Left Hand Grip for Perfect Putting Stroke
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This putting grip tweak can have a HUGE impact on your putting stroke, give it a try and see if helps you stop pulling putts! RSA members, please provide your feedback with this test and let me know how it performs for you!
Do you have a tendency to pull putts? I did horribly. And so using the Sam pet lab, I've been starting to work out what's causing it and making little changes and then testing those changes and see what the data shows to start getting myself to the point where I should put as well as I hit the ball. And I've made huge strides so far, I'm at about four and a half to five strokes improved in my pudding, which is absurd, especially for a plus handicap golfer, to be able to take that many strokes off just from the putting stroke. But you'll see why in this video, because I want you to test something. I tested something today. I'm going to show you both in video, what I did and in in the data, what the data shows, because at the end of the day, it's all about making pods.
And if the face angle is point where it's supposed to be at address or at impact, we're going to be in good shape. So I just want to, the baseline data I have is here on the right. This was the very first time I got on the pet lab this year. And just to, I'm not gonna think of anything. I'm just gonna set up there and put and do what I do naturally. And then this on the left is showing after I've made some adjustments and then practicing a little bit, not too concerned about the static stuff, the stuff that's happening at setup, I'm more concerned with what's happening during the stroke. And that's what we're going to start to look at. So on the right hand side, you can see that I was pretty severely swinging to the left and an at the end of this video, in a moment, I'm going to show you on video, what was causing that?
And then the change I made in my grip that started fixing this because it made a lot of other changes in my setup. And so if you have a tendency to pull putts and make sure you stay on to the end of this video, because I want you to try this fix that I put into play and see what it does in your own putting stroke. So at impact, you can see that on the right hand side, I was 2.4 degrees left. Now that's pretty severe. But as you know, from, from some of the, from the first pudding video that I did, that the path is far less important than the actual face angle to impact. And in the case of my baseline, I was 1.4 degrees closed. And as I mentioned before on a standard typical, good birdie putt that you're taking a look at 15, 16 footer.
If you're one degree off, you will miss the putt, you'll miss the whole. So it's very, very critical to be inside of that one degree at impact which I've accomplished here. I'm much closer. I'd love to get it to zero, but you know, half a degree of improvement is a significant improvement on a 15, 16 foot putt, because it means I can actually make it now. So no point in hitting a great drive and a great iron shot, and then missing the putt by a mile simply because the putter face was pointing the wrong place at impact. You will also see that my path is markedly improved. I went from 2.4 degrees swinging left, which is the equivalent of a out to end over the top golf swing. But with putting, you know, the, obviously it's a much shorter stroke, so it doesn't show up as severely as very difficult to see even on high-speed video.
It's why you have to have a tool like this to really see what's going on dynamically at impact. And you can see now my path has only 0.6 degrees left, and I'm very consistently getting that same path. So now we can, as the stroke is, is markedly improved, worrying about facing will becomes much more easy to focus in and dial in on as I've become much more consistent with my stroke. You'll also see that the, the actual stroke itself when you can visualize it, this dotted line represents basically a straight back and straight through putting stroke, or really just the target line, if you will. And my putting stroke before on the right, you would see have a tendency to go outside and I'm going to pretty much all of these. I took it to the outside and now the putter is more consistently starting on the line one little outside there, one little goofy, but it's much more consistently following the path instead of swinging kind of out and over the top.
And this is again, due to the grip change that I'm going to show you in just a minute. This also had an impact on where I was hitting the ball in the face. You can see at the beginning, I very consistently hit it in the heel and still kind of all over the face. And now the concentration, the grouping is getting a lot tighter and it's less severe towards the heel. So that is also making a big difference in the quality of the strike because where you're hitting it in the face. If you have a tendency to kind of hit it way out on the toe or way out on the heel, it'll it'll affect distance control control, cause the distance or the the solidness of the strike will be impacted. So you may start leaving some short, you may nuke some it's very difficult when you're hitting it inconsistently on the face. This stuff here tend to do pretty consistently. Don't tend to worry too much about that. It's really about figuring out the space single and path, and making the adjustments to your body, to get yourself, to be able to make a consistent stroke and get yourself to get the club face as close back to square to 0.0 inside a one degree on every single stroke and make sure that that path is squared up. So let's take a look at the video now. Okay.
So on the left left, I have my normal putting stroke, which was leading to a ton of pools, a ton of missed putts struggling with distance control, mostly just yanking the ball left and not making nearly as many parts as I should. And on the right, I have video of the grip change that I made. Now, I realize in this view, it's, while you can see somewhat of the grip change, it's difficult to understand everything. So I want to use this video just to point out what you'll see in the setup. And then I'm going to go and actually walk you through the script change for rotary swing academy members. Cause I want you guys to test this and experiment with it and give me feedback before we share this with everybody, I want everybody to have a chance to, I want the RSA members have a chance to test this out and give us some feedback first.
