To putt successfully, you need to be in the correct posture position. You should have a slight knee flex in your putting stance. If your knees are locked in a straight position, you're straining your back too much. Don't bend your knees too much, though, because you may start to look like a golf geek!
You should bend over from your waist so that your arms hang straight down. This stance allows the arms to swing in a pendulum motion, back and forth from a fixed point. Hold your arms straight out from your body as you are standing straight and tall.
Now bend down with those arms outstretched from the waist until your arms are pointing to the ground. Then flex your knees a little bit, and you're in the correct putting posture.
You can break a lot of rules in how you stand to hit a putt. (See Figure 1.) Ben Crenshaw stands open to the target line, his left foot drawn back. Gary Player does the opposite: He sets up closed, his right foot farther from the target line than his left. But that's their style.
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Figure 1: Putting stances are optional. |
As in a full swing, your toe stance line is the key. Regardless of which stance you choose, your toe stance line should always be parallel to your target line (refer to Figure 1). Be aware that the target line isn't always a straight line from the ball to the hole — if only putting were that simple. Unfortunately, greens are rarely flat, so putts break or bend either from right to left or from left to right.
So sometimes you're going to be aiming, say, 5 inches to the right of the hole, and other times maybe a foot to the left. (See Figure 2.) Whatever you decide, your toe stance line must always be parallel to your target line.
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Figure 2: Playing the break. |
Being parallel to your target line is important. In effect, you make every putt straight. Applying a curve to your putts is way too complicated and affects your stroke. Imagine how you have to adjust if you aim at the hole and then try to push the ball out to the right because of a slope on the green. You have no way to be consistent.
Keep putting simple. Remember, on curved putts, aim your feet parallel to the line you have chosen, not to the hole (see Figure 3).
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Figure 3: Feet are parallel to your putting line. |
Okay, now what about width of stance? Again, you have margin for error, but your heels need to be about shoulder-width apart at address, as shown in Figure 4.
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Figure 4: Heels and shoulders are the same width. |
You have to bend over to put the putter behind the ball. How far should you bend? Far enough so that your eye line (a much-neglected part of putting) is directly above the ball.
To find out how that position feels, place a ball on your forehead between your eyes, bend over, and let the ball drop, as shown in Figure 5. Where the ball hits the ground is where the ball should be in relation to your body. The ball shouldn't be to the inside, the outside, behind, or in front of that point. The ball should be right there, dead center.
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Figure 5: Align your eyes over the ball. |
This alignment places your eyes not just over the ball but also over the line that you want the ball to travel.
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