Dear Bruce,
Online Putter Fitting Leaves a Lot to be Desired
In general, online putter fitting is a dubious proposition, because the instructor-fitter really needs to see you and check out your stroke and setup, and the golfer simply inputting measurements about stature / height, arm length, etc., isn't addressing the right measurements in the right situation. The right situation really requires in-person observation of a knowledgeable instructor for putting (not a swing coach, either, by the way).
But let's plow ahead anyway and look at Todd Sones' approach to online fitting. First, he doesn't seem to have a strictly "online only" fitting. He wants you to see one of his certified fitters. (That's a problem, as we'll see in a bit.) There are four points in Sones' approach:
Tri-Fit Method
Great putting is about fundamentals. The constant lure of going out and buying a putter that will magically improve your putting is a myth at best. Players that have consistently succeeded on the green have one thing in common: solid fundamentals that are trustworthy under pressure and a putter that fits properly.
Solid fundamentals begin at the set-up. The set-up in putting is almost more important than in the full swing. In a full swing, because it is a longer motion, there is more time to recover during the swing. If you have a 10 inch back stroke and the putter goes outside, it's very difficult to get the putter back on line and square to the intended target. When a player learns the correct set-up it is much easier to develop a sound putting stroke that will hold up under pressure.
Eyes Over The Ball
There are four major keys to fitting the putter. The first is that the eyes should come to rest over the ball. When the eyes come to rest over the ball, they are on top of the target line which is the best optical advantage to make sure that the leading edge of the putter is lined up at right angles to the intended target.
Arms Under The Shoulder
The next major key is that the arms should be slightly flexed at the elbows and hang directly under the shoulders with the shoulders square (parallel) to the target line. When the arms hang under the shoulders, they are able to swing back and forth, allowing the putter to move on the correct path naturally. When the putter swings in the correct path naturally, the player doesnt have to think about or guide the putter. This is an important element to great putting because when the putter swings in the proper path naturally, the player doesnt have to think about the mechanics of their stroke. This leaves the players mind clear to focus on the speed, line of the putt and ultimately the hole.
Balanced over the Center of the Feet
The third major key is that the hips should be lined up over the heels. When the hips are centered over the heels, the player is balanced over the center of the feet. When a player is balanced over the center of the feet, they are able to keep their body or head still during the putting stroke which leads to solid and consistent contact with the golf ball.
Find The Length Of The Putter
Once they player is set-up in the proper posture, the length of the putter can be measured. When a putter is the proper length, it should simply connect the distance from where the eyes hit the ground and where the arms hang naturally under the shoulders.
The Tri-Fit Measurement System is a simple method of using the Tri-Fit tool to measure the distance from the top wrist crease down to the ground which becomes the vertical leg of a triangle. Where the eyes hit the ground is measured with a mirror marked in inches at the bottom of the tool. This measurement becomes the horizontal leg of a triangle.
Once the professional Coutour fitter has the vertical and horizontal leg of a triangle, he or she squares and adds them together using the Pythagorean theory (A²+ B² = C²) to calculate the diagonal leg of the triangle which in turn becomes the perfect length putter only determined when the player is in the proper posture.
Find A Belly Putter Length
If a player is interested in being fit properly to a belly length putter, there is an extender at the ending of the grip on the Tri-Fit tool. Use the extender to measure the distance to the players belly, then add that measurement to the length of the putter that has already been determined using the Tri-Fit tool.
Lie Angle
Once the proper length of the putter has been established, the sole of the putter should be flush on the ground. If the toe or heel is off the found, the ball will tend to travel off line. The key to lie angle is to only make adjustments if necessary after the players posture and length has been determined. Coutour putters are made of the highest quality carbon steel milled in the U.S.A. making it easy to alter the lie angle with a standard loft and lie angle machine.