So on the left-hand side, you can see the most obvious difference is that you can see a ton of my right arm, right? This is all right, forearm, right, bicep here. And on the right hand side, you can just barely see my bicep and no form. And that is all done just by a grip change. It may seem like I'm trying to turn my shoulders or something like that, but this is really just the script change that I want you to test out. And what you'll notice is that, again, as I, before my stroke tended to go a little bit to the outside and then kind of pull it, I think it was 2.4 degrees left. So I was stroking, my stroke was swinging to the left and the putter face was closed on top of it, just a big old pool.
So you'll see here. This one is after a little bit of practice, I still hit a little bit of a pull here and missed the putt. And again, it remembers just one degree off from this distance is enough to miss the putt. So by having my forms misaligned and see my forms as we come down into impact, she's right about there, my forms, if you put a shaft across them would be pointing well left to the target. Now let's look at the stroke on the right. You can see. Now my left forearm is clearly covering the right forearm and my shoulders. This helps square my shoulders up a little bit more as well. You can see the left, you can see less of my shirt around my midsection here on the right hand side, then you can compare it to the left.
You can see a little bit less of the logo on my shirt and so on. So this is just helping, getting everything with my upper body squared up a little bit better. And more importantly, what directly immediately affects the path of the club, which is what my, how my forms are aligned. So as you'll see here, as I go back into impact right there, my forearms are almost perfect alignment, almost exactly where they were to address similar to where in my forums were pretty much where they were at address on the left-hand side as well. Then on the right hand side, they're actually square, which helps me know where that the putter face is square as well. So is this ball rolls nice and true more into the center of the cup. At least I made it. And then just one more stroke hearing.
See again, just a hair of that right. Form forms are basically in really good alignment here and say, now as I let this play through, I should make a nice, good stroke and the ball rolls pretty true. So let's take a look at the grip of close again. This is just for RSA members so that you guys can test this out and give me feedback. So the second half of the video, you need to be an RSA member to, to watch and, and give me comments and post feedback on, cause I want you guys to test this out first,
All right, rotor, spring academy members. I need your help. I want you to test the script change and I want to explain why, what we're doing and why. So, first of all, I want you to do, to understand the whole purpose of what I'm doing. The purpose of this is to teach you a simple, repeatable, super consistent, super reliable, accurate putting stroke. As I've talked about in the PR in the first video, how critical face alignment is, one degree is so difficult to see with the naked eye. You can see it, but it's very difficult. And so it's really hard, especially when you're looking at your swing, just on video, your stroke, just on video, to see all of this stuff within naked eye with, even with high-speed cameras. It's very difficult to see. So what I wanted to do is start giving everybody fundamentals that would allow everybody across the board to start putting better.
And as you've seen, I've already shaved about five strokes off my own putting stroke, which had a huge impact on my scores, just because I've started working through fundamentals that are data-driven, which is of course what the Sam putt lab is all about. Sam PuttLab measures everything down to the hundredth of a degree, which is way more precise and accurate than wherever we're going to be. But what it lets you do is start to really understand what's really affecting when you miss a putt. And for me personally, and for many, many golfers across the planet, there's a lot of pulled putts. In fact, I just played in a golf tournament this weekend with some amateur golfers. It was a hit and giggle fun tournament, but I watched countless putts, including my own being missed on the left side of the hole with pools. And I started noting this noticing a very consistent trait.
And I said, well, I'm going to video my stroke from up the line and see if I see the same thing. And so I did, and I noticed that from up the line, it was very evident to see that my right forearm was above my left. Now part of this is something just, I didn't realize that I was doing it. And second thing is that part of it was the stuff that I was taught and the taught other students over the years that allowed me to kind of get into this bad habit. And that is many, many years ago, I had it an instructor who was working with me when I was still trying to make it as a pro. And he had me get my hands externally, rotated like this as much as I could within reason. And the reason for this was that your wrists are now opposing each other.
If you try to move your wrist this way, well, that one doesn't work that way. Whereas when most golfers, if they take their hands like this, easy to get your risks to be very handsy, to have a very handsy putting stroke, if you struggle with it hips, and you've got your thumbs kind of going down the shaft while the right wrist can bend in this way and the left wrist I've been in this way. So it's very easy to be very handsy. So a lot of times instructors, including the one that I worked under at that time had me take my wrists and externally rotate them. So now that the risk, when you try to move on this one doesn't or want to work and bend in that direction, and it does give you a much simpler stroke, it takes the hands out of the stroke.
