Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Plumb bobbing you can see happening on the greens with club golfers and with some top professionals. Its not an exact science, but it can help you feel a lot more confident in the read that you’ve made on the green that you have read the green correctly and that you have got the correct left to right or right to left break on the putt. So lets have a look how to plumb bob correctly. First of all you need to know which is your dominant eye, because you need to use that eye to plumb bob correctly. And what I would do here is just create a circle between your index finger and your thumb. And pick an object that’s in the distance away from you hold that circle out in front of you eyes and just make sure that the object you’ve picked is in the middle of that circle as you are looking at it.

Now close your left eye, if you close your left eye and the object still remain in the circle, it just shows that your right eye is a dominant eye. So as I do that exercise there and I close my left eye the flag that I’m looking at through the circle stays in the circle, so I know I’m using my right eye. If you do that and the object doesn’t stay in the circle, it would mean you’re left eye dominant. So now you know which eye that you are going to be able to use which eye is dominant that’s the eye we need to use as you plumb bob. So the way you will plumb bob, is you will stand directly behind the golf ball looking towards the hole and then you would hold the putter Shaft between your index finger and your thumb, just to allow the putter to hang vertically down towards the ground.

With your dominant eye open now set the shaft so that’s its covering the ball and then look up the shaft and see which side of the shaft the hole now appears to you. If the hole appears on the right hand side of the shaft it means the slope is going to move the ball left to right and if the hole appears on the left hand off the shaft the ball is going to move right to left. So it basically plumb bobbing shows you where vertical; is and where the hole is relative to vertical. Its not an exact science as I said before, but if you’ve read the green and you think the ball is swinging left or right and then you use that plumb bob to just double check that yes you have got the general left to right swing, it really helps improve your confidence and you should find that you putt a lot better.