A 2ft putt counts the same as a 300y drive — one stroke. The putt is only one of several types of swings golfers make, but it accounts for nearly half of the swing made — 43% — and perhaps as much as 80% of the anguish derived from the game.
The reality of the game of putting is that not all well-struck putts go in, and that sometimes poorly struck ones do. Your odds of success will never be anywhere near 100%, even if you are perfect in every stroke you make.
Putting looks, and can be, simple. A short putt looks so easy that most golfers are embarrassed when they miss one. And since there are many seniors and youngsters who putt very well, “regular” golfers get extremely frustrated when they can’t hole a simple-looking putt.
This frustration is based on expectations. If golfer have unrealistic expectations for holing putts, they are building frustration and disappointment into their games.
Part of the charm of putting, indeed of the game of golf itself, is the occasional unfairness of the results versus the quality of the swings. Put another way, some of the best-stroked putts in history have not gone into the hole, while some of the worst have. The challenge of putting includes an examination of your ability to accept adversity and move on.
There is no such thing as overall or long-term luck in putting. The good and bad breaks that occur to an individual always balance out over a golf season.
A foursome often makes more than 500 footprints on each green it plays. Even worse, these footprints were not evenly distributed: Most were within 6ft of the hole, because half of all putts were from less than 6ft away. They created a trampled-down area between 6ft and 6 inches away from the hole.
Here is a fact: Straight downhill putts are usually easier to make than straight uphill putts. This may be the opposite of what you think. On downhillers, the force of gravity tends to hold putts on-line, minimizing the error caused by a slightly open or closed clubface at impact. On the same length uphill putt, however, gravity maximizes the result of the same error, actually increasing the possibility of missing the hole.
All that said, it’s easier to 3-putt a downhiller than an uphill putt of the same length. The reason is speed: Downhill putts require a more delicate touch to control rolling speed.
The uphill putts stop closer together, indicating that on uphill putts, balls tend to roll closer to the same distance. This means the roll of an uphill putt is less sensitive to the length of the stroke than putts on a level surface. The lesson is that even if you don’t hit all of your uphill putts the right speed, be sure to get them past the hole. That gives them a chance to go in, and the longest ones will probably stop near enough to the hole to leave no-brainers coming back.
Downhill stroke has to be about 3 times more precise than your uphill stroke to stop a putt at the right distance. When putting downhill, make a stroke of the wrong speed and you’ll have trouble making your next putt.
Learning is what good putting is all about: It’s not hard to putt well: it is hard to learn how to putt well. And the difference is crucial. I place much of the blame for the difficulty in learning squarely on the putting green. The green provides a very poor environment in which to learn.
Standing on the putting green, golfers have no idea why they miss putts or why they make them. After missing a putt, most golfers assume their stroke mechanics were to blame. However, they may have stroked a perfect putt but it hit a hard-to-see footprint, which caused the putt to miss the hole. Or they might make a putt and assume they stroked it perfectly when they actually hit a terrible putt but misread it just the right amount to compensate, and — only luck can explain it — roll it into the hole.
I learned a long time ago that if you learn from your mistakes, things usually get better. But if you continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, things get pretty bad. Reliable feedback is the key to efficient learning. The basic notion is that if you don’t know right from wrong in practice, there is no way you can improve.
In time, some of the pigeons thought that when they lifted their right wing, a pellet was released. Some of the pigeons thought that if they chirped they would get a pellet. In 2 months, none of the pigeons learned to feed themselves.
This means that you shouldn’t practice only short putts; the long ones are also important. And you must stop 3-putting those long ones if you want to be a good putter.
To lag a putt is to minimize thoughts of holing it, instead concentrating on stopping the ball as close to the proper distance and as close to the hole as possible, thus minimizing the possibility of 3-putting (which is first priority).
Once you understand the reality of the problems of the game, and the often cruel statistical nature of its results, you will be better prepared to proceed with your learning program, which will lead to your improved putting. Always remain alert to the importance of immediate, accurate, reliable feedback and what it can do for your practice and on-course putting.
And that brings us to the simplest, easiest, most repeatable, most reliable, and therefore best way to putt — the pure, no-hit, pendulum stroke. By this I mean a putter swinging in rhythm with the arms and hands, with no power input from the hands and wrists whatsoever. If the pendulum is pure and swings down the line with no face rotation, it is as simple a motion as can be made under the Rules of Golf.
