Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Becoming a really good putter when you are playing golf needs you to focus on your stroke and when we are looking at what’s the best type of stroke to use to hole a lot of putts we are going to use a pendulum method. Now today that all we are focusing on is creating one unit between the arms and the putter. So if I set up to the ball here we want to focus on the movement happening from the shoulders and from the shoulders the arms and the putter all move as one unit. In a pendulum there’s no hinge so we don’t want any movement from the wrist at all but just step forward pendulum stroke would look like this.

So there’s no movement in the wrists at all the movement’s coming form the shoulders and the arms of the club act as one unit. Whereas this kind of movement there’s now no pendulum action from the shoulders and there’s a hinge at the wrist and it becomes difficult to control the putter face and to control the distance that you are going to hit that ball with that type of stroke. Now pendulum method of swinging the putter all relies on tempo so a great drill for you to work on is if you put two head covers on either inside of the swing up, set yourself in the middle of it and have a good set up widen the feet shoulder with the par check that your eyes are just directly over the ball or just on the inside of the ball and then just stand ball is in the middle of the feet and allow the arms to just dangle.

Then hold the poster in that position, what we want to do is welcome this touch drill so we are going to swing back we are going to touch the head cover on the right and then touch the head cover on the left. Touch the head cover on the right touch the head cover on the left and if you think of a sort of making a tik tok, tik tok. the tempo always wants to be constant. It doesn’t mater how far apart these two head covers go the tempo is always the same. So work out what’s a nice comfortable tempo for yourself and then maintain that tempo to control the distance either go shorter with the stroke or longer with the strike, but always keep a constant tempo.

Now really getting used in a very good pendulum action very little wrist movement so once again wide feet shoulder with the par, balls in the center, nice long arms this is where you hold the putter as the arms are dangling so in a nice relaxed position. And then work on the touch drill which will go tik tok, tik tok or whatever the comfortable rhythm is for you but that will get you hitting really good putts your distance control will improve you’ll be taking much fewer shots around the green.