How can you make your own putting interesting again?
Given putting makes up something like 45 per cent of our shots, many of our practice regimes don’t get anywhere near this. While we all quite happily bash driver after driver at the range, the putting green is relatively empty and certainly not busy with many golfers putting in any purposeful practice.
Duncan McCarthy is a performance coach who has helped golfers win on every main tour, including Ashleigh Buhai’s win at the Women’s Open at Muirfield in 2022. Here he outlines five ways to put a spark back into your putting.
Re-engage yourself
I think with putting it’s about captivating someone and getting them engaged with the session because when you hit a driver at the other end of the game there is a bit of anticipation. Whereas a putt could go anything from three foot away to 50 foot and you know it’s just a putt.
That’s why I always come back to performance sessions which create a consequence because people overthink this part of the game and that builds up the anxiety levels.
You don’t need to complicate this and you don’t even need tee pegs. Just putting three balls around a hole from six foot away and you’ve got to hole all three back to back is a good start. And if you don’t do it, you just put them all back and you go again.
Equally you could do that with the same three balls and hit putts from 5, 10 and 15 foot and you have to hole two out of the three. So all of a sudden you will be looking to hole 66 per cent of your putts from 15 foot and in. You’d like to think that you’ll hole the five-footer, then there’s some consequence on the next two.
With your mid-range putting hit three putts from 30 feet and look to get them all inside three feet. Then 40 feet and four feet so you are always looking to finish inside that 10 per cent distance.
So there’s a putting session where you could do 10 minutes on holing out, 10 minutes mid-range and 10 minutes distance and you have 30 minutes which will be more purpose than most people have in a season of putting.
The process
What does your pre-shot routine look like and do you even have one? Number one is reading the putt and there’s lots of different ways to do that so find your way.
Number two is to create a picture that you want the ball to roll and then the third one is roll the ball down that line. It’s so important to train this over and over so go on a putting green with one ball and just hit random putts but your goal is not to hole the putt but to run steps one, two and three.
When we need to put in a good score or we deem a round important, this creates anxiety and then basically what happens when you feel anxiety is you become results focused. So it’s about staying calm enough to be process focused and go through what you’ve practised time and time again.
You can create your own little mental scorecard and just put a little tick at the end of the hole if you’ve managed it.
Shut the door
When Ashleigh Buhai won her Major she had four steps in her putting routine all week at Muirfield – read the putt, plumb the putts, line the ball up and then hit it. There would be occasions when she would second-guess herself in between the stages so we came up with the idea of closing the door after each stage.
So read it. Close the door. Plumb it, trust it and close the door. Line it up. Close the door. And hit it. That was her routine and her only focus on the greens. So she would hit every putt having done everything that she wanted to do.
You can create your own stages and this is a fantastic way to instal a new process.
A positive mindset
It’s great to be think about picturing the ball go in but I would always be on the side of creating pictures, especially with the short game. When you’re operating from a place of imagination it is like having a kid’s mentality and pretending that the ball’s gone in already and you’re not in thought because thought can lead to unhelpful thinking.
It doesn’t even have to be the entire putt, it might just be the last roll of the putt and then rolling it down there. Some people see the entire putt, some see bits and some see the last roll but I think that that’s a great place to get to because how many shots have you hit around a golf course where you’ve already created a picture? As in stood there and not rushed into the shot but just pictured what does this look like behind the ball and painted a proper picture? Probably not many.
Love your putter
I think it’s really important to look down at something that could be bruised and battered and chipped but you love it because it’s yours and you’ve got history with it. As opposed to having the latest putter with the latest technology as opposed to having something where there’s a trust there.
People are too fast to just move on to the next latest thing, especially with a putter, and you don’t see great putters changing their putters a lot. That’s easy to say as they’re the best putters but maybe it’s not the putter’s fault maybe and maybe you just need to look at yourself.
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Article Link: Five putting tips from a major-winning golf coach