However, it also does another thing Elisa did in my case that as I externally rotate in my left arm, you'll see that it's rotates my arm back and puts my right hand into a position where it wants to be on top and dominant. And so what I'm saying on top, you see my forms are pointed to the left at address. And of course, as you saw on the Sam PuttLab data that my stroke tended to go a little outside. I was 2.4 degrees closed with my, or out to end with my stroke, which caused the club face to be a degree and a half closed. And that's enough to completely miss the whole on a 15 foot putt easily. So understanding the critical importance of being inside that one degree, we have to have that putter face very precise at impact and having a stroke that allows for that and a setup that allows for that is the goal.
Now for me, the, the benefits of the dead drill are that it helps you understand how to fix stuff when it goes wrong, right? Golf is so much for so many people, just all about feel and they try something different every day. We call that chopping woods swing, thoughts that work only one day, you don't want to chop wood with your full swing. You don't want to do with your putting stroke either. And trust me, I have chopped tons of wood with my putting stroke, because I have tried everything under the sun to try and improve, and finally just gave up and said, you know what? I'm just not a good putter. I'm just not born with it, right? I'm not ever going to be like a Lauren Roberts or a Brad Faxon and just have the silky smooth putting stroke and make every putt that I look at.
And then as I started thinking about it, it doesn't make any sense. The stroke is so simple. Why could it possibly be that I can't, I can hit a 350 yard drive and I can't make a three foot putt. It doesn't make any sense. And so I started saying, okay, let's just take the same approach to putting that I have with full swing. Let's look at everything. Analytically, it's look at things logically, it's all cause and effect based relationships, right? If you input a, you should get output B, if you input C and it's wrong, you're going to get output D or E. And these things all start to work together. And they're very simple to understand. And in the putting stroke, when you have a tool like the Sam PuttLab, that can allow you to measure and quantify everything, it becomes very clear immediately to know exactly what you're doing wrong in your stroke.
And then we combine that with video and you can see the whole picture of knowing exactly what you need to do to fix your putting stroke. So for me, as you saw made a huge difference in the data, right? Going from two and a half degrees shut to, you know, 0.4 degrees or whatever it was you know, with my path made a huge difference, made a huge difference in my face angle. And all I did was make a grip change. You'll see that the script change that I want you to test for yourself and just a minute is makes a huge difference from my setup. When you look at it from up the line, just how I want you to video this when you're practicing. So go out, take your phone, put it on a little tripod up the line on it, straight putt, and see where you look at address are your shoulders.
Cockeyed are your forms. Cockeyed, can you see your right forum on top of the left? Can you see it under the left? The goal is that these should match because we want the stroke to be as simple as we can possibly make it. And so if we're trying to compensate for a bad setup, then we're just adding way too much variable and way too many variables into the stroke and the putting stroke. We want to make it as simple as humanly possible. So by getting my left forearm into position where more or less matches my right forearm, this made a huge difference in my stroke and my face angle. And all that did was something that I've seen many golfers do for many years, which has never really made a ton of sense to me because golfers like this, like tiger woods and Brad, Faxon all tend to use skinny grips, more like this.
All right, this has got a much thinner profile. This grip is much thicker, much deeper and overall just a much fatter grip, which is the trend nowadays, right? You see so many golfers out there with these giant grips and I've tried them. They feel bizarre to me. I've never putted well with those either. I don't, you know, I'm not, I don't tend to be very handy with my stroke, but just like anybody else every now and then that right-hand wants to take over when I make a bad stroke. So I always thought, well, gosh, it makes sense to have a fatter grip and then this thin grip, because that makes it really easy to get the club in your fingers and get kind of rusty with it. But some of the best putters I've ever seen on the tour over the history years have all had thinner grips.
And what's interesting about it is this descript change that I made works really well with a thinner grip. But in this case I have kind of a mid size yeah. His grip. But you'll see, as you start setting your hands, how the grip will make a big difference in this, but you'll understand how it affects form alignment. Let me show you first what we're going to do. I'm going to sh get my fingers, the grip more into my fingers. So from a pier, you'll see that I'm basically getting my pad of my Palm more on top of the grip. Now, what this is doing is it's putting the club more down my fingers. Whereas if you externally rotate, hate your arm, like so many golfers do nowadays to get it, take the risk out of the stroke, it puts, is it more into the Palm slightly versus the fingers?
As soon as you do this and you rotate your hand over this way, you'll see how it wants to get your hand on top. Now, why does that happen? Well, in the putting stroke or in the full swing, the way that we avoid getting our shoulders really open at setup is we have access tilt, right? So your right hand has to be lower on the club than the left. Of course, unless you're putting left hand low, which is also fine, but I wanted to have a very natural feeling, putting stroke. I wanted to feel like I just up to the ball and I, the best pictures I've ever seen of all, then, you know, very neutral looking, very relaxed at a setup and with a neutral grip. Oh my gosh. If I could just put like that, it seems, it feels so much more natural, but I just pull everything.