Swingweight
Swingweight is the most overlooked aspect of putter fitting, mainly because it is not visible. Swingweight has to do with feel. It is the feel of the putter head as it swings. Swingweight influences the distance the putter travels on the back and forth stroke. It influences tempo as well as the path the putter head swings. Swingweight is crucial to the fitting of a putter.
The swingweight of your putter should be close to the swingweight of the rest of your golf clubs. Industry standard for men[']s swingweight is D0-D2. Women[']s is C6-C8. Whenever you alter the length of a golf club by cutting it down, gripping down it or even adding length to it, you change the swingweight. When you shorten a club, you decrease swingweight. When you lengthen a club you add swingweight. For every inch you alter the length of a golf club, you change the swingweight by 6 points. 1 swingweight equals 2 grams of weight. Ultimately, if you have shortened your putter or even grip down on your putter by one inch, you decrease its swingweight by 6 points or 12 grams of weight. 6 swingweights is enough to drastically change the feel of your putter, your tempo and your stroke.
Another factor that most people aren[']t aware of is that when you buy a 33 or 34 inch putter off the shelf, the majority of computers use the same head gram weight no matter what length, which serves their purposes for reducing inventory of putter heads and increasing their profit margin. Using the same putter heads benefits the manufacturer, however it is a detriment to the player.
Coutour Golf is dedicated to people putting better, so each model is available in 3 different gram weights of 335, 350 and 365 grams. Once your length has been determined, the professional fitter will match the correct gram weight so that your putter will have the proper swing weight.
The basic problem in this approach is Sones' faulty understanding of the position of the eyes as determining distance back from the ball. They don't. The conventional lore (which frankly is "stupid and tiresome") is that positioning the eyes over the ball is necessary for being able to see the target line in the aiming process. This is just not the case, AND the posture for aiming the putter and perceiving the aim of the putter beside the ball is NOT the same as the posture for making the stroke. Sones assumes the two postures are the same. So Sones doesn't know what determines the correct distance back from the ball, and he doesn't know how to perceive correctly beside the ball.
So what does determine the correct position back from the ball? Answer: The golfer's body, not the eyes. When the golfer sets up beside the ball and bends forward slightly, balanced well in the feet, and allows the arms and hands to hang naturally beneath the shoulders, there is a natural quasi-permanent flex / bend in the elbows due to that person's muscle development on either side of the elbows. This steady muscle tone determines the angle by which the forearms depart from the vertical of plumb in gravity. (Strictly speaking, the bent arms hang plumb beneath the shoulder socket, but the center of mass of a bent arm is on a line between the upper arm and the middle or so of the forearm, and this point (COG) hangs plumb beneath the center of the shoulder, with the elbow joint slightly back of this plumb line, but not by very much.) Basically, wherever the forearms aim along their axis at the ground is where the end of the putter shaft needs to also end up, with the sole of the putter flat to the surface, so long as the Rules-required minimum angle of 10 degrees off vertical is achieved. The eyes have nothing to do with the stroke, as this only concerns from the base of the neck down, and so the eyes have nothing to do with the proper distance back from the ball FOR PURPOSES OF THE STROKE SETUP POSTURE AND POSITION. Mixing up the stroke setup and the positioning of the eyes is, quite frankly, a silly, often-repeated mistake. Pat O'Brien makes this same mistake in a recent article in Golf Digest.
So, this typical mistake about eye position is two errors at once. First, the positioning of the eyes over the ball is NOT required for proper perception of the aim of the putter face -- aiming the face at the ball and therefore aiming the eyes straight out of the face instead is the requirement. The eyes may be inside, over, or beyond the ball, so long as the face aims at the ball and the eyes are aimed wherever the face is aimed, and this posture allows the golfer to obtain accurate sideways perceptions of the line of aim of the putter face. Second, the aiming posture and the stroking posture are NOT REQUIRED TO BE THE SAME. Once you have verified or checked the aim of the putter face, you are NOT required to maintain the aiming posture unless you like it and want to use it also for the stroke. You MAY simply not change the aim of the putter face while you re-set to the putter face as aimed for purposes of making the stroke.
