Dear Scott,
Your question about the relationship between weight and feel brings up a very interesting point about how the brain works. In the course of this discussion, I hope it clarifies your concerns.
Golfers talk about "feel" as if it is a horse that is required to pull the cart of successful distance control. The fundamental reality is that distance control is timing, not feel. What golfers think about as "feel" is mostly an association between the awareness of the body and its parts as they relate to the mass and shape of the putter during the stroke movement. Within a pretty wide range of masses, WHATEVER the mass of the putter and the feelings of the body during moving the putter, distance control is timing. So long as the velocity of the putter head at impact is correct, the momentum transferred to the ball will impart the appropriate rolling so that the ball rolls the correct distance.
The confusion seems to arise from the "naive" (i.e., common-sensical but inaccurate and somewhat uninformed) view that summoning up a distinct "feel" sense for a given putt's distance is what is CAUSING the golfer to make the well-timed stroke that gives the ball the right rolling for the distance. This is not how the brain works for distance control.
What the brain really does is take an assessment of the mass of the golf ball (and its cover hardness or softness), the mass of the putter head, and the speed of the green along with any uphill-downhill or other additional green considerations, and then combine these basic unchanging aspects with an internal tempo and an awareness of the distance from ball to target in terms of the action of the stroke. The assessment may be one made "on the spot" with little or no prior familiarity, or may be one informed by years of experience with the same ball, putter, and a variety of greens.
The tempo is the same-every-time duration of the stroke at least from top of backstroke to impact and probably really from the start of the stroke to the end of the thrustroke. A pendulum of a given length has only one tempo in a given gravitational field, and would be different on earth and on the moon, but generally on earth GRAVITY will give YOUR putting system always the same tempo. In contrast, your voluntary efforts to manufacture a tempo different from gravity requires a learning process and involves concerns of memory and faithful repetition under various conditions. (Voluntarily chosen tempos are always faster than the tempo of gravity.) The stability and consistency of whatever tempo you habitually use determines your ability to correlate the velocity of the putter head at impact with the velocity needed for the given distance of the putt.
Tempo is like gearing in a race car. The lower gears have only a limited usefulness in managing the starting acceleration up to full speed or managing curves or entry onto pit road, but during the bulk of the racing at full speed the workhorse gearing is the one that matters. Any golfer can change tempo and successfully handle a given putt with a faster or slower tempo than usual. The brain is adaptable (adjustable) that way, as it has a rich storehouse of experience with many different tempos and with movement control under a multitude of variable conditions. The brain can very successfully "come up with" the stroke movement and putter head velocity at impact for a given putt using a variety of putter masses and a variety of tempos and any combination of ball, putter, green, tempo, and distance. But there is a workhorse tempo that should be relied upon, for the sake of consistency, as consistency of expectation in the brain is the basis for accuracy and is also the basis for minimal adjustment from one situation to the next. There is a lot less to worry about for distance control when the tempo is a stable one.
The notion of a workhorse tempo derives from the fact that all humans develop in the same gravitational field from infancy to adulthood, and so have many, many decades of steady experience with how gravity drops the body or its parts when relaxed, and also how gravity opposes the body and its part (or other masses) when moved by the muscles against gravity. If you lift your arm out to the side and then "kill it" and let it free-fall against your side, your hand slapping down against your pocket or thigh, the arm and hand will always fall with exactly the same tempo that is gravity's tempo. The tempo in this case includes an exact pattern of acceleration from zero at release to a peak speed at impact on your thigh. The acceleration of the arm-hand coming down is CONSTANT and is the one CAUSED by gravity (which is 32 feet per second (fps) additional velocity for each second of free-fall, or equivalently an additional 9.8 meters per second (mps) each second, or 384 inches per second (ips) each second, or 21.8 mph each second). If you release a ball from zero at the top of the Tower of Pisa and measure its speed after exactly one second of falling, its speed will be (in various measurement schemes) 32 fps, 384 ips, 9.8 mps, or 21.8 mph. After two seconds of falling, the speed of the ball will be twice this fast, etc.
If you hold the arm and hand out to the same starting position each time, the hand will always impact the thigh with exactly the same velocity at impact, BECAUSE of the steadiness of gravitational acceleration. This velocity of impact will be the same every day, regardless of you or how you feel, so long as only gravity is in charge. If you hold your hand and arm out to a different starting position, your hand will impact your thigh with a different velocity, but this velocity always correlates with that starting position. This is the basic tempo and pattern of acceleration that all humans experience every day, and golfers have had over 58,000 hours of experience with this tempo during the waking hours every decade of their lives. This is the brain's workhorse tempo.
When a golfer chooses to "let the putter head do the work" or to "let the putter move itself," he is choosing to give the tempo control to gravity. Ben Crenshaw has said that it took him a couple of decades to understand that "the putter moves itself."
