Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

If you are going to be a really good golfer, it’s extremely important to have a great putting stroke. And here we are going to look at why it’s so important to align your balls – your eyes directly over the golf ball, to have a really consistent and fantastic stroke that works effectively every time. So we are going to look at the putt this way on, when you are putt and you are trying to create a pendulum effect from your shoulders. And if you are think how a pendulum swings, if I swing the pendulum this way on, if we look at the pendulum swinging, the pendulum swings straight back and through when the top of the pendulum is directly over the bottom of the pendulum.

Now when you address the ball, obviously the shaft of your putter will lean away from the ball to a certain extent, but the same principle applies. We want to try and create a pendulum effect where the top of the pendulum is as directly over the bottom as possible, because that’s going to give us a much more straight back and straight through swing. Why is that important? Well, if we keep the club face pointing at the target, and we just swing the putter straight back and straight through, the ball is going to go directly at the target.

If you set up with your eyes just over the ball or just on the inside of the ball, that’s the optimum position to allow you to create the straight back and straight through stroke. So if we set up in this type of a position, we can swing straight back and then swing straight through. If I set up with my eyes outside the ball, so on this side of the ball, that’s going to cause me to swing the putter across the target line, rather than straight back and straight down the target line.

And if I start to swing the putter outside the target line, I’ll then have to pull it back across and that’s going to cause a lot of directional issues because if the club face is pointing square to my swing path, I will pull the putt to the left. Otherwise I’ve got to turn the face and try and guide the putt into the hole and that’s going to start to pull a lot of side spin onto the ball. So it’s going to make it much more difficult to putt well.

So a great tip to check that your eyes are in the right position is, once you’ve set yourself up to putt, just take another golf ball and place it on the bridge of your nose. And as you do that, just take your stands up as you would putt from and then just drop the ball and it should land just on the inside of the golf ball that you are going to hit from. Your eyes are now set correctly over the golf ball. If the ball lands on the outside of the golf ball, you know you’re too far over the ball and that you need to step back slightly. So you should be looking for the ball to land just on the inside of that golf ball that you are going to putt, and then you know that your eyes are set correctly over the golf ball. Try that the next time that you are on the practice green and it’ll give you a much more, straight back and straight through stroke. You should find you are holding a lot more putts.