the individual in this case.

Make A Pendulum Stroke

The fact that the putter is now fixed in place means that you can create a pure pendulum motion with your stroke. In fact, you can recreate the image of the pendulum on a grandfather clock swinging back and forth. This will give you much more control over your putter head and help you hole more short putts and take less putts throughout your round.

For a long putter to work in its most efficient manner, it really needs to be anchored or fixed to the body in some way. If you hold it away from your body then you will not be able to reduce the amount of wrist action throughout the stroke.

A long putter really needs to be anchored around the chest or even just under your chin. The fact that a long putter is around 50 inches in length makes it impossible to hold against your belly. A belly putter would be no more than 44 to 45 inches even for the tallest of players.

To swing a long putter with your hands defeats the purpose of using one in the first place. It would also be extremely difficult to swing a putter of such length this way as you would struggle to get your body in a position of reasonable posture to be consistent.