Well, this was hi. So now with, with the putting stroke, you don't have all this crazy access till in order to get your shoulders to be square. So with a tendency, and this is what I was seeing, observing with all these amateur golfers this weekend in this tournament is that they set up like this because they're sitting up nice and tall and it helps them look at the hole. So they set up kind of open. So now you've got this tendency to kind of pull across and swing across with a close face. And that's how you start missing a ton of putts. Even though you feel like you've got a good putting stroke, you know, you may not be hipping it, you may have a decent, smooth stroke, but if you're aligned at setup, all bets are off and you're going to make some sort of crazy compensations to try and make up for it.
We don't want any compensations simple. That is the goal of the putting stroke. That's what we're trying to do here. So getting the club more into the fingers of the left hand and getting the pad more on top of the grip, not only does this get my forms into much better alignment. So now I'm not cockeyed like this. And sh you know, pulling the putts. This also gave me another benefit that I asked Craig Morrow about. Who's the certified rotary swing instructor. Many of you guys know him taking lessons with him, and he's also still to this day, one of the best putters I've ever seen. And he's very naturally puts with the conventional grip and he steps up there and just looks like he's going to make every putt. And he darn near does. And I asked him, what does he feel in his putting stroke?
Because to me, I've tended to kind of always feel, you know, you see a lot of golfers out there. Tiger does this a lot, go out on the, putting green and get the field with their right hand. And, and so I've kind of always felt that's a little bit more of a right-handed stroke. That's where my sensitivity and my touching my feel is Craig said, he feels the exact opposite. He feels that he just pulls through with the left hand and the right hand doesn't do anything. Oh, that's really interesting. It's the opposite of what I would have expected because he looks very natural and fluid and looks like the club just releases releases perfectly, but he feels left-handed when I was able to get my left hand on top, I instantly changed this feel. It changes the way that the club sits in your hands and the way that the hand activates the left wrist activates at this point, versus this kind of makes it dead.
As soon as you get the left hand on top, it feels like, gosh, I don't even need my right hand there anymore. It just feels like this just wants to swing back and forth and have more, more of a pulling stroke, which is, you know, from a physics perspective is a much more stable way. We're pulling the club through the hitting area instead of hitting at the ball, which is what a lot of golfers who struggle with the ups. Do, you know, kind of get a little right wrist pop in there. So this has two bins. It has the benefit of getting your forms aligned without you having to try and add some crazy access tilt in there to get your right hand below the line. And it also starts aligning yourself with the same things that made me want it to go left hand low is left-hand low.
Naturally puts you in a position to want to pull the club through the hitting stroke. And that really made a big difference in my putting, but it just never felt natural. It never felt comfortable. I felt like I was, you know, always trying to like, just keep everything rigid. And so I wanted to again, have a natural feeling, conventional putting stroke with very simple fundamentals, getting everything set up perfectly square. So you don't have to think about it. When stuff goes off, you have to just go back and look at the basics, right? If, if you're one of these people like me, who's tried 50,000 different things. Well, let me, I'm really right. Eye dominant has somebody told me I need to play the ball off my back foot and then get my, my wrist to do this. And then I had somebody to tell me to play the ball off my front foot.
I've taught wide stance, all of this stuff. And it's just all of it works once, right? I, you know, you change your focus for a minute. You have something different to think about some other distraction. And you know, you go out and you put better for a day or two, but eventually it all falls off. And then you're like back to square one searching. How do I get back? And the goal with this for me was to give everybody a set of simple fundamentals, just like the dead drill. When you do, if you don't shift your weight, this is going to be the result. If you don't turn your hips, this is going to be the result. Same thing with the putting stroke. If I get you set up correctly and get myself set up correctly, then all of a sudden you can see the data verifies that this stroke is more repeatable.
It's more consistent. It's giving the desired results. And more importantly, when I get off in the future, I can go back and just say, oh, well, I'm set up incorrectly. My grip has changed. My posture has changed. All of these things are what we're testing with the Sam, PuttLab making different variable tests. So the first one that I want you to try is this left-hand and grip. I want you to try and get the left-hand more into your fingers to get your pad more on top. This is going to put the, the wrist, the back of the hand, more down the target line, or even slightly to the right of it versus this position where a lot of people are teaching. And as I did in the past myself, getting the corner of the club to kind of be in the lifeline. This is the opposite.
We're getting it in the had. So I would love to hear your feedback. Again, I'd love for you to video your swing up the line and take a look to see if you're open at first, at all, because of sin, most people tend to pull their putts and then, and post down the comments below, as you made this change, did you see a change in your, in the putts made? Did you change how your putting stroke felt? Did you start making more putts, et cetera? So I'd love to hear your feedback on this. I'm going to keep testing it. I'm going to keep trying things piece by piece. We're doing things. One thing at a time to give you a simple and repeatable putting stroke.
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