You may have heard me blathering on about the fact that getting really good at putting is the real key to shaving huge chunks of points off of your score card.
It's the truth, but I haven't revealed exactly how to putt, but I mean to solve that right this very minute.
It is certainly true that getting really good at putting will do more to improve your scores than any other single thing you do, but the real trick is that putting is all in your head.
Now, there is some form to putting, but you can find all that advice in other places.
I'm just going to help you get your head wrapped around the process properly.
Putting isn't really all that hard once you understand the physics behind putting a round object into a round hole.
It turns out that the hole is really an awful lot bigger than you think, and all you're trying to do is get it close.
So let me rephrase myself a bit.
Even though putting is all in your head, one of the things your head needs to be good at is speed.
The speed of your putts will be the key factor most of the time in a hit or a miss.
The problem is that most tips about putting get the speed all wrong.
Most people will tell you that you are trying to putt the ball a few inches past the cup.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.
Without going into why that is so silly let's just give you the real speed.
You want to putt the ball just fast enough so that it will stop at a point that would be right in the middle of the hole.
No faster, no slower.
You want the ball in the hole, and it will get there far more often if you putt it in such a way that it would actually stop in the hole and not somewhere past it.
Oh, but I'll leave my putts short! Nonsense, you see, this is where physics takes over.
A round object near an edge of any type will roll off the edge when its center approaches the edge.
If the ball is moving too fast, angular momentum will overcome this tendency to fall.
If the ball is almost at a stop, all you have to do is get just a bit of the ball, as much as half into the edge of the hole and it will quite naturally plop right into the cup because of gravity.
Therefore, the hole is actually much wider when it comes to getting the ball to fall right into it than the hole itself.
A golf cup is actually as wide plus another width of the ball on either side.
So you can practice your putting by doing this: Place one ball one inch behind the cup and another ball on either side a little more than half a ball width from the sides.
Then just move this target areas to a location where there is no cup.
That is the area you are trying to hit.
If you can putt a ball so that is ends up inside of these three balls without touching them, you will vastly improve your putting.
You will see that it is really easy to keep from hitting the ball hard enough to touch the ball on the back side of the cup when you are trying to keep from doing so.
Later, place your practice area back around a cup and do a few more strokes.
Your eyes and mind will begin to see the hole as much larger, and you will find your ball falling quite gracefully into the cup more often than ever before.
Using these tips when it comes to how to putt will also mean that you never have that six or ten foot putt coming back when you have tried to keep some "speed" on the ball and just went way past the hole instead.
Putt slower and let the ball find it's own way to fall into the cup and your putting will improve dramatically in a very short period of time.