Quite often when we are playing golf there’s going to be more pressure on your short putts than there are on your longer putts. And that’s because when you’ve got a really short putt and let's talk about a shot putt as in here, this sort of distance, three to four feet out from the hole. When we’re looking at a short putt like this, we feel like there is more pressure on this, because you're expecting to get it in. And if you keep missing these short putts, your confidence really dips. And you start to be sort of fairly negative, you start to look at how the ball is going to miss and how it's going to break away from the hole and how it's not going to go in. So it's really important that on these short putts particularly we really stay positive.

And to help you do that here is a couple of different techniques. The first thing is when you're reading the putt make sure you read a line that you're really confident it's going to help the ball go in. So it might be that you don’t allow too much break, because too much break means you're going to have to hit is as soft and gentle speed quite negative. So try and read it so it's a nice firm straight putt. So we have a little look at the break of this one we think yeah that’s going to break too much. So I'm going to be firm and positive. But then pick a really small point right in the back of the hole. Maybe even as small as one blade of grass, the one that flick off dirt and then that’s the thing I'm going to aim for.

I don't want to aim for this great big hole because if my eye on or the club face gets taken by one corner or one edge, I could miss. But if I pick a spot exactly at the back of the hole and I can hit that really firmly. Even if I miss that exact spot, exact blade of grass, I’ll still have plenty of other parts of the hole that I can fall into. So to be picking one very defined spot right at the back of the hole, aiming nicely for that making sure I've got a good positive read on it. And then really accelerate when I'm putting stroke. So back and through and really be positive and pop the ball forwards. The worst thing you can do with short putts is have a long back stroke. As soon as you have a long back stroke you need to decelerate that because you going to hit his ball too hard, it's going to bubble over the hole and miss.

So you have to decelerate and decelerating just kills that positive stroke, it makes it very negative stroke, it totally falls and it takes every break, every bubble, every spot and will come to green and we've missed another one. To be remaining really positive on this short putts read a nice straight line, pick the spot directly at the back of the hole, little short back swing and a really good positive push through to the hole. Don’t be too quick to peek and have a look to see whether it's gone in like we always say, you’d rather listen to it drop than watch it miss. And that’s how you can improve your positivity on your short putts.