In the cold months of winter golf, it’s tough to motivate yourself to head to the driving range and work on your swing. But it’s a great time of year to work on your putting technique by doing your golf practice in the warmth of your home.
Clearly, you can’t work on longer putts and you’ll be working on a flat green, but this is a great chance to work on your core technique and eradicate bad habits you may have slipped into. Remember – most golf pros work with a coach to ensure they are not developing bad habits and not always improving their technique.
Golf Practice – What Are The Advantages Of Practicing Putting At Home?
There are many advantages to doing your golf practice at home apart from the fact that it’s warm:-
- You have ready-made objects in the house to help you with your golf practice (see below)
- You can practice at any time
- You can work on flat putts (these are really hard to find on a practice green)
- It’s free!
What do you need to work on in your golf practice at home?
Firstly you need a surface to practice on! This could simply be a piece of the carpet but it obviously needs to resemble a real putting green in terms of its speed. Color isn’t too important!
If you don’t have a suitable piece of carpet then you can buy a synthetic practice green and these can range from a few dollars/pounds right up to a few hundred dollars/pounds – but spending this amount really isn’t necessary to benefit from your indoor golf practice.
If you have not purchased an indoor practice green then you need a target to hit. You can either purchase a practice putting cup or hit a target of a similar size such as a coffee mug.
But before you start your golf practice on either your carpet or