Why You Need This: In today's video, I'm going to show you five putting hacks to improve your stroke.

I know you've been there before.....

You're standing over a crucial putt....the pressure is on...

Miss this and your team loses the hole....

You've read it perfectly, you know the break, you've had this same putt 100 times before.

Then it happens, your normal putting stroke disappears, you get "handsy" and the putt comes out off target.

I'm going to give you some excellent, simple putting drills to help you keep this from happening.

You'll learn:

• Simple drills to make you aware of what mistakes you're currently making,
• techniques that will accelerate the learning process and have you putting better right away, and
• some tips on how to better read the greens so your good strokes start sinking putts.

I'm confident these simple drills will be effective in helping you become a better putter.

Let's get started....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 8:05

Video Transcription:

It is absolutely awesome to have you here today. I have five sure-fire putting hacks that are going to help you to drain more putts today. Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so one of the biggest problems we have is getting wrist-y with these short to mid-range putts.

Seems like we get to a really pressure putt, we really need to make this one, and that’s when the hands and arms start to act up and we hardly ever make those.

There’s a great solution to this. All we need to do is put a golf ball between our right forearm and the top of the putting grip.

As I take my normal grip, I’m going to notice there’s a little tiny bit of pressure between my right forearm and my wrist. Now if I move my wrist at all, all of a sudden that ball’s going to fall out.

I really have to be super, super stable with my wrist and my arms, I’m not going to get very much hand action in there, but that golf ball fall out right away, and I’m going to stay stable over this, it’s going to help me to make some more putts.

Now keeping with that same theme of eliminating the wrist from the putting stroke, getting a really good feel for the putting stroke, I recommend you putt with a wedge.

Now right away with a wedge, something you’ll realize is you have to be much, much more precise than you do with a putter. If I’m a little bit off, now it’s going to be a big miss.

So I don’t actually mind if make any putts with the wedge, what I’m trying to get you to do is have a much better feel with your hands and how to control the club face when you’re making a putting stroke.

So the first thing we want to do here, this is what’s called random practice, so there’s tons of research out there in motor learning that says if we can actually practice on the extremes, both ways, it’s going to increase our feel, and we’re going to keep that feel for a longer period of time.

So when you’re putting with this wedge, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to purposely hit some putts off the toe of the wedge and off the heel of the wedge.

Immediately you’ll start to feel how it wants to open up the club face a little bit when I hit it off the toe, and how it wants to close the club face a little bit when I hit it off the heel.

You’ll start to really be able to feel that much more in the wedge than you would be with the putter. Second, from there, I want you to try to hit this a little bit lower on this golf ball.

So the problem with the wedge is, if I start to hit, especially if I get out to 20 or 30 feet and I hit a little lower on the golf ball, the bottom of the golf ball, that ball is going to pop up in the air.

Then you’re going to hit a little higher on the golf ball, we’re going to notice that that ball’s going to smoosh down in the ground and then hop up and roll too.

So I have to hit it right in the equator, very, very fine-tuned and precise to get this ball to roll pretty well.

So we’re trying to hit off the toe, we’re trying to hit off the heel, we’re trying to hit low and high, and then finally, let’s find that middle zone in between where we actually hit right off the center of the face, and then the equator, or the center of the ball.

You may be asking why use a wedge? What’s the point of this? This speeds up your improvement process, it speeds up the time it’s going to take you to develop this feel, because it’s just too easy with a putter.

If we don’t get enough feedback, we’re not really sure what we’re doing. With a putter, I’ve got this big, wide, flat face. I can hit it anywhere on there and it’s going to be fine.

With a wedge, I just have this one thin, tiny bit of a line. If I’m off at all, I’m going to get that immediate feedback and I’m going to develop feel much faster.

So the wedge, a great way to practice your putting. Now here’s a great way to determine if you’re releasing the face correctly.

A lot of times what I’ll see players do is they try to hold this face dead square, they make this great putting stroke, and they try to guide it into the hole.

Whenever you guide it, what ends up happening is that face ends up opening up because we’re dragging the handle forward and a lot of times the heel will be releasing faster than the toe of the putter.

Now with all the research out there, what they’ve shown is the face is going to open up slightly in the backstroke, for players to have more of a straight back and straight through, that may not be very much.

If players have a little bit more of an arc, that’s going to be slightly more opening, but everybody opens it a little bit in the backstroke.

It squares up to square at impact, and then closes a little bit coming through. So with all great putters, we’re seeing that face open and close.

