Dear Clive,
My personal experience has convinced me that the left hand is key to the stroke (right-hander), and that a steady grip pressure is one aspect of left-hand control. (This aspects is well understood by elite players, by the way, and a steady grip pressure is a fairly standard bit of putting lore, albeit not as well known or often repeated as it should be.) Other aspects include moving the whole left arm by the shoulder lifting with the pivot at the base of the neck rotating but not following or chasing the ball; back of left hand "slapping" flat and untwisting towards the sky sideways across the body; no lifting of hands by elbow action but keeping the hands low and heavy; full extension of the arms in a relaxed way to eliminate excess "play" in the triangle shape and to promote greater relaxation in biceps, pectorals, and top of back muscles; top of putter handle in left hand does not alter relationship to inside of wrist during stroke; and others.
As far as the right hand is concerned, this being taken as the dominant hand, the tendency is for the right hand to assert control at impact and into the follow-thru, right at the critically inappropriate moment. This control impulse comes from several sources: a) a lack of commitment to left-hand control; a general plan to send the ball "at" a distant target instead of a general plan to make the same-every-time stroke that sends the ball rolling straight away from the putter face to wherever it is aimed; a precision grip of the right hand in which the right thumb is affirmatively engaged with the handle of the putter; a taking back of the putter at the start with the hands and arms lifting the putter back from the ball instead of the lead shoulder dipping down and back to shove or tip the apex (putter head) of the triangle shape as a whole straight back from the ball; a general notion that the forward stroke from the top of the backstroke ought to be accelerated by the golfer rather than being patient at the transition and allowing the relaxed and somewhat slow transition of a gravity-sponsored free-fall back down towards the ball to transpire on its own timing terms; a "hit" mentality that causes the right hand grip pressure to "clutch" tighter in anticipation of impact; a slight failure of the shoulder frame to keep up with the "accelerated" speed of the arms and hands, so that the rear arm is crossing the abdomen of the torso into a follow-thru and this action tends to promote the right forearm bones to "fold" shut in the stroke and roll the right hand inside (a "pull" action) instead of keeping the right arm and elbow at the rear side and not allowing it to slide across the abdomen; and other things.
The basic cure for this is to train "thinking about" only the lead shoulder prior to the start of the stroke -- whatever body part you are consciously or even subconsciously thinking about or aware of at the critical time is the body part that will take control of the stroke and move. Put your conscious awareness on the ball of your shoulder socket, to the exclusion of any other part of the body (specifically eliminating consciousness of the hands and the right hand). It also helps to loosen the right thumb on the grip before doing this shoulder focus. Overall, slowing down the back-stroke, letting the back-stroke coast to its full position without curtailment, being patient at the top, and NOT accelerating down and thru impact by virtue of voluntary muscle action, but instead, staying relaxed and letting the putter drop freely into the bottom of the stroke under the natural and gradual accelerating forces solely of gravity to peak in speed exactly at the bottom of the stroke before using gut muscles to lift the lead shoulder socket up and back in a symmetrically continued pattern of decelerating motion to match the down-fall pattern in reverse while the pivot stays in place and the putter head coasts to a finish at the top of the thru-stroke without getting twisted off line to the inside but staying extended out and away from the feet as it rises flush towards the sky, thus levering up solidly into the back of the ball smoothly without rushing or hurrying or "hitting" the ball with a square putter face moving square and slightly rising at the very least over the absolutely important last one inch before impact and remaining square, straight, and rising for about 5-8 inches thereafter. There's a mouthful!
As far as target awareness, my experience has taught me that "awareness" in the sense of an explicit conscious image of the target being maintained in the mind's third eye while the stroke is being prepared and during execution is not helpful. Once the putter face is aimed, the aim of the putter face and the general intention to make the same-every-time straight stroke that rolls the ball straight away wherever the putter face is aimed is an IMPLICIT commitment to putt right at the target that does not get any added benefit from a conscious image of the target. At this time, my teaching is to "live only in your feet" -- that is, be happy with the ACTUAL visual experience confined to looking down at the ball and your feet, planning on making a straight stroke that rolls the ball right out of this scene over the same point off the left foot's big toe that a straight roll always goes over when the ball exits this scene. This keeps the mind vacant and transparent, and specifically uncluttered by mentation or consciously willed and generated images. There are additional tricks to control vision, to park vision in idle, to stare blankly at the ball, to look relaxedly at a blade of grass just in front of the putter sweetspot just before starting the stroke and keeping the gaze there interested only in what the grass blade looks like while the stroke is happening, and so forth -- all of which "kill" vision so that the kinesthetic processes of the brain can have their time in the sun with full resources and without interference for making the same-every-time movement that is always the same stroke.