The stability and consistency of the pattern of acceleration is what allows control of the putter head velocity thru impact. This is what the brain relies upon -- consistent acceleration -- rather than a specific sense of how fast the putter is moving precisely at the moment of impact. You do not want to try to hit the ball with a certain hardness or even with a certain putter head speed -- what you want instead is a stable tempo with the same-every-time pattern of acceleration. The brain takes it from there and GIVES you the backstroke, free of charge, via nonconscious processes of the brain for movement that have been carved out in the brain by decades of experience on earth. Let me try to clarify that a bit.
When the acceleration is "smooth" and "steady" and "consistent," as with gravity or some other chosen and well-honed tempo, the putter head's velocity is simply a matter of how long the acceleration has been underway. In a pendulum stroke pattern, the putter head (like a pendulum's bob) attains its peak velocity always at the same place -- the bottom of the pendulum arc (about the middle of the stance). Working backwards from this fact, the putter head velocity at the bottom of the stroke increases incrementally for every increase in the SIZE of the backstroke. The size of the backstroke, plus steady tempo-acceleration, together generate the putter head speed at impact, and hence distance of the roll.
With a steady tempo, a golfer basically has a DIAL similar to a DIMMER SWITCH so that every bigger backstroke length corresponds to one and only one bigger putter head velocity at impact, and this whole DIAL is always the same every day, regardless of the green speed.
The kicker is that the DIAL is also the same regardless of the mass of the putter, within a reasonable range suitable for use by humans. That's because gravity's acceleration pattern does not depend upon mass, and light-mass balls fall exactly the same as heavy-mass balls. A golf ball and a bowling ball released simultaneously will drop with exactly the same pattern of acceleration and will hit the ground at exactly the same instant. Similarly, a light putter and a heavy putter will both drop the same in a gravity-driven pattern of acceleration.
Distance control is built upon this fundamental reality of the brain's familiarity with gravity and its reliance upon tempo for smooth, consistent movement control, due to its countless and habituating experiences with gravity and gravity's pattern of acceleration of all objects the same way regardless of the mass of the objects, every day the same.
So, how does the mass of the putter head affect this underlying system for distance control? While it is obvious that a more massive putter employed with the same velocity at impact as a lighter putter will send the same ball farther across the same green, it may not be so obvious that if the issue is how to use the two putter to make the ball roll the SAME distance, the heavier putter uses a SMALLER stroke than the lighter putter. This means that the heavier putter undergoes less acceleration time, and hence has a SLOWER speed at impact than the light putter. Heavy means a SMALLER STROKE and SLOWER-AT-IMPACT VELOCITY versus a light putter employed with the same tempo. So what?
The "so what" is that the human body has a comfort zone range of motion in making strokes based upon biomechanics and personal physiology of muscles and tissues. (For most people, this comfort zone of putter head motion from side to side is probably about twice the width of the shoulders.) This comfort zone is a little ragged at the ends -- too short is not as under control and neither is too long. If the mass of the putter for a given green speed and the shank of typical putt lengths forces the stroke size into these troublesome ragged ends, the putter mass is not optimal. Accordingly, the putter mass needs to be tuned and custom fitted to your greens and your stroke comfort zone. That way, the SIZES of strokes and same-every-time TEMPO correlate well with your comfort zone of motion and the greens usually played by generating a useful range of velocities at impact in your DIAL.
Now, back to your specific question about feel and heavy putters. "Feel" that golfers experience is the body sensations of moving in a certain range and pattern with a given putter, plus the after-the-fact vibrations and sounds of impact against the ball used. There is the tightness or tone of muscles, the sameness or changing of relative positions of body segments, the inertial resistance of body masses in relation to gravity and in relation to the putter mass, and the overall sense of the speed pattern of the motion. "Touch" in terms of "feel" is an association between a specific set of feelings for a motion and the distance those feelings and movement send a ball across a given green with a given putter.
With respect to big muscles versus small muscles, the big muscles that control a shoulder stroke are NOT in the shoulder. The part of the body that moves another part is always closer in to the core than the part being moved. n this case, the lower back and gut and side muscles that connect the upper torso with the lower body are the muscles that move the shoulders. The shoulder muscles themselves and the upper back and pectoral muscles have a minimal tone, but are basically relaxed and unused in a shoulder stroke. In contrast, a hands-arm stroke is partly the abdominal / lower back muscles and partly the pectoral and upper arm muscles "swinging" the arms and hands back and thru a bit farther than they otherwise would go if moved solely by the abdominal / lower back muscles (shoulder rock only). Interestingly, only rarely do golfers actually "move" the hands independently, which is accomplished by altering the wrists with forearm muscles (like Billy Casper used to putt in the 1960s and 1970s). The standard notion that the finer muscles of the hands are better suited to the precise hand-eye coordination required for making an accurate putting stroke is a bit ill-informed about the biomechanics -- the hand muscles are practically NEVER used in a good putting stroke. The real advice is to establish one grip pressure at address and then not to allow the grip pressure to alter at any point in the stroke, so the hand muscles just aren't being used. This confusion is really spawned by the brain's AWARENESS of the feeling of the hands and the position of the hands in space, as golfers tend to confuse this awareness for "sensitivity" and fine motor skills. The truth is, the fine motor skills of the hands are irrelevant because they are not used to any telling effect except in unorthodox, wristy strokes. Even strokes involving some deliberate or "naturally occurring" forearm rotation do not use these fine motor muscles of the hands.
