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 Putt 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 putt 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 putting, 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 the data what the data shows.
Because at the end of the day, it's all about making putts.
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 Putt Lab this year and just said I'm not going to think of anything.
I'm just going to set up there and putt and do what I do naturally.
And then this on the left is showing after I've made some adjustments and been practicing a little bit.
I'm 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 then 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, 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 some of the from the first putting video that I did, that the path is far less important than the actual face angled impact.
And in the case of my baseline, I was Degrees closed.
And, as I mentioned before, on a standard, you know, typical good birdie putt that you're taking a look at.
A 15-16 footer.
If you're one degree off, you will miss the putt, you'll miss the hole.
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'll 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, obviously it's a much shorter stroke, so it doesn't show up as severely.
It's 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 is only Degrees left, and I'm very consistently getting that same path.
So now we can.
As the stroke is is markedly improved, worrying about face angle becomes much more easy to focus in and dial in on as I 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 gonna 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, because the distance or 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 I tend to do pretty consistently, don't tend to worry too much about that.
It's really about figuring out this face angle 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 clubface as close back to square to Inside of 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 I have my normal putting stroke, which was leading to a ton of pulls, a ton of missed putts.
Struggling with distance control, but mostly just yanking the ball left and not making nearly as many putts as I should.
And on the right, I have video of the grip change that I made now I realize in 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 gonna go and actually walk you through the script.
Change for Rotary Swing Academy members.
Because I want you guys to test this and experiment with it and give me feedback before we share this with everybody because 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 right bicep and no forearm.
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 this grip 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.
I think it 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 pull, 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, remember, it's just one degree off from this distance is enough to miss the putt.
So by having my forearms misaligned, you can see my forearms as we come down into impact, which is right about there, my forearms.
If you put a shaft across them, would be pointing well left of 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 compared 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 forearms 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 dress, similar to where my forearms are pretty much where they were at address.
On the left hand side as well, but on the right hand side, they're actually square, which helps me know that the putter face is square as well.
So as this ball rolls nice and true more into the center of the cup, at least I made it.
And then just one more stroke here, you can see again just a hair of that right.
Forearm.
Forearms are basically in really good alignment here.
And so 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 up 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 give me comments and post feedback on, because I want you guys to test this out first, all right, Rotary Swing Academy members, I need your help.
I want you to test this grip change, and I want to explain what, what we're doing and why.
So, first of all, I want you 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 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, 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 with the 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 PuttLab is all about.
Sam PuttLab measures everything down to the hundredth of a degree, which is way more precise and accurate than we're ever 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, you know, hit and giggle fun tournament.
But I watched countless putts, including my own being missed on the left side of the hole with pulls, and I started noticing a very consistent trait.
And I said, 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 had 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 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, very easy to get your wrist to be very handsy, to have a very handsy putting stroke.
If you struggle with the yips and you've got your thumbs kind of going down the shaft, well, the right wrist can bend in this way and the left wrist can bend in this way, so it's very easy to be very handsy.
So a lot of golf instructors, including the one that I worked under at that time, had me take my wrists and externally rotate them.
So now that the wrist when you try to move on, this one doesn't work, 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.
At least it did in my case, that as I externally rotated my left arm, you'll see that it rotates my arm back and puts my right hand into a position where it wants to be on top and dominant.
And so when I'm saying on top, you see my forearms are pointed to the left at address.
And, of course, as you saw on the Sam Putt lab data, that my stroke tended to go a little outside.
I Degrees closed with my or out to end with my stroke, which caused the putt club face to be a degree and a half closed.
And that's enough to completely miss the hole 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 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 wood 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, it's 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 this silky, smooth putting stroke and make every putt that I look at.
And then, as I started thinking about, 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, let'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 Putt Lab 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 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, it made a huge difference in the data, right?
Going from two and a half degrees shut to, you know, 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 and you'll see that this grip change that I want you to test for yourself in just a minute is makes a huge difference from my setup when you look at it from up the line which is 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 a straight putt and see where you look at address are your shoulders cockeyed are your forearms cockeyed can you see your right forearm on top of the left can you see it under the left the goal is that these should match because we want this 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 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 it more or less matches my right forearm this made a huge difference in my stroke and my face angle and all I 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 Faxson all tend to use skinny grips more like this one 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 uh I don't you know I'm not don't tend to be very handsy 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 and 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 wristy with it but some of the best putters I've ever seen on the tour over the history of the years have all had thinner grips and what's interesting about it is this grip change that I made works really well with a thinner grip but in this case I have kind of a mid-sized grip but you'll see as you start setting your hands on here that how the grip will make a big difference in this but you'll understand how it affects forearm alignment so let me show you first what we're going to do I'm going to get my fingers the grip more into my fingers so from up here 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 your arm like so many golfers do nowadays to get it take the wrist out of the stroke it puts 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 axis tilt right so your right hand has to be lower on the club than the left well 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 stepped up to the ball and I the best putters I've ever seen have all been you know very neutral looking very relaxed at a setup and with a neutral grip oh my gosh if I could just putt like that it seems and feels so much more natural but I just pull everything well this was why so now with the putting stroke you don't have all this crazy axis tilt 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 closed 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 yipping it you may have a decent smooth stroke but if you're aligned incorrectly 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 by 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 forearms into much better alignment so now i'm not cockeyed like this and and you know pulling the putts this also gave me another benefit that i asked craig morrow about who's the certified rotary spring 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 natural he 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 feel with their right hand and and so i've kind of always felt it's a little bit more of a right-handed stroke that's where my sensitivity and my touch and 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 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 you 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 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 yips do is you know kind of get a little right wrist pop in there so this has two benefits it has the benefit of getting your forearms aligned without you having to try and add some crazy axis tilt in there to get your right hand below the left and it also starts aligning yourself with the same things that made me wanted to go left hand low which 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 like oh well let me i'm really right-eyed dominant i had 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 tell me to play the ball off my front foot i've talked 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 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 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 putt lab making different variable tests so the first one that i want you to try is this left hand 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 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 the corner of the club to kind of be in the lifeline this is the opposite we're getting it in the pad 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 i've seen most people tend to pull their putts and then and post down in 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 etc 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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