There are a lot of other apects I could discuss about this, but let me only talk briefly about two: a) target awareness as a help to "where" to send the ball, and b) target awareness as a help to keeping hold of the sense of distance to the target.
First, the
image of the target or target awareness when actually making the stroke has some benefit to informing the golfer "where" to roll the ball, but really that help is not as substantial as many seem to think and is also totally unnecessary and indeed a source of confusion and bad strokes. If you aim the putter face, you have to aim it at the target. Once it is aimed, you have to believe and know that the target is located straight away from the putter face as it is aimed. If there is any source of confusion or doubt about "where" the target is located, you have done only a so-so job aiming the putter face to begin with and need to learn how to do it accurately. Once you know how to aim the putter face accurately, you have to perform the task correctly and then live with your performance, move along to the next step in the process (setting up the body to the putter face as aimed to make a straight stroke), and live with the results of putting straight -- if you miss with a straight stroke, due to indifferent aiming, you clearly know what went awry and what needs attention, and so your aiming learning progress is accelerated and you resolve not to miss from poor aiming in the future.
The use of a mental image of the target for purposes of helping (during the making of the stroke) get the direction of the stroke "corrected" in any manner that differs from the aim of the putter face is inherently a bad thing, as it is a source of doubt and odd stroke compensations and inappropriate activation of movement patterns other than the same-every-time pattern. Your aiming of the putter face encapsulates all you ever will need to know about the line the putt needs to start on -- it is the same as where the putter face is aimed, so just roll the ball straight away from the putter face, the same every time. In fact, once the putter face is aimed accurately, you could go eat a ham sandwich, take a nap, and come back into your routine and make a straight stroke that would head straight at the target! In terms of "line" for the stroke, there simply ins't anything to think about or get assistance for.
Second, the sense of distance from ball to target for purposes of touch or distance control is not something as transitory and evanescent as many golf instructors claim or as many golfers seem to believe. Nor does the sense get developed in a discrete, brief process of targeting right before starting the stroke -- whether "gathered" from behind the ball with face-forward practice strokes to "feel" the distance, or by practice strokes from beside the ball before sliding the putter head out to the ball for the real stroke, or similar techniques. To the contrary, the sense of the distance and touch for the putt starts as soon as the ball lands on the green and settles in a relationship to the hole, and builds from then forward all the time until the stroke is made and the ball stops rolling and for a short while thereafter. The specific techniques for sensing distance and touch in closer to the moment of execution of the stroke should be supplementing, complementing, and sharpening this building sense of distance. And even after the putt, the sense of distance for the specific putt remains pretty well until the golfer walks clear of the green headed to the next tee and starts focusing on the next shot. Then the golfer basically "releases" awareness of the putt and its distance as the focus shifts gears.
In my teaching, for putts up to about 25-30 feet, I advise golfers to walk behind the ball for sighting the line a distance that equals the ball-to-target distance. Doing this gives the golfer at least six separate doses of engagement with the distance of the putt leading right up to the execution of the stroke (estimating where to stand back from the ball, walking there from the ball, looking back to the ball to verify this from the new perspective, looking then from ball to hole, walking the line back into the ball, and then looking from ball to target before starting the stroke), and renders the trying to "feel" the distance with face-forward strokes back behind the ball as well as practice strokes beside the ball unnecessary, so their distraction from putt focus can be safely eliminated from the routine -- at least as far as sensing distance for touch is concerned. (You may still want the practice stroke to calm your nerves and to clear the body's cobwebs for the stroke's fluidity.) With the building sense of distance and especially with my technique, there simply isn't anything that "maintaining" target awareness by virtue of an image really adds, and the mentation it involves is definitely unhelpful.
The brain processes for visual awareness (looking around in the world and seeing mental images in the mind, both) and the processes for planning and executing movements take place in separate areas of the brain and at separate times, in a sequence. The visual information is fed forward in the time sequence to combine with body-awareness brain processes to help plan the movement; once the movement is planned and the execution draws near, visual processes are no longer useful. Continuing visual processes at this point with active directing of visual attention in the external world or with active generating and paying attention to internal mental images HURTS movement execution in two separate ways. First, the metabolic processes of energy consumption in the energy-greedy visual areas of the brain actively deprive the movement areas of precious resources at just the wrong time. Second, the informational "noise" generated by the visual system in attending to visual images (external or internal) sends unwelcome and distracting information into the movement areas interfering with execution of the set plan. So movement is both weakened AND beaten up by continuing the visual processing past its role in the sequence of events leading up to execution. It's better to kill your eyes once they have done their job.