In a dead-hands, gravity-based stroke, the mass of the putter head affects the size of the stroke, but there is not really much difference in how the bodily sensations occur. A two-foot backstroke with a heavy putter and the same-sized stroke with a light putter will "feel" the same during the dropping down from the top of the backstroke to impact in a dead-hands stroke. When the hands are not really "dead" but are holding the putter head up to any degree above where the putter head would hang with relaxed arms and hands, the "weight" of the putter head mass is being held against gravity, and this requires a little tighter grip and muscle tone in the arms and hands. This tension makes it less likely the golfer will allow gravity to have its control in the downstroke, so there will be a different "feel" in the same-sized strokes of a heavy putter and a light putter. And when the golfer "brings" the putter down from the top of the backstroke to impact by voluntary muscle movement defining the pattern of acceleration, the golfer is instinctively trying to outrun the base acceleration given by gravity -- otherwise he would not "feel" anything during the downward dropping of the putter. With this sort of stroke, the inertial properties of a heavy putter make the handle inside the grip press harder against the rear side of the inside of the two hands on the handle, and there is a differential "feeling" inside the hands plus a degree or level of pressure against the back hand.
"Feel" is either something that is remembered and associated with a past experience or is something that occurs during a stroke. Because green speeds are never exactly the same from putt to putt or from day to day, the notion of being able to summons up from memory the correct "feel" that is associated with a specific putt distance is only valid upon the assumption that the golfer's memory is based on the SAME green speed, which in turn is heavily dependent upon an accurate appreciation of the specific green speed for this putt, an accurate memory of the earlier green speeds, and an accurate memory of the earlier "feel" associated with that speed and this distance. Memory is not that good or accurate or reliable day to day, really, and neither is the explicit recognition of green speed then or now. In contrast, the human brain by a process of developmental experience (not just on the green) has a workhorse gearing and a hard-wired intuitive process for looking at each putt afresh and uses this system to generate the right stroke for the distance non-consciously, without any explicit concern for green speed, tempo, or the size of the stroke. The familiarity of life on earth channels the brain's ability to handle movement situations in such a way that the system is shaped by experience but not dependent upon memory of experience -- the "memory" resides in the shaping that has taken place. You just have touch already, so there is not much need to try to summons it from memory of "feel" and this effort is fundamentally wrong-headed.
All of these body sensations of "feel" may be present, but they are not really CAUSING distance control. They are just markers to indicate sameness of tempo and acceleration pattern. The brain's familiarity with the putter, the ball, the green, and the tempo is what CAUSES the size of the stroke and its pattern of acceleration, and hence the feelings. If you look for feeling first and distance control second, you are approaching the matter backwards. For the brain, timing is first, and timing generates the feelings. When the timing is set for a given putter, the DIAL is set, and the brain instinctively generates the appropriate size stroke for a given putt length and green speed and putter and ball. Actually, so long as the movement timing is right for the backstroke size, you can safely IGNORE FEEL altogether -- it's irrelevant to what happens. (A putting robot has a gravity tempo, a perfect one-to-one correlation between every backstroke size and putter head velocity at the bottom of the stroke, and absolutely NO feel at all.)
Indeed, the "feel" that actually accompanies a stroke may often be inappropriate -- that is, in the middle of making the stroke, the "feel" feels wrong and suggests a change in the timing of the movement. On these occasions, you MUST ignore the "feel" if you want to let your stroke proceed in the way the intuition and the brain have set the stroke going. Changing the stroke's timing at the behest of these mid-stroke "feel" signals is almost universally a bad idea, shifting from an experience-channeled motion plan to a plan-less "feel" based motion prompted by memory associations of dubious pertinence. It's the same as yielding to a mid-stroke doubt or second-guessing yourself, and is the opposite of "trusting" your stroke.