There are other minor, technical mistakes in Sones' approach, which collectively indicate something of a lack of carefulness in his analysis. The point on the ground that matters is where the shaft aims into the ground, not the ball position and not the sweet spot of the putter. This is the point in the "Pythagoreum Theory" (as Sones calls it on the video) that is the correct distance out from ... what? The hands? The wrist? The shoulders? The toes? The balls of the feet? The correct answer is: the distance out from a point vertically beneath the center of the hands hanging naturally in a well-balance bending forward. The distance from this point beneath the hands out to where the forearms aim into the ground determines the "short side" of the right triangle, while the distance from center of hands down to ground determines the "long side" of this triangle. Sones uses the "wrist crease" as the start of this distance out to where the eyes are positioned. Geometrically, the wrist crease is not on the same line as the line from the end of the shaft at the ground and the center of the hands (but in fact is above this line), so that is not correct for determining length. Instead, one uses center of hands to ground, calculates the "diagonal side" to the center of the hands, and then adds a couple or a few inches to get the top of the handle above the wrist crease.
In addition, he says the hips are directly above the ankles in a well-balance setup, but for reasons of counterbalancing the forward-leaning head and chest, the butt has to stick backwards slightly (like the back-weight on an industrial construction crane) and this means that the hips shift rearwards to a position behind the ankles. Otherwise, you stand wooden with tight ligaments along the back of the legs. It's possible to simply "droop the ass" straight down towards the ankles with a slight knee flex that does not poke the butt rearward, which is perhaps what a short person can do, but this actually is a) different and not as habitual as the setup for the full-swing, so not recommended, and b) makes bending in the mid-section more difficult as this tightens the abdominal muscles and restricts the stroke.
In addition, on the video where he explains his fitting, his notions of what happens if the golfer's distance from the ball is slightly off are vaguely correct (the stroke has a "tendency" to go off line, since gravity tends to cause the swinging arms to come off line / plane when the arms have reached out to the handle or reached in to the handle in adopting the setup posture to start with) but this diagnosis is not accompanied with a knowledge of any cure for what corrective action or muscle tone the golfer can use to adapt for good strokes notwithstanding a putter that is not perfectly fit. This is a lack of common-sense perspective that is not a great note in putter fitting. In general, a slight increase in muscle tone in the hands and arms and pecs takes care of this issue, but Sones isn't aware of how this plays out in the choices made in putter fitting.
As to the Sones certified fitters, there is a problem. The problem is that Sones allows ONLY PGA and LPGA members to become certified. Why is that? Twenty years of direct familiarity with PGA and LPGA members would teach anyone that hardly any PGA or LPGA members know much at all about putting. If the objective is to have a well-trained and knowledgeble putting expert observe the golfer during the fitting process, then Sones' approach of allowing ONLY PGA and LPGA members to act as his fitters is not all that helpful. What appears to be the motivation is that Sones is trading upon his magazine-conferred status as a Golf Magazine Top 100 teacher to spark a marketing effort to get his fitting system used by "credentialed" golf teachers. His list includes lots of fellow Top 100 teachers, but that doesn't mean any of them know much about putting. If they did, Sones would not stand out from the crowd at all. This magazine-based credentialing is exactly why American golf teaching suffers a chronic illness, so it's just pouring more gasoline on the fire for Sones to trade on this self-proclaimed "exclusivity" and "professionalism" for marketing of his putters and fitting system.
By the way, Sones should "know" that placing the eyes over the ball is not what the teacher should teach if the objective is to impart the skill of accurate perceiving of the aim of the putter face from beside the ball. He and I discussed just this, with reference to his diagrammatic photo (blow-up photo of him at address with eyes vertically above the ball but with his head tilted up and his face aiming several feet out beyond the ball, the same one that he uses on his website today -- a posture that guarantees aiming perception problems), in the 2004 PGA Merchandise Show when he first started his putter fitting, and he then accepted my explanation to him that proper aiming does not require eyes above the ball and that his setup posture in the phot was not conducive to good aiming perceptions. But, it doesn't seem to have mattered to him.