But be careful, because there is not just one single pendulum motion. A pendulum stroke can be swung down the line, around the body, or across the line. It can be swung with the face rotating or with the face kept square. It can be pushed or pulled, or allowed to swing in a consistent, natural rhythm.
The best of all these is the simplest of the simple, the pure-in-line, vertically swinging, face-always-square, natural-rhythm pendulum.
Golfers can take their putters severely or slightly inside and outside their Aimlines, waver along their Aimlines, and sometimes incorporate a bit of all of the above into their putting paths. I believe there are almost as many distinct putter paths as there are golfers, and I’m sure I haven’t seen them all.
It is a fact, proven by testing, that the better you aim, the better you putt. That’s why I say aim is the first fundamental of putting stroke mechanics. Most golfers aim very poorly, which is significant because aim can have a direct impact on all the other fundamentals: If you aim poorly, something else in your stroke must compensate to correct for the error.
Aiming is easy. Everybody aims. It is aiming precisely where you want to aim that is more elusive. The fact that most golfers do a poor job of aiming is not surprising, because there’s no feedback on a putting green to teach golfers how to aim properly. In the absence of feedback, golfers use 2 inputs to guide their attempts to aim: First they use their previous putting results (what I call reaction aiming), and second they use the look of their putter relative to their Aimline (what I call position aiming).
Any golfer whose eyes are not consistently vertically above his Aimline will have to change his view of alignment due to the changing angles he sees for putts of different lengths. The result is inconsistent alignment. The only way to align the putter face properly time after time is by positioning both eyes exactly vertically above the Aimline so the alignment is always zero degrees for all putts, regardless of length.
The 3 most common power sources used in putting are: (1) the small muscles of the fingers, hands, wrists, and forearms; (2) the arms and shoulders; and (3) body motion.
Supplying the power, which determines how fast and how far your putts will roll, from the muscles of your wrists, hands, and fingers is bad. Wrist motion (hinging) causes putter face angle variations, and hand and wrist muscles lend to tighten up and not working well under even slight pressure. But powering your putts with these muscles also brings an added complication: It’s not bad all the time.
You can practice putting this way for years, and as long as you putt on the course exactly the way you do in practice — relaxed and calm — things will be reasonably okay. But wait until you get really excited. When your heart begins to beat faster because a putt really matters, your body naturally produces adrenaline, which makes all of your muscles stronger. Then all your practice goes out of the window.
Just about every shot in golf except putting requires rotation of the forearms through the impact zone. But apply that same rotation to your putting stroke and you’ll produce double trouble. First, your putterface will rotate from open to closed, so the likelihood that it is square at the moment of impact becomes very small. Second, forearm rotation supplies unwanted and unnecessary power, and usually a lot of it.
Putting is a game in which delicate feel and touch create exactly the right speed and break of your putts. When you’re trying to be precise, body power causes nothing but trouble.
Putterface angle has more effect on the line a pull starts on than does the putter path. But golfer practice putter path because it’s easier for them to see, their friends (from whom they take advice) can see it, and they don’t know what else to practice.
It’s important to realize that the putter shaft is not the pendulum of the stroke, and the lie of the putter shaft does not affect the path of your stroke, unless it makes you move your hands.
The problem is obvious: If you don’t align your shoulders to the desired starting line for the putt, even the perfect stroke path and a square putter blade won’t start the ball rolling on the right line.
Putter path is somewhat important to good putting. Putterface angle is 4 times more important. And guess what? Your impact point — where you make contact with the ball — is even more important still.
A word about hitting putts high or low on the face. Most golfers habitually make contact at roughly the same height on their putterface. As long as this height is about four-tenths of an inch above the sole, where most putters are designed to be hit, this is good.
But some golfers try to hit up on their putts to produce overspin or topspin, and in doing so usually contact the ball very low on the putter face, near its bottom.
I have found that the best place to position the ball in your stance is approximately 2 inches ahead of this bottom point. At this spot you have the best chance of striking the ball on an ever-so-slight upward arc, as your putter comes up from its lowest point. Striking the ball slightly on the upswing gets putts rolling on top of the grass without lofting them too high, which produces bounce, or hitting them down into the surface of the green so they squirt off to the right or left.
The angle between your back and hips should be great enough to provide room for your arms to swing with your hands vertically below your shoulders, but small enough to let you comfortably practice putting at least 10 or 15 minutes at a time. Your knees should be slightly flexed, enough to give you stability on windy days without making you feel crouched or uncomfortable.