Many people think that the eyes are still needed for accurate "hand-eye coordination" in the stroke, to make sure that the putter face comes into the back of the ball square and centered and is moving straight along the path. The prevailing notion is that without hand-eye coordination, an accurate stroke is far less likely to happen. But actually a good stroke is a combination of feed-forward control and feedback-sponsored corrections-in-progress. Between these two, the eyes are much less beneficial to feedforward control than to feedback corrections. And feedforward controls are the more important. If effective, feedforward controls render 'corrections" irrelevant or greatly reduced in importance. Feedforward controls are almost entirely based upon the "feel" of a good stroke as learned and practiced, and works with eyes closed and in the dark very, very well. So at most, the role of vision DURING the execution of the stroke is a) NOT to detract from feedforward "feel" of a good stroke, and b) at most to stabilize the body so that only the right parts are moving under feedforward control and the stroke is unhampered by extraneous motion and balance issues. The eyes, then, just stare straight and help keep the stroke simple, but there is nothing going on in terms of visual attention and processing that actually helps the motion. Indeed, visual detection of unwanted head movement is not at all a straightforward thing, as the eyes are trained to IGNORE head motion and keep the gaze steady on a point of fixation without awareness of head motion. So even using vision for this limited role is a learned art not normal to golfers.
The actual brain process that generates the appropriate length backstroke for green speed and target distance is handled by the cerebellum processing information generated by targeting motions (walking about, turning the head to look from ball to target, etc.). The cerebellum is emphatically not accessible to conscious experience. It influences and in fact "sets" the backstroke instinctively -- that is, by a biological process, not a conscious willed process. What the cerebellum does is no more open to conscious communication than is communicating with a cauliflower stapled on the back of the neck, or communicating with the kidney to encourage it to feel a certain way. This means that if you consciously worry about the length of the backstroke, fear that it is not going to get the ball all the way to the hole, decide that the stroke is going too slow for the backstroke and so the tempo needs speeding up, try to guestimate where the top of the backstroke should be reached for the distance of the putt, and the like conscious processes of attempting to control the backstroke, you are hampering the cerebellum's ability to get it right. Sticking strictly with the tempo, not rushing, and being content with whatever backstroke emerges are all essential to getting good touch for a putt. So consciously, at the time in the routine that starting the stroke draws near, "conscious" target awareness for touch needs to dissipate in favor of letting the cerebellum's exquisite control process emerge. This means not to worry about touch -- the necessary sense of touch has been built, so stand back and admire the results and let the putt transpire unhampered. At most, all I "think about" for touch is nothing more specific than the general intention to "roll the ball all the way into the hole" (not short, and not long) or "to the target," as serves best for the occasion. Then I turn total control over to non-conscious "instincts" and get out of my own way.
In the above, I speak about a consciously maintained image of the target at the time the stroke is executed. But target awareness or consciousness of target does not have to be in the form of a mental image of the target. Nor does it have to be explicit -- at least when it's time to make the stroke. I DO find that attending to and promoting a vivid and accurate sense of where the hole itself is located in reference to where you are standing early on in the routine substantially aids the further development of the routine inwards towards execution. Later, as the sense of the breaking path develops, the path as a whole or a straight start line and an end-point target near the hole grows in awareness, building upon the underlying sense of where the hole is located. As the plan for the putt goes forward and you pick a startline for aiming the putter face and develop a sense of the required touch, the target awareness becomes incorporated into your body and its forthcoming action of the stroke and there is simply the view at your feet as the mind clears. The closer the golfer gets to pulling the trigger, the less there is in the mind and the clearer the mind becomes. The ultimate putt just happens and the golfer doesn't seem to be part of it, but more usually the golfer just needs to count to two with same-every-time tempo or remind himself to get the ball all the way to the hole or something simple but not quite with a vacant mind seemingly performing without conscious direction.
In this regard, I find it very interesting that the title of John Feinstein's book about basketball great Bill Bradley is "The Sense of Where You Are." Great title for athletes! Targeting is premised upon the ability to live in your skin, in the moment, where you actually are, and nothing else. From your body into the immediate external world, the world as it actually is, this basic awareness of body location is the foundation for accurately sensing the location of targets in the scene in relation to your body. More specifically, your sense of targets is developed strictly in relation to ACTION with respect to the target by your movement from where you are. Picking up a glass off a side table starts with accurately sensing where you are in relation to the glass and table AND sensing how your body needs to move to extend the hand and shape the hand to take hold of the glass securely. So it is in putting. You start with where you are, and you aim your same-every-time stroke motion, which really means you aim the putter face "at" the target and then use a stroke that is appropriately sized and same-tempoed based on your sense of the target distance and green speed. So, yes, I believe target awareness is very important, but it's really the relationship between where you are and the developing sense of where the target is, considered exclusively in terms of your forthcoming action of rolling the ball across the intervening surface to the target. I just don't like the visual aspect of the target "image" being held in mind. It's not necessary and it detracts from the feel of the same-every-time stroke.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
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