Golf Instruction Zone: 3 Keys for Self-Evaluation of Your Putting

Today we’re going to talk about how to evaluate your putting. So many times, I’ll have our clients come and they say, “I putted awful, I didn’t putt well.” Well, we want you to have a system where you can actually:

1. Be able to evaluate your putting, but

2. To give yourself praise as you’re playing.

It’s so important that you’re complimenting yourself, improving your self talk when you’re playing, to shoot your best scores. If you have a system where you only evaluate your putts on whole putts, then you’re going to feel like you’re the worst putter in the world. But, if you have a system where you can check, then you’re going to say, “Okay, I did that well, I did that well, it didn’t go in, but this is the reason,” and you’re going to have a lot of confidence.

Those three areas where I’d like for you to think about in your putting if you miss a putt:

1. Did you start it on line? You need to know that. Not everyone aims perfectly, some people aim left and push it, some people aim right and pull it. That’s fine, is if you’re hitting the spot you’re trying to get the ball to roll over.

2. Did you read the green well? Here at the Golf School, we teach our clients AimPoint green reading that teaches you to feel the putt, feel the amount of slope with your feet, rather than try to see how much slope there is.

3. How good was your speed control? You want the ball, if you miss the putt, more or less to finish no more than 16 inches past the back of the cup. So if your ball finished further past that, you’re more or less reducing your chances of making the putt by 50 percent because then the putt has to go straight in the middle, you won’t get the putt to fall in on the edges because it’s going too fast.

So if you make a putt and you miss it you said, “Right, I started on line, my speed was good,” because you see how far by it finished, then it’s probably, you misread the putt. If you read the putt well, you started on line, but yet you missed the putt and the putt finished too far past, then your delivery speed the ball was taking to the hole was too fast.

So I want you, when you practice, to look at those three areas, there are so many drills out there that talk about start line drills. There are so many drills about how to improve your speed. There are so many different ways of reading a green.

We here at the Golf School like to teach AimPoint; we feel that’s the simplest way of having a green reading system. But, if you start looking at your putting in those three departments, what you’ll learn is you’re a lot better than what you think you are. You won’t be spending all of your time working on your stroke, and you’ll start being able to really fine tune that system and you’ll really start to have a lot more confidence when you grab your putter. So work on that at home and it’ll give you a fresh new way of looking at your putting.