Now generally speaking the putting stroke should be one of the simplest mechanical movements we make in a game of golf. It's nothing like a full swing or even a chip or pitch shot. It's a very, very simple action. The club only moves a couple of inches backwards and forwards very few moving parts within the body. It should be the easiest thing to do. But as any golfer will tell you, it's possibly the hardest thing we do and certainly the most frustrating thing we do, and quite often is the difference between a good golfer and a higher handicap golfer.

So if the stroke is so simple, then why is putting so difficult? And more importantly how can we improve it? So one of the first things I'd like to think about when you've got a reasonable putting stroke is do a lot of drills, a lot of practice drills. So these drills might be the stuff that you can just do in the house. You don't even need to go to the golf club or the driving range to practice. But distance control drills, alignment drills, holding out drills, any of those sort of things you can practice on a regular basis should help ingrain the correct strokes that becomes more natural rather than having to think too much about it.

The next thing we're going to try and do is use good visual imagery, so good pictures of the brain. So I am aligning up to look at a put, we’re visualizing the ball going in. We’re visualizing the ball rolling along the right line, along the right distance, picturing how it curves, picturing the success of the ball going in. Then as we set up to the put, hopefully we can still have that visual imagery in our brain as we hit the put. Imagery and putting is probably as if not more important than anything else out on the golf course, certainly more important than visual imagery and all the shots because we've got this image of the ball going in. We’ve got a very black and white success or failure here. Either it goes in or it doesn't.

So if you can picture the ball going in, picture the ball curving into the hole that would be fantastic. The next thing we're going to have a look at with improving your putting is just going to be having to find your natural tempo, your natural rhythm, your natural cadence. We’ll often find that golfers are always told to slow down and swing easy. But that's not always the case if you're a person that has a very quick rhythm to your general life.

If you talk fast, walk fast, if you get set up to the golf ball quickly and then try and slow down, that can sometimes upset your natural rhythm. So particularly in putting, the distance control is all about the rhythm back and through. And somebody like myself, I have quite a long slow rhythm. I don't hit the ball particularly with a short stubby stroke. It's quite a long, smooth stroke. That doesn't advocate hitting the ball any harder or any softer. It just means I've got a quite a slow rhythm.

For some people they might have a little bit of a jerky, stubby rhythm. Now it's not necessarily for me to say what's better or what's worse. It's what works for yourself. What I would suggest is you try all this out. So you spend a bit of time on the putting green trying long, smooth strokes. So not hitting the ball longer or shorter, maybe we’ve got a ten-foot putt. But we could hit a ten-foot putt with that stroke or we could do a ten foot putt with that stroke. Both balls would go the same distance.

One would be long and languid and slow. And one would be a little stubby jab to the whole. Practice, maybe have three or four parts with each different tempo with longer putt, shorter putt, different tempos. Work out what suits you and then stick to that. Don't be put off by that just because you read a magazine article that said do something differently or somebody on the TV said do something different. Stick to that natural rhythm. So improve your putting by improving your tempo, lots of practice drills and good mental imagery of the ball going into the hole. And hopefully that will improve your putting without necessarily changing your stroke mechanics.