Practice your Putting

I ran into this simple, yet effective putting practice idea the other day at the Golfclub Gross Kienitz. They just drilled two smaller putting holes into their putting green, both barely wider than a golfball. Now, if you practice on these holes and you manage to sink your putts after a while, you surely will hit it dead center on the regular-sized holes.

One other thing that finally sunk in is the revolutionary insight that when I swing slower, I am able to hit the ball more precisely. Wow! The people that have played golf with me know what I am talking about. For the last years I used to thrash at the ball as if I wanted to kill it. It worked for a while, but then resulted in loss of accuracy.

The proof that swinging slowly works came on the Par 4 seventh hole of the Vodafone course. You have to manouver your tee shot through the constriciton guarded by high grass on the left and the pond on the right and then face a narrow fairway to the green. My seven wood off the tee landed perfectly on the left side of the fairway, leaving me 155 meters to the green. The following six iron made it to the fringe of the green on a perfect straight line down the fairway. And I didn’t even try to hit it hard, I just let the club do the work. So that was what my pro was telling me all the years. It just needed some time to sink in.