When that happens the toe of the putter is moving a little bit faster than the heel of the putter. So if I hit two balls when I make contact, I should see the outside of this toe ball go a little bit farther than this inside ball.

So if I go ahead and hit one here, I’m going to hit it toward the hole but I’m actually not going to make any of these, probably not going to make any of these, but I’m looking to see if that outside ball went just a little bit faster.

You can see those were pretty even, so that means my heel and my toe are moving pretty similar speed.

If I grab one and I move with a lot more of the toe, so I move the toe much faster, we’re going to see that toe ball is going to outrace the heel by quite a bit.

See how that jumped out another three or four inches in front. Now if I’m doing it incorrectly, then I’m really holding off that release and I’m trying to guide that ball in there, that’s the worse thing we can do in putting.

We’re going to see that heel starts to guide it toward there, I’m really holding off on this, and my heel kind of outraces my toe, that’s one of the worst things you can do in putting.

In this one we’ll notice the inside ball really jumps out in front and we’ll see that heel one just caught out a little bit there. So it’s just a fine-tuned difference.

If your balls are even, that’s completely fine. If the toe ball’s going a little bit more, that’s great too. But what we don’t want to have, is that heel ball racing way out in front or we don’t want a lot of difference.

We don’t want to see the toe going one time, and then the heel ball going one time, and then the toe ball going one time. We want to get nice and even.

Try to hit 10 or 15 of these putts, with even strokes with the toe ball just barely outracing the heel ball.

Here's another big mistake I see. When players are reading their putts, they’re way too close to the golf ball.

Now from here, it’s almost like I’m looking straight down at the golf ball at a sea of green, I really can’t see the break.

If you want to accurately read the break, we’ve got to go farther back. You’ll notice as we start to look at some pictures from 30 or even 40 feet behind this golf ball, it becomes much more apparent which way this overall green is sloping.

Now I can easily see this putt’s going to break to the right whereas when I was closer, it’s a little tougher to see.

The plumb bob, one of my favorite sure-fire hacks to read putts correctly. The cool thing about this is it’s based on cold, hard science.

It’s the same way you would plumb up a house, you hold that string down to see if your frame is perfectly straight up and down, we’re doing the same thing for putting.

If we do this correctly, it’s going to be perfectly accurate, telling us if the putt’s going to break to the right or to the left. If we do it incorrectly, that’s when the problems are going to come up.

The first thing I need to do is I need to step behind this putt, I need to have the center of my feet, the golf ball, and the hole, all in one perfectly straight line. If I’m standing over to the side one way or the other, this isn’t going to work.

Then I’m going to grab the putter, really loosely in my two fingers so it swivel freely. I’m going put the bottom of the shaft completely covering the golf ball.

Then the top of the shaft is either going to be to the left of the hole or to the right of the hole if it’s a breaking putt.

Now here, the putter shaft is to the left of the hole, that means this putt is going to break to the right. That’s due to the slope of the green.

So when you hold up this putter, it’s not going to be even with the slope of this. If I came over to the other side of the hole, then it would be going the opposite way.

The shaft would be to the right side of the hole and the putt would break to the left from that way. If I had a dead-straight putt, both the ball and the hole are going to be in a straight line.

This is really cool when you’re trying to figure out does the putt break to the right? Does it break to the left? I’m not really sure, now we’ve got a sure-fire way based on science to know without a shadow of a doubt.

All right, so take these five putting hacks, you’re going to get the wristiness out of your stroke, you’re going to feel a lot more confident, and you’re going to be able to better read the greens. Most importantly, we’re going to drain a lot more putts.

If you’re a member of the website, I don’t want us to stop here.

We talked about how to get the wristiness out of the stroke, we talked about how to better read those greens, but less really make this completely automatic where we don’t have to think about it.

What I want you to do is go to the Top Speed Golf System, go down to the Putting section, and start working our way through those videos.

I have some great drills in each one of those sections, those highlight the most important pieces of your game. As you work through those, you’re going to get to where you don’t even have to think about this stuff.

You’re automatically going to be nice and solid with the wrist, you’re going to be a great putter, and you’re going to have a routine built in for how to read those putts.

You’re going to have that stroke that is nice and consistent day in and day out. That only happens when we get that muscle memory going by working through each of these videos.

So one video alone is great, but working through a system of videos that’s really where you’re going to get the long-term lasting results. I’ll see you in the Putting System.