As to the weighting, I see no indication of a principle in Sones' approach for deciding good from bad weighting. There is one, but he seems not to have any such principle in mind. There is also the unrecognized issue of "just noticeable difference" (JND) from the science of psychometrics, or the measurement of differences in perceptual proesses. The JND for human tactile perceptions of weight as in holding two putters of different weights and being able to discriminate which one is heavier (even if not able to tell by how much) teaches that humans generally cannot tell whether a 335 gram putter head weighs more or less than a 350 gram putter head, and "may" be able to tell which of two putters is heavier when one weighs 335 grams and the other weighs 365 grams (not quite a 10% difference). So there is a big measure of hoodoo in the weighting here. Besides, the "standards" for swingweights are simply standards that he has heard about and accepts without analysis. A proper fitting session doesn't stick a golfer with the usual, so why do this in the case of swingweighting? Where's the customization? Apparently, Sones does not know how to customize swingweighting or why.
Notwithstanding the preference for in-person fitting, Sones does offer online fitting. There is a problem here as well. The website explains the process:
Take the Tri-Fit Test
The Tri-Fit method was based on the belief that golfers will perform better and more consistently if they are in the correct set-up with a putter that is fitted to them. The first key point to the set-up is to have they eyes over the inside edge of the ball. Next is to have the hands directly under the shoulders with the elbows flexed just under the ribcage. The last key is to be balanced on the center of the feet.
Although the best option is to work with a certified fitter to learn the correct set-up and then be measured for a Coutour putter using the Tri-Fit system to determine the specifications, ordering online can be a simple process. After 4 years of using the Tri-Fit method, Todd Sones and his Impact Golf staff have documented over 600 fittings, enabling Coutour Golf to develop fitting charts based on a players height and knuckles to ground measurement.
First, the Tri-Fit method was used to find the correct length of the putter for a player. Then the players height as well as the measurement of middle knuckle to ground was taken. By cross-referencing the length determined by the Tri-Fit method against the players height and middle knuckle to ground, Coutour Golf was able to develop a custom length chart. The custom length chart enabled Coutour Golf to offer customized putters direct to the consumer. It is important to understand that these measurements are based on putting from the correct set-up positions. Please carefully watch the Tri Fit video to learn about the correct set-up position. Remember that the Tri-Fit method matches the correct set-up to the correct putter enabling the player to develop solid putting fundamentals and repeatable results. Even if you purchase a custom putter directly from Coutour Golf, it would benefit you to receive instruction on learning to set-up correctly.
The key sentence is: "By cross-referencing the length determined by the Tri-Fit method against the players height and middle knuckle to ground, Coutour Golf was able to develop a custom length chart." This is anthropometric voodoo. In human anthropometry (the study of human body measurements and proportionality), there is not a correlation between stature / height and knuckle-to-ground height. That would depend upon a steady relation between height and arm segment lengths, and this is emphatically NOT the case for the human species. Arms lengths are all over the map.
As an experiment, I looked at a 6'1" golfer with knuckles 26" high (standing at military posture), and the suggested fit was for a 32.75" putter with 365 g head weight, 70 degree lie, and 3 degree loft.
For a 6'5" golfer with knuckles at 27", the fitting "tilted" and gave the message:
WE ARE UNABLE TO FIT YOU ONLINE
Unfortunately, due to your height and/or knuckle measurement selections, we are unable to complete the online fitting process.
Please call Customer Service at 847-837-9818, or Email Us for further assistance.
