You can build your putt from the ground up and make it better. And you can do it faster than you think.

September 13, 2022 by Steve Andrews in Instruction, Opinion with comments

There is no right way to putt. Looking at the best putters in the world, there are a wide variety of forms and wildly different mechanics. The goal of putting is simple – get the disc in the basket, usually from within about 30 feet – but there is no consensus about the best way to do it. Players can succeed with all kinds of grips, stances, and weight shifts.

It should be the easiest part of the game. It doesn’t require long levers, fast twitch muscles, or incredible speed. It is the one part of the game that nearly every player can master, and yet few areas of the game produce more frustration. For almost every amateur player, making every putt inside the circle would boost their rating by 100 points.

And that’s not just for players struggling to get their rating to 900. Some of the best players in the world can agonize on the putting green. Time and time again, even top players can seem lost trying to get the disc in the basket. Some of it is the pressure of the big moment, of course, but nearly every player finds their putt breaking down at some point.

One way to get better at putting is to really think about your mechanics – how the parts of your putt work together to get your results. Changing your putting mechanics is simpler than changing your full throw. It’s much easier to take the elements of your putt apart and then assemble them the way you want.

You can build your putt from the ground up and make it better. And you can do it faster than you think.

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Putting mechanics is all about tradeoffs, and your mechanical choices usually either make your putting stroke more powerful or more consistent. These aren’t always in opposition, but thinking of these tradeoffs is a good way to get a basic understanding of how your putt works.

The heart of your putt is the number of hinges you have in your stroke. The more hinges you have – and the wider their range of movement – determines how much power and spin you have in your putt. However, the cost of those multiple levers and greater movement is a loss of consistency and a difficulty in timing the movement under pressure. On the other side, limiting your hinges and their range of motion will produce a consistent putt that, at the extreme, is unable to move the disc…