Golf Putting Practice
How much time do you spend on your golf putting practice? 10% of your practice time? 20%? More???
During your next game of golf, calculate how many times you use your putter in your round. It will definitely be over 40% and possibly quite a lot higher, so it stands to reason that you should spend more time for your golf putting practice.
Not only is the amount of time you spend for golf putting practice is important, it’s also very important what you practice?
The key to golf putting practice is to ensure that whatever practice you do is making you develop habits. Practicing the wrongs things will make you develop bad habits which can become so difficult to ‘unlearn’.
Putting is one of the easiest parts of the game of golf to practice since you can break it down and work on one part of the putting stroke at a time and then put it all together like a jig-saw. For example you can work on your tempo just with a couple of cushions and your putter or you can work on your swing ratio with a couple of tee pegs in the green.
So – what should you practice?
With putting the first thing you need to be confident of is that you can hit the ball at your intended target. If your intended target is not right, that’s a different issue! But that can be addressed later.
To do this you first need to work on short straight putts and ensure you can hole those up to a length of around 8 to 10 feet. And to hole these you need to work on drills that will ensure your alignment is correct – both your body and your club face alignment.
Work on really short putts to start with, and as you get better at these, start to move away from the hole. If you start to miss, move nearer the hole again.
After this you can start to work on other drills as you get further away from the hole including tempo, ball position and then start working on the next most crucial factor – pace.
Much of learning to hit putts with the correct pace comes from experience, but you need to ensure you are controlling the pace of your putts in the correct way – otherwise you will experience inconsistent results.
Finally you need to practice putting under pressure – if you can perform well under pressure you’ll have a HUGE advantage over other players. For this you need to work on your psychology and practice drills that simulate the pressure of a real game.
You’ll find separate lessons on the golf putting lessons DVD covering golf putting practice drills, how to control pace (under short, medium and long putts), psychology and another lesson on how to read greens.
