Any regular watcher of golf played at the highest level be it on tour, or be it on television, or be it at live events, will notice that the worlds best players don’t all share the same common putting strokes, they often use different putting strokes, different putting groups and even different putter lengths. One of the common things they are trying to achieve is stability through their hands, arms and particularly forearms.

Stability as in resisting the flicking or the twisting action of a bad putting stroke, anything where we flick or twist or react badly with our forearms or hands is going to cause inconsistency in the length, the pace and the angle of our stroke. And one of the best guys in keeping everything nice and firm and stiff through the ball with his putting stroke is Matt Kuchar. Now he is taking quite a peculiar approach to this, he’s gone away from the standard putter and he’s also avoided the belly putter, which when you consider the anchored put is into the chest, that’s going to be banned from 2016 is probably quite a smart move that he’s found something different.

Now Matt Kuchar actually uses a mid length putter, to do what we class as a left arm lock putting stroke. And the way Kuchar does it is he plays his left hand on and actually locks the club against the side of his left forearm, he then places his right hand below in a traditional left, sorry, right below left putting grip, but with the left wrist so the pressed against the back of the putter there as he makes his stroke. And that really angles his hands so he can’t use his wrist flick and if he did use his wrist flick, it would become incredibly obvious, he would really notice that he is scooping and flicking.

So if you struggle with a little bit of a flicking action, and you’ve considered changing to a belly putter or an anchored putter but you decided against that due to the ban that’s going to come in 2016 you would have fancy changing just before that ban comes in. You could consider having the stability of the left arm lock Matt Kuchar putting stroke. You can also if you wanted to grip it left bellow right. That’s actually my preferred method of putting in my own game. So you get your left below right and anchor it in as well, left below right with the left arm lock. Now be careful, it’s not the ban at a grip that we use to see do back in the heyday of actually holding the left forearm.

Kuchar doesn’t employ that method, he just presses that butt end into the top of his left forearm, keeps the club very stable, rocks back and through very smoothly and you can see absolutely no left wrist bending, breaking or flicking, that will become very obvious. It’s actually a very good method and if you are interested about changing away from the standard putting grip and you’d like to try something different that doesn’t involve anchoring, because this technique is going to be illegal after 2016 you cannot still do it, it’s not a bad method to copy Matt Kuchar putting stroke.