Once I address the ball, I have incorporated the 4-sceond gaze at the hole that Geoff recommends prior to putting. Although my distance control has been great since doing so, I feel a little less fluid initiating the putt and wonder if I might hole more outside of 15' if I gazed at the hole and then did a quick 4 or 5 step routine that Dave Pelz recommends.
Any thoughts? My problem is after I have come to a complete stop for 4 seconds starting the putt sometimes feels less smooth.
The 4-second look is only one piece of the process of building a relation to the target and of using a physical routine for targeting that feeds into the stroke. The head-turn to and from the target, before and after the look at the hole, is supposed to mimic the "smooth pursuit" following of an imaginary ball rolling from a perfect putt along the path into the hole (reversing the pattern on the way back from the hole to the real ball, although the smooth pursuit to the hole is the important one). Smooth pursuit, especially with the gaze fixed straight ahead instead of with the eye muscles shifting the eyeballs left or right while the head turn does not point the face in the same direction of the look, is a physical procedure designed to integrate targeting and stroke movement.
It works like this: when you turn the head towards the target in such a fashion, your brain generates an image of the ball as it rolls, complete with the pace of the ball; this mental timing is communicated to your neck muscles so that the head-turn keeps pace with the imaginary roll of the ball; using a straight-ahead gaze positions your head and neck so that the neck muscles involved turn the head in the vertical plane of the putt without causing the necessity of eye muscle shifts; the pace and orientation of the head turn are registered in the pattern of muscles used in the neck; these neck muscles communicate back to your brain the speed of the head turn which is also the mental speed of the perfect putt; the orientation of the neck muscles as they turn teaches your brain the upcoming pattern of the shoulder movement rocking back and thru on the same vertical plane of the putt (albeit offset and parallel a bit); in addition, the combination of straight-gaze and head-turn to the target requires that the extent of the neck turn or its angle from looking down at the ball to looking at the target corresponds to the precise distance along the ground from the ball to the target the same way the vertex angle of a right triangle necessarily corresponds to the length of the base, so long as the heighth of the eye-to-ball side of the triabgle is set (which it is); in addition, this gazing at the ground "in between" the ball and target is precisely what most golfers skip over by using a "saccadic" shift of the eyes from the ball to the hole, during which eye motion vision of the "in between" is positively suppressed by the brain, and looking at the in betwwen turf makes the sense of distance better and the sense of orientation to the putt of your body and upcoming stroke more comfortable.
There are other perceptual and movement processes underlying this design as well. For example, the lenses of your eyes must change shape to refocus after you change gazing from one distance to another -- so you really don't even focus well on the hole until you have stopped your gaze on it for about 1 second, and the same is true when you return your gaze back to the ball -- it takes a good 1 second beat to let your lenses refocus by changing to the appropriate shape to clearly see the ball in detail. Likewise, the inner ear during head movement essentially sloshes like the tide in tall kelp or like the water inside a fishbowl as you move it across a table. There are two physical mechanisms to register head motion in the inner ear that work with this sloshing-thru-kelp process. The bending of the kelp stalks under the influence of the tide signals the brain about the movement. That's why you can turn in a circle for a while, then stop, but your world continues to swirl around. The inner ear is still swirling. A similar process occurs when you look from A to B by moving your head - it takes a beat before the inner ear clams back down for your visual and spatial perceptions to become defined.
So, these are the physical and neurological realities that are being respected and taken advantage of. The question is whether this causes a negative trade-off for the fluidity of starting the stroke motion. My answer is absolutely not, so let me suggest why you might be experiencing what you report. The smooth start of the stroke is set up by the smooth pursuit turn of the head and neck and the mental generation of this physical sense movement. The turn to and from the hole has this special pacing and orientation, and the stroke mimics this pacing and orientation. So the routine I suggest helps set the stroke in motion. The making of a smooth start depends upon having in mind a smooth tempo for the motion ahead of time. The routine requires that you key into this tempo by slowing down the process. The tempo comes strictly from the length and mass characteristics of your putting set up and putter, as a matter of physics. A good tempo for most people is an unhurried "one potato, two potato" with impact on "two." Thus, once your head-turn has come back to the ball, you relax a beat to let vision and the inner ear reset as you sense your tempo. Then you push back away from the ball in that tempo, allowing your targeting cues to control the slow, luxurious amplitude of your backstroke in the timing pattern of the tempo. It doesn't get smoother than that.
To me, it seems you are getting stuck on "how" to start the stroke -- that is, what muscle groups to use to move the putterhead away from the ball. The most normal pattern is to use the hand muscles, as the golfer thinks about moving the putterhead itself, rather than thinks of moving the whole body-putter system back in an integrated tempo. If you focus on moving the putterhead primarily, you will habitually want to do this with the precision move of the hand. However, all movement is caused by changing joint angles, and the hands are typically moved by changing finger angle or wrist angles, instead of elbow angles or shoulder angles. That's not good, because the orientation you build up in relating to the target is mostly about orienting the eyes, head, and shoulders, and not about relating the hands to the target. Starting the move away from the ball with the putterhead-hand notion effectively cancels out most of the build-up, right before you use it. This tossing out of the build-up leaves you bereft of an anticipated move, and causes a hitch in the getty-up while you come up with another movement plan. The hand movement plan is usually not well calculated, and is hastily thrown together during the hitch / balk.
The cure is to stick with the idea of relating the whole system of your body plus putter to the target and the upcoming stroke, and use the timing smoothness of the turn to and from the hole to key your well-tempoed whole-system push back into the stroke. The stroke is thus seen as a continuation of the targeting process and the targeting movements, even though there are the pauses at the target and back at the ball. The internal mental planning is fully capable of maintaining the sense of tempo and fluidty in the upcoming stroke movement, and not shifting over to hand-initiated control at the last moment is a good idea to preserve and protect this sense of fluidity.
So turn smoothly and look from the ball along the path to the hole; pause there with visual attention focusing as your brain takes stock of the body and the target location in anticipation of the stroke that will send the ball along this path into the hole with perfect speed; then turn back fluidly back along the path to the ball, allow your vision and balance to clarify, perhaps mentally preview a perfect-tempo online stroke thru the ball, than start the move back away from the ball into the tempo-defined pattern of the stroke. There is a very definite timing element at every step along this routine - one that is not rigid, but needs to work with the shelf-life and enhancing aspects of the perceptual processes.
I'm sure this is not nearly as clear as it could be, and I would really like to demonstrate some things in person, but this will have to do for this media.
Hope this helps.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
The PuttingZone
The Future of Putting Now - elite instruction, comprehensive resources.
Thanks for the in-depth response. Let me print this out and incorporate it into my routine and I will let you know how it goes. Although, I clearly was not aware of the science behind the gaze time and my ability to focus my eyes, my distance control has benefited from the process versus my old 5-step routine once I got over the ball. That always felt a bit out of kilter for me, but it did bring organization to my putt preparation. Hopefully, this will be one of the steps to get my putts per round average below 30.