For a 6'5" golfer with knuckles 29" high, the fit suggested 34.25" putter with 335 g head, 70 degree lie, and 3 degree loft. That's longer and lighter than the putter for a 6'1" golfer, so the weight adjustment is giving both golfers the same swingweight.
A 5'10" golfer with knuckles 26" off the ground gets the fit suggestion of 32.25" putter, 365 g head, 70 degree lie, and 3 degree loft. Although the knuckles are the SAME height as those in the 6'1" golfer example above, the putter comes out a different length (0.50" shorter). Why's that? Did the shorter golfer lean over more? My study of golfers indicates that the standard proportionalities that are pretty steady include pupil-to-pupil distance (about 2.25") and shoulder to pupil distance (8-10" for adult western males). So the bending over in itself won't make the hands get closer to the ground unless the bending over is different for a 6'1" golfer and a 5'10" golfer. It's not. Even if the (bogus) objective is to get the eyes out to the ball (actually Sones says the eyes should be positioned vertically above the "inside edge" of the ball, but he fails to make this clear on the website), a 5'10" golfer and a 6'5" golfer are BOTH basically shifting their shoulders out above the balls of their feet and then tilting an 8-10" piece of the body (shoulders to pupils) down somewhat with a flexing of the mid-body and/or the hips and/or the neck spine. Since Sones does not know or seem concerned about HOW MUCH the head tilts down in the setup, he is totally in the dark about how to define the distance out to the ball AND the extent of the head tilt downward in the setup. Not good.
The lie angles suggested also appear wrong to me. The arm and hand hang determines the lie angle -- not the eyes positioning over the ball. This lie angle may or may not fit a golfer using the online process. Apparently, ALL golfers receive the same 70 degree lie suggestion. Why 70? And this lie angle is NOT available in three of the six models offered by Contour golf. The website appears to ask the golfer to CHOOSE the lie angle from a range from 67 (flat) to 73 degrees (upright) and makes this statement (if the golfer knows to click on the ? symbol to the right:
Lie Angle
If a putter is more than a couple of degrees to flat or upright it can send a ball off line. However In Coutour's fitting process we have found that a 71 degree lie angle fits the most people when they are in the correct posture with a putter that is correct in length. If a putter needs to be adjusted after you purchase it the putters are made with soft carbon steel and easily bent in a normal putter loft and lie machine.
I note that the website suggest 70 degrees, not 71 degrees.
I must be missing something. First, the golfer enters height measurements, and then the golfer ALSO CHOOSES THE LIE ANGLE? The measurements are supposed to determine the lie angle (by the "Pythagoreum Theory"), but the Sones approach determines ONLY length. The last time I studied geometry (5th grade, I think), trigonometry teaches that for EVERY right triangle (triangle with one angle 90 degrees), the setting of any two features for the three sides and two other angles necessarily sets all the remaining features that define the triangle shape and proportion. This means that specifying two sides as Sones (side one: wrist crease to ground; side two: wrist crease out to ball and eyes) does also sets the lie angle. So why ask a golfer to undo this? And why doesn't the Sones website process just tell you the lie that goes with the two measured sides? No reason other than he doesn't get this. So that's a mess.
The loft angle is not determined with golfer measurements or setup posture, but the online process makes a suggestion. Where does the suggestion come from? The usual suggestion is 3 degrees. But this is NOT available in three of the six models offered by Contour golf. In an actual fitting process, there are questions to ask and observations to make before the loft can be decided, and part of this is the length and the putter head mass. Nothing about that here, or apparently even in the real in-person session either.
There are other issues to address in a proper fitting by a well-trained PUTTING coach (not a swing teacher, even if he has PGA / LPGA credentials), and none of these issues are apparently recognized in the Sones approach (e.g., the aiming influence of different putter head shapes and hoseling patterns, grip dimensions and material, backweighting, weighting inside the shaft, face inserts, aiming lines, etc.).
So I don't really think Sones' approach is all that great. It's just the usual approach with a marketing twist.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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