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Grooving Your Putting Stroke

A common feature of many great putting strokes is flow. And what we see as a graceful stroke is actually the result of letting the putter head load naturally on the backswing and release through the ball. In this Play Better Golf Segment, Titleist Leadership Advisory Staff member, Justin Parsons, provides some tips on how to groove this type of motion and build a reliable putting stroke. Justin also shares his one-handed putting drill that is sure to help you add some flow to your stroke.

Hey, Justin here with another piece of advice to help your golf game. When you’re putting the ball I think it’s very easy to sometimes get a little bit too robotic and a little bit too tense and one of the areas that was explained to me, by Butch Harmon himself, was to
understand the correct loading in the correct releasing of the putter.
Now this is a very very simple little little drill that you can have a look at when you look at the design of the putter, the butt of the club up here and the club head over here, if I move the top of the club around along, if I move that side-to-side quite vigorously you’ll see that the putter head doesn’t move really at all. Whereas if I keep the top of the club fairly stationary I can let the putter head swing.
That’s an excellent way to understand and describe the loading and the releasing of the putter. When you see the best putters in the world, if you take a little imaginary line and draw it up from the butt of the club, you’ll notice that it will stay pointing to the stomach as the player swings back and it will still point to the stomach as the player swings through. What you won’t see with the better players in the world is the grip of the club moving side to side like this because we know that’s an inefficient way to create movement in the head of the club.
Now, the best way to experience this in your own time is take your dominant hand, in my case that’s my right hand, and you can hit some long putts just feeling the putter loading and releasing. Maybe putts from 20 to 30 feet. That’s going to help you to experience that and look for that for better distance control and better rhythm in your putting stroke.