The most comfortable and solid putting posture sets your center of mass (the center of your weight) over a spot between the balls of your feet.
Once your posture is correct, position your eyes somewhere directly over the Aimline. Accomplish this by moving closer to or farther away from the ball — not by changing you back angle or leaning over or hack. Remember, the Aimline extends behind the ball, so it’s okay to set your eyes slightly behind the ball.
I am a strong believer in taking a narrow stance when chipping or pitching onto the green, because that encourages golfers to use their lower bodies to maintain the rhythm of their swings.
My measurements also show that many of the word’s best putters create a stable lower body by placing slightly more than half — 55 to 60% — of their weight on their forward foot.
There are any number of ways to hold a putter. But I think there is one way to set grip pressure, and that is light and unchanging throughout your stroke. Light pressure is better than tight because squeeze your hands and flexing the hand, wrist, and arm muscles makes them stronger, less pliant, and less sensitive to delicate feelings. And remember, your hands should be dead rather than strong when putting. So the lighter your grip, the less likely you are to “hit” your putts and the more likely you will “stroke” them. This applies to all putting grips.
The grip that makes it easiest for most people to produce a pure-in-line stroke is the parallel-palm grip. By parallel, I mean the palms and the back of both hands are parallel to the putterface, which means they are perpendicular to the intended putt-line.
Touch is in your head, but it begins with knowing what your putt looks like, and remembering (knowing based on past experience) how much power (the size or intensity of stroke) was required in the past for similar putts. Touch is an acquired skill based on past experiences. It resides in your memory bank, and plays a part in creating the mind’s-eye picture of the size of stroke you need.
Before you can develop a good feel for a putt, you need to have a good idea for how long it is and how much power will be required to roll it the proper speed and distance: In other words, you need to have touch.
Having good feel for a putt is having the idea or picture in your mind’s eye of how the stroke will look and feel, in both rhythm and intensity, as it rolls the ball to the hole. Feel also involves a kinesthetic awareness for the violence (or nonviolence) of your swing and knowing the physical sensation to expect at impact, including the vibrations that will travel up the shaft after the putter strikes the ball. It is based on the feel of your collected experience from thousands of swings you’ve made on previous putts, and the results they produced. This feel is produced in your nerve endings, fingers, arms, and shoulders, in the muscles of all of these entities, as well as in your brain and memory.
Feel, ultimately is experiential. You’ve got to do it lots of times to learn it and know it.
Feel is knowing how to do it, touch is knowing what to do. A golfer is good touch can have a bad day physically, when his body simply can’t execute what his brain knows he should do. On a day like this, we’d say his feel is off.
It would be logical to assume that both touch and feel would transfer easily from the practice green to the course. But that is not the case. In fact, transferring them to the course is often one of the most difficult aspects of the game for golfers at all skill levels.
No adrenaline, because no matter how hard you practice or how much you concentrate on the practice green, by its very nature, practice is repetitive and boring. Deep inside, you know that the results don’t matter. You can pretend that this 5-footer is to win The Masters, but you can’t fool your subconscious. If you want to put a little pressure and excitement into your practice sessions, either compete with a friend for more money than you can afford to lose, or when practicing alone, tell yourself (and then live by it) that you can’t quit until you achieve some specific goal, such as holing 10 3-footers in a row.
Let me explain what this “dead-hands” stroke is not. It is not your natural stroke, because most golfers’s natural instinct is to “hit” a putt with the muscles of the fingers, hands, and wrists.
And therein lies the problem: You can’t see or feel the power of a hit before it happens. No matter how much a golfer practices hitting putts the right distance and speed, when he or she gets under pressure and tries to apply the same hit to the ball with adrenaline-filled muscles, the results will be wrong. Once again, as the muscles get stronger, the same feel that produced good results in practice produces a more powerful hit under pressure.
Many low-handicap amateurs fall into this trap. They practice with the belief that the harder and longer they work, the better they’ll putt under pressure. If you insist on hitting your putts and controlling your putt distance with your muscles, then the only way to practice feel and touch is under pressure. The good player can accomplish this by playing in tournaments in which he is likely to face many pressure putts. Do enough of that — and enough is a lot — and you begin preparing yourself for future pressure situations.
A pure pendulum stroke is the weakest, least powerful swing in golf. When you first try it, you will probably feel insecure, as if you can’t get the ball to the hole, so you’ll probably leave every putt short. You also will feel as if you don’t have control of the ball.
Trying to control your putts with a hitting action may make you feel good in the short run, but ultimately it degrades your putting. On the other hand, not trying to control your putting — using a dead-hand stroke — is a positive action because it is pressure-proof.
Because it is the weakest swing in golf, it requires much longer strokes for longer putts than the hit stroke. That means it will be easier to learn to control the length of the roll by the length of the stroke.
Not easy, mind you, but easier. In this regard, putting is similar to the rest of golf. If you swing in a rhythm consistent with the way you naturally move your body, then your consistency becomes a function of your talent and technique, which is how it should be. This means putting with a rhythm consistent with your personality, body size, weight, and walking pace.
This is why you must learn to hold your follow-through until the ball has stopped moving. As soon as you drop your putter or move your body in a motion unrelated to putting, the feeling of the stroke is replaced by the feeling of that motion.
Whether he is putting to win a tournament or putting on a practice green, he always holds his finish as he watches the ball roll. He learns a little hit about his putting, his stroke, and the green from every putt.
I don’t putt until I think I’m ready to make it. Do you? And if you don’t, then why the hell do you putt it?
Given the length of most putters, tall kids grow up learning better setup postures (especially wrist angles) than shorter kids.
For the moment, forget about acceleration and concentrate on stability. First off, what does stability mean in putting? Stability relates to the relative success a putter has in retaining its orientation and motion upon encountering outside forces and influences.
Your stroke should always take the same amount of time and should always move at the same rhythm, for all putts, regardless of putt length or the length of your move.
Taller players move and walk more slowly than shorter players on the PGA Tour.
Watch any good athlete, and even more than the skill, you can’t help but notice the same attribute over and over: rhythm. It may seem natural but it is something they continually must work on (repeat), and something that anybody can develop and make his or her own.
Rhythm is more than the fluidity of the athletic motion. Rhythm is a way for athletes to suppress thinking and obtain consistency and accuracy.
Almost all putts break one way or the other. About 98% of putts have at least some break or curvature in their roll to the hole. This occurs because greens are built with slight inclines to shed water.
I’ve since learned a very important lesson: In golf, the subconscious always wins. Golfers do many things they are not aware of. They don’t swing the way they think they swing (watch someone’s face the first time he sees his swing on video), and they don’t play anywhere near the same break they think they’re playing when they putt.
Putts never stay on the line you start them on; they always get pulled downhill and show you only the visible break, which you wrongly assume is where you putted them.
Whenever you have doubts about the true break, fudge toward the higher break. If you are going to make an error judging break, it’s always better to play slightly too much than too little.
The reasons are simple:
- A putt is more likely to catch the high edge and lip-down-and-in than it is to catch the low edge and lip-up-and-in.
- Balls that hit spike marks or footprints bounce downhill more often than uphill.
- When your subconscious thinks you are aiming too low, it tends to hit your breaking putts hard. When this happens on a downhiller, look out for the 3-putt.
- While the chance of the ball wandering into the hole from the high side might not be near 100%, the chances from the low side are near zero.
Grain will have the greatest effect on a putt near the hole, since that’s where the ball rolls slowest. So check how the grass is growing around the hole.
A last word about grain: Don’t become obsessed with it. It rarely do more than add or reduce the break (due to slope) you read by 10%.
Grain usually affect break by less than 10%.
Grain can affect roll distance by more than 25%.
Their mistake is not understanding that controlling speed is a skill, just like all the others in golf, that can, and should be, worked on and improved.
Speed is 4 times more important than line. But what do golfers work on? Most golfers spend more than 90% of their putting practice time working on controlling their line.
It’s instinct, because it’s easy to see: Ball goes right of the target, it’s a push; ball goes in, it’s perfect; ball goes left, it’s a pull.
Rather than focusing on line or speed, I’ve found that the best way is to imagine neither the Aimline nor the speed but the entire ball track you expect to putt to roll on. Because you can’t correctly imagine a ball track without your mind including both line and speed.
The faster the green speed, then the less or initial speed you have to give to your putts to get them to roll the perfect distance. So putts on a fast green actually will be rolling more slowly, giving gravity more time to influence the ball and pull it downhill, so it will break more.
Grain also affects a green’s speed. Because Stimpmeter ratings are taken in more than one direction, grain is averaged into the green-speed reading. But you must still learn to recognize green speed in the direction you are putting.
Years of experiments have shown me that the optimum speed for making putts is one that would, if the hole were covered or missed, roll the ball 17 inches (43cm) past the back edge.
By learning to roll the ball a little long, you’re much less likely to leave putts short. It’s an old joke, but true: Putts that don’t make it to the hole have very little chance of going in.
Speed is important enough to be number-one principle in putting. It is the one element that you should think about with intense, full-bore, flat-out focus in the form of ball tracks every time you putt.
Reviewing the highest-scoring rounds on the PGA Tour over the last few years, we find that essentially all occurred on high-wind days. That won’t come as surprise to professionals, who know that playing in strong winds has a much greater effect on scoring than rain, cold, long rough, or hard greens.
It can move the ball 2.5 inches off-line on a 9ft putt and again that’s enough to miss the hole. The 5mph breeze you enjoy so much as it caresses your face and makes you think golf is the greatest game ever is the same SOB that just blew your ball out of the hole and cost you a stroke.
The wind gusted 40-50mph the entire final round, and no one could hit the GIR. Kite tried to keep his shots low and safe up to the greens, then used his exceptional short-game skills to shoot even par. He played strategically, getting himself into positions from which he could hit relatively easy short-game shots that would leave very short putts.
Finally, don’t let the wind beat you before you get started. It’s easy to overthink or get psyched out by possible wind effects, when, in fact, most putts won’t be affected, or if they are, the effects will be small. So work on everything else about your putting — stroke mechanics, aim and setup, feel, touch, and green-reading — before you start worrying about the wind. Become a great putter first; then you can worry about becoming a great wind putter.
Modern balls fly farther and straighter than ever before, in part as a result of the size and patterning of these dimples. However, dimples have a downside: They make it a little more difficult to roll short putts straight.
On normal putts, when the cover material compresses substantially, there is essentially no dimple effect. However, on putts as short as 3ft or 4ft (and anything less) on super-fast greens, there can be a measurable effect.
And while I don’t want to discourage you, I do want you to appreciate that it’s far easier to improve your putting (or any part of your game) if you have a knowledgeable instructor by your side as you practice. Without a trained set of eyes watching you, it’s up to you to learn what needs to change and what can be left alone. Then, once you know what to work on, you have to work carefully and accurately with feedback. This is usually is the most difficult part of learning to putt better — deciding what to leave alone, what to improve, and how to improve it.
And when I say, “Do it,” I mean “Do it properly 20K times.” Note that I didn’t say do it quickly and carelessly a few times, then hope for improvement. It takes 10K proper repetitions to begin to form a proper habit, and 20K to ingrain and own it.
10K repetitions is only 100 reps a night for 100 nights.
Your routine can be time variable — that is, you can make as few as 3 or as many as 6 practice swings, taking different amounts of time over each putt until you see each perfect preview stroke. Flow long this takes depends on your ability to concentrate under pressure.
The purpose of the ritual is to get your mind and body into the automatic (subconscious control) mode. It removes the necessity for any thinking or decision-making before or during the execution of your stroke.
The ritual can be simple, but it cannot be mental. Your mind races when you’re excited. Your heart beats faster, your brain tends to run faster, and time seems to fly when you’re in the heat of competition.
To make your rhythm, routine and ritual a habit, you need to have repeated them any times, over and over, the same way every time.
Many golfers spend years developing their stroke mechanics only to putt miserably whenever they face pressure. This happens because pressure shuts down the conscious mind, forcing the subconscious to revert to whatever feels natural.
When you putt with a vertical pendulum (hands vertically below your shoulders), your shoulders should rotate in a vertical plane (moving up and down, not around). But many golfers (out of habit) rotate their shoulders around their spines horizontally because that’s what they do in their other golf swings.
Once you’re standing properly, the ball should be positioned just ahead of the bottom of the stroke arc, so it will be launched only slightly upward at impact.
A properly fit putter is important, but it’s not the top priority in helping you putt better. It may not even be in the top 5 or 10. Putting success depends to a far greater extent on your ability to properly execute the right stroke at the right time. You need to know what to do and how to do it on the greens, and no equipment can change that.
So rather than wrapping your lower hand completely around the shaft, giving you the opportunity to make it rotate through the stroke, take a grip that minimizes hand control. I’ve found the claw and fingertip grips the best options for achieving this.