In addition, "feel" at address, and summonsing a particular "feel" into your awareness of the hands prior to initiating the stroke is not the best idea. Whatever the brain is aware of as a body part at the outset of a movement is the part most likely to lead the movement by activation of its muscles. If you think about your hands or are mostly aware of the hands and their sensitivity and feel just prior to starting the movement back from the ball, you are very likely to engage the muscles that independently move the hands, and those are first the muscles controlling wrists (i.e., forearm muscles) and then those controlling the elbows (forearms and upper arms). This combination of wrists and elbows has a high potential for sending the putter head out across the line of the putt and generating a loop in the stroke path that makes accuracy a problem. In contrast, if you "feel" and are aware of the lead shoulder socket at address and plan on pushing the socket down to shove the bottom edge of the putter face back from the ball, this makes it biomechanically impossible to send the putter head across the line of the putt unless the shoulders are aligned biomechanically to send it there -- instead, the putter will either go straight back on line or slightly inside. So "feel" is a bit of a booby-trap when the focus is on "feel" in the hands or based upon a misconception of what muscles move what body part. Awareness of the right body part need not imply extra tension of forthcoming action.
The bottom-line answer is that so long as the heavy putter is useful for a given green within the comfort zone of stroke motion (sizes) and does not require the stroke size to go off into the ragged ends very often, a heavy putter is not a detriment to "feel" or distance control. The DIAL will be intact.
There is obvious sense in tuning the mass of the putter to your tempo and your greens so that your stroke sizes best fit within your movement comfort zone, but there is a lot of overlap here between light putters and heavy putters.
Taking a specific putt as an example, we can ask whether the Heavy Putter (sold under that name) hurts the ability to control distance. Let's suppose the putt is 4 feet long and the green speed is Stimp 11 (fairly fast, if not quite lightning slick). My rough guess on the SIZE of the stroke useful for delivering the ball to the target with a good capture speed is about 3-4 inches back with a nice, slow tempo not much faster than gravity. A light putter commonly available might use a stroke that is 5-6 inches back, with the same tempo. If the 3-4 inch stroke is too short for the golfer to maintain a nice timing, then that is a problem. The problem reveals itself in whether the putter motion has stops and starts in it or whether the motion is continuous and smooth going back and thru. If you set up to this putt with the Heavy Putter and can make a smooth stroke with a good tempo and not overpower the hole by delivering the ball too fast but with your customary delivery speed, then it's fine.
If there is a problem, then the issue is how MUCH of a problem is it. Can you adapt to handle it, and how often in your game is it likely to arise? How does the Heavy Putter work on other putts, and is there a sufficient advantage to make the short-putt problem worth it?
In general, I like a heavier putter than has usually been available. The typical putter mass of the past ten years has been about 325 grams. That mass requires either a faster-than-gravity tempo or a bigger stroke than most golfers are used to. With a light putter and a gravity tempo, the stroke is usually larger than golfer are used to making. This, plus bad putting instruction about tempo, has encouraged the use of light putters and quick tempos to keep the stroke sizes in the golfers' comfort zone -- faster than gravity and hence dependent upon the golfer to replicate the tempo faithfully day to day. A more massive putter allows for a slower tempo closer to gravity (more of a dead-hands stroke emphasizing timing over feel) within a more comfortable range of stroke sizes.
The greater the mass, the more the hands tend to hang with relaxed or at least full extension in the elbows. This tends to reduce "lifting" or "handsiness" in the stroke, reduce the need for "hand-eye" coordination, and promote simple, minimalist timing and biomechanics. Also, the more the mass of the putter, the greater its inertial properties. On the one hand, greater inertia tends to make the putter resistant to starting from a dead stop; on the other hand, greater inertia during the stroke once started tends to resist the putter getting sent off line by nervy fine-motor muscles injecting small impulses (and in some cases, wind). The mass also factors a bit into how much muscle tone is needed to hold the putter head in the air -- the further out from the feet and the shoulders the putter head is located at address, the more arm and hand tension is required to prevent the putter from falling back in toward the feet. More massive putters require more tension than lighter putters, and at some point this extra tension tends to creep into the fluidity and timing of the stroke or causes breakdowns in the stroke path. Keeping the hands hanging naturally and not using an excessively flat lie or too heavy a putter when the putter head is out a bit far from the hands is usually all that is needed to keep the tension in acceptable limits, but there is a danger of a heavy putter with a flat lie causing problems.
There is a bit of a trade-off between distance control (better with a gravity-based tempo) and line control (a gravity-based stroke is pretty dependent upon alignment and consistent stroke control with the shoulder rocking and "timing", whereas a more hands-arm stroke with a voluntary-muscle tempo faster than gravity is more dependent upon hand-eye coordination and "feel"). But the building of a sound technique should proceed first from timing, and then to comfort zone of stroke sizes. This reduces dependence upon subjective and variable "feel" in favor of objective and consistent "timing."
Whether the Heavy Putter is the best fit for you, your tempo, and your greens is another matter. But as long as you can use it with good timing on short, slick putts, it's definitely not ruled out for you.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
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