I feel that, after a couple of months of work, I am making progress with my putting. If it stays where it has been for the past four rounds then I'll be improving by almost two strokes per round. Time will tell if the improvement is permanent, but I am optimistic (which is not a term that I would have used WRT my putting earlier this year).

However I ran into two "psycho-physical" (if it isn't a word, then it should be) things that I'm posting here for Geoff's comments.

The first is what I think of as "The Gravity Trap". I found the feeling of a truly weightless putter to be very seductive. It is a peculiarly satisfying feeling to start your backswing and then relax and kind of follow the club up to the top and through the ball feeling virtually no resistance/weight. But I found myself focusing on achieving this feeling on the course to the point that it was a detriment. Specifically I would sometimes find myself (subconsciously) making mid-stroke corrections trying to keep the putter absolutely weightless. Ultimately it did not yield good on-course results and probably delayed progress at least a month.

These days my stroke has the tempo that can generate a weightless putter, but the on-course focus is tempo and not 'gravity results'. Interestingly I notice (particularly when practicing lag putts) that the best putts are almost envariably those that generate that truly weightless putter. But that has to be something that you just let happen - in my case too much focus on achieving that result can be problematic.

Is this common - or am I missing something?

The second psycho-physical element is Quiet vs. Dead hands. Keeping the hands out of the stroke and using a shoulder-rocking motion seems almost trivially simple. But early in my putting transition I came to the realization that, while I was rocking my shoulders to achieve a straight-through stroke, I was still mentally 'managing my hands'. Instead of my shoulder-rocking dragging my hands straight back and pushing them straight through, I was moving them back/through as I rocked my shoulders.

The difference, while visually imperceptible, is huge. I will occasionally have just a tinge of the YIPS. If my hands are truly dead then (in my case) there are absolutely no funny motions with my hands - and better puting results.

Have you run into this with others? I did an interesting exercize for just a couple of days to try to 'teach my shoulders to truly take charge'. I would intentionally line up left (or right) of the intended target line and use only shoulder motion to hit the ball on the target line. I'm not sure that this is a good long term drill, but it was an interesting (and difficult) exercize to try to "truly" take the hands out of the stroke.

dave

Dear Dave,

Touch comes from timing. Gravity just gives you a reliable timimg. But gravity does not give a true pendulum motion or timing in the human shoulder stroke except from the top of the backstroke down into the impact zone, and the timing needs a wee bit of help in the upward motion of the putter thru impact.

To get out of the "gravity trap", try moving the lead shoulder socket down and under (going back) and then back to level and then past level up and back (to top of thrustroke) and paying attention to the timing of the shoulder socket. You will learn that keeping the shoulder moving until the timing is complete is a valuable key to touch or distance control. This makes the stroke a little more than just the free-fall dropping of the putter.

A true pemdulum is a rod attached at a pivot. But the human shoulder stroke is not like that -- the backstroke is effortful, the dropping back to level and impact is basically an effortless relaxation, but the body tissue resists the continuing momentum of the stroke heading up to the finish. In other words, the shoulder stroke, left to its own devices, stalls out after impact. The arms and hands and putter, though, will continue on past the stalled shoulder frame, in something of a "flapping" that is really a tethered "pull" around the feet. A conscious effort to "catch" the free-falling pace of the downstroke and then continue it upward past impact by raising the lead shoulder socket seems to be a needed addition to a gravity free-fall. The way I think of the timing of the raising of the shoulder socket past impact is to keep the lead shoulder moving just slightly ahead of the pendulum-like swinging of the putter head to avoid any stalling out. The shoulder frame stays coordinated with the putter head's "flowing" motion this way, without adding hit to the action. And in my view, the direction of the lead shoulder raising needs to be vertical, straight up from the balls of the lead foot.

Because the lead shoulder has a role to play thru and past impact, there is the issue of coordinating the hands and the shoulders in the thrustroke. In my view, the lead shoulder socket "pulls the train" uphill, with the upper arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, and putter all following the movement power of the "engine" of the lead shoulder. This way, there is a slight sense or feel of the rest of the arm below the shoulder "lagging" thru the impact zone. And the limb and hands never outrace the movement of the lead shoulder.

I don't want the image of the engine pulling the train uphill to imply much real muscle activity or force in the thru stroke. I really mean that the shoulder socket moves up slightly ahead of the free-falling putter head, and this slight movement leads the rest of the limb and the putter. It's more of a symmetric continuation in reverse of the downward acceleration of the shoulder frame and putter from the top of the backstroke to the impact zone. From the top of the backstroke, the putter starts coasting down on its own and gathers more and more speed until the shoulders level out at the bottom of the stroke, and then the pattern reverses and the putter coasts slowing to a stop at the top of the thrustroke, about as high as the top of the backstroke, but only if the lead shoulder gets out of the way without adding anything (or much) to the stroke timing.

Thus, there is no issue of left-wrist breakdown in a true shoulder stroke -- the hands are dead and the wrists have no activity at all.

I would hope that including this essential action of the lead shoulder thru and past impact would take the focus off the hands entirely. The hands have no reason to notice anything in the feel of the stroke unless the stroke is off somehow, so ignoring the hands in the stroke should be the normal approach. Naturally, this is not always going to be the case, and some attention to the thumbs, for example, helps keep the shoulder action on track.

I like your suggestion for challenging the body to focus upon the shoulder action, and I'll try it out!

Let me know what you think.

Incidentally, I've read your posts on this issue in rec.sport.golf and was speaking with teacher Rob Akins today about it. he said he played with Ben Crenshaw some at the Masters and saw that his stroke then was so gravity-based that the putter head slowed after impact upon losing momentum to the ball, almost to the point of a limp follow-thru. he speculated that perhaps it was just something applicable to the dangerously fast greens at Augusta National.

My take on this is that the voluntary movement of the lead shoulder upward and backward past level to the conclusion of the stroke's timing both gets you out of the "gravity trap" and back to dead hands.

Cheers!

Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
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Thanks for the complete (as always) response, Geoff. I've been kind of 'dithering about' regarding the value of working towards timing that generates a 'truly weightless putter' (and in that case the putter truly does lose momentum to the ball, and you can feel that). I think that I can quite dithering now

dave