The more a putterhead is “heel-toe” balanced — more of its weight is placed toward the ends of the head — the less it twists when mis-hit. (In scientific terms, such a putter is said to have a higher moment of inertia.) In general, this is good, and explains why heel-toe-balanced putters have sold well over the years: Putts hit away from the sweetspot roll a little closer to their intended speed and line.
Now the bad news. The less a putter twists when mis-hit, the better it feels. Using a putter that feels good even on mis-hits lets golfers get sloppy with their impact patterns, which leads to long-term degradation of putting performance.
For a stable stroke to be consistent (especially under pressure), it must accelerate through impact without the hands providing acceleration.
Knowing that you should always putt with a stable stroke motion and actually doing it are 2 very different things.
By practicing with no ball, no pressure on results, and no distractions, you can focus solely on rhythm and feel.
I say work because it will take about 20K solid practice strokes to make solid contact a habit.
You can see what happens when I lock my arms and putter to my chest, then rotate my hips around the axis of my spine: My arms and hands didn’t do anything, yet the putter moved and rotated.
The best way right-handed golfers can stop their right-hand wrist from supplying unwanted power to the stroke is to use the left-hand-low-clamp grip.
When you first try practice putting in ski gloves, you’ll be surprised to find that most of your feel actually is in your mind, and you’ll probably putt better than you expected.
Almost every golfer I know could improve simply by remembering this one rule: All putts are speed putts. If your putts don’t roll at or near the right speed, it doesn’t matter where you aim or what your stroke mechanics are like — you won’t make many.
Many golfers baby their short putts, afraid to roll them firmly to the hole because they worry about not making the putt coming back if they miss. But a short putt is particularly susceptible to the green imperfections you can’t see — footprints, the lumpy donut, etc.
It’s like any other problem in life: If you don’t admit that you have it, you deny yourself the opportunity to eliminate it and the benefits of that elimination. Dealing honesty with reality is the first step to making it easier to see the true break as you stand over your putts examining the greens.
Have you ever trained yourself to see slopes in greens? Can you see, detect, or differentiate between one slope and another? Unfortunately, for most golfers, the answer to both of these questions is no. It’s not that seeing a slope is difficult, it’s just that most golfers have never looked at slopes with any point of reference (again, no feedback) that would allow them to learn which is what.
Which do you think provides the worse perspective for evaluating visible break? Of course, as the perversity of nature demands, the worse view is the golfer’s view, from behind the ball, because it shows the less obvious vision of the visible break (it appears smaller from this view).
Now here comes what is, for many, the hard part. You’ve got to keep believing, keep the faith, and trust in what you have been learning. The power of positive thinking is a wonderful thing in life and in golf. And a bad attitude is the same as giving up.
Tom and Hal are 2 of the best ball-strikers I’ve ever seen. Gifted athletes, yet both often aim the flow-lines way to the left, and both have struggled with their putting because of it.
When there’s grass behind the ball, the bellied wedge is a much smarter shot than a putt. He head of a wedge is heavy and bottom-weighted, so if you swing with your putting stroke and contact the center of the ball with the leading edge, the ball will roll like a putt about the speed you expect.
If your ball is sitting down in tall grass, even if it’s close to the edge of the green, the putter is the last club you want to use. Among the clubs that will work better are a 5w (small head, rounded bottom, good loft), a 3i or 5i, even a wedge played well back in your stance.
While all 3 distances are the same from the balls to the holes, they appear to be different when viewed by a golfer standing vertically over his ball in the address position. The discrepancies occur because in each case the eyes of the player are a different distance from the hole (even though the balls are not). The funny thing is that on uphill putts, which need to be given more energy, the distance always appears shorter than it really is, while on downhill putts, which should be rolled more carefully and with less energy, the distance appears longer.
Downhill putts become extra troublesome if they are also sidehill. This is what we call the downhill slider, the most dangerous putt in golf.
How much speed will a toe strike or gripping down take out? Only you can answer that, and only by practicing on the actual slopes and greens you play.
Attitude is upbeat, positive, determined, and aggressive. You never met a putt you couldn’t make, and you never will.
Don’t use devices that force or control your body to move in a certain way or do it for you. Use feedback devices that allow you to control your movements, then tell you when you do it right or wrong.
For reasons I don’t understand, golfers expect golf to be easier than it is. Golfers think they can buy a better game, or if they take one lesson and learn how to swing a club, the game will become easy.
They expect that after they learn how to hit a shot and hit it once, they should be able to do it perfectly every time for the rest of their careers. I’m sorry, but that’s not golf.