Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro
If you have a look and watch better putters when they’re on the greens and they’re putting, you’ll notice that on their longer putts they have really, really good distance control. And that’s the main thing to focus on with long putts and how to manage your long putts. If your distance control is good, if you can lock the putt up to the hole, you’re never going to really take more than two putts on a green. Accuracy is important; however it’s not as important as distance control on these longer putts. If you didn’t even aim the putter correctly and you just did what you thought, you never going to be more than say three feet left, three feet right, whereas if you’re not hitting the ball at the correct speed and you’re not controlling the distance that you’re hitting the ball, it’s quite easy to be six to eight feet shot or past on these longer putts. And that’s what causes the, the three putts, not getting the ball up to the hole, not lagging the putt up to the hole to make the second putt easy for yourself.
So focus on distance control when it comes to managing longer putts, lag the ball up, lagging just means rolling the ball at the correct space, so it finishes really, really close, rather than it being very short or really speeding past. So here’s a great drill to help you with learning how to lag the put up to the hole and to improve the distance control. What you want to do is go out to the green and just stand on one side of the green, so it gives you a good 20 to 30 foot putt to the other side of the green, and use the fringe on the other side of the green as a target for you to get the putt close to. Work on setting up correctly, so get the feet shoulder with the par, they eyes over the ball or just inside the ball, the ball centre of the stands and the arms nice and long and relaxed. We really want to work on swinging as a Y shape, so the movement comes from the shoulders and the key to distance control is to keep your tempo really constant. So think about metronome or a clock ticking, and the tick of that clock, the tick of the metronome is really constant. It doesn’t matter if it’s a quick tick or a slower tick; it’s the fact that it’s always constant. So maintain the consistency in your tempo, if you need a longer stroke rather – if you’ll need a longer putt I should say, rather than using, a short stroke or quickening it up which becomes difficult to control, maintain the tempo and just use a longer stroke. But whatever the stroke length is, the tempo should always be the same. Okay, so work on hitting your ball from one side of the green as close as you can to the fringe on the other side, do this with three or four balls, go to that side of the green, then hit the balls back and get the ball as close as you can to the fringe, that’s really going to help you working on lagging those putts up, and then you’ll be able to manage the longer putts with no problem. 2014-04-11 Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro
If you have a look and watch better putters when they’re on the greens and they’re putting, you’ll notice that on their longer putts they have really, really good distance control. And that’s the main thing to focus on with long putts and how to manage your long putts. If your distance control is good, if you can lock the putt up to the hole, you’re never going to really take more than two putts on a green. Accuracy is important; however it’s not as important as distance control on these longer putts. If you didn’t even aim the putter correctly and you just did what you thought, you never going to be more than say three feet left, three feet right, whereas if you’re not hitting the ball at the correct speed and you’re not controlling the distance that you’re hitting the ball, it’s quite easy to be six to eight feet shot or past on these longer putts. And that’s what causes the, the three putts, not getting the ball up to the hole, not lagging the putt up to the hole to make the second putt easy for yourself.
So focus on distance control when it comes to managing longer putts, lag the ball up, lagging just means rolling the ball at the correct space, so it finishes really, really close, rather than it being very short or really speeding past. So here’s a great drill to help you with learning how to lag the put up to the hole and to improve the distance control. What you want to do is go out to the green and just stand on one side of the green, so it gives you a good 20 to 30 foot putt to the other side of the green, and use the fringe on the other side of the green as a target for you to get the putt close to. Work on setting up correctly, so get the feet shoulder with the par, they eyes over the ball or just inside the ball, the ball centre of the stands and the arms nice and long and relaxed.
We really want to work on swinging as a Y shape, so the movement comes from the shoulders and the key to distance control is to keep your tempo really constant. So think about metronome or a clock ticking, and the tick of that clock, the tick of the metronome is really constant. It doesn’t matter if it’s a quick tick or a slower tick; it’s the fact that it’s always constant. So maintain the consistency in your tempo, if you need a longer stroke rather – if you’ll need a longer putt I should say, rather than using, a short stroke or quickening it up which becomes difficult to control, maintain the tempo and just use a longer stroke. But whatever the stroke length is, the tempo should always be the same. Okay, so work on hitting your ball from one side of the green as close as you can to the fringe on the other side, do this with three or four balls, go to that side of the green, then hit the balls back and get the ball as close as you can to the fringe, that’s really going to help you working on lagging those putts up, and then you’ll be able to manage the longer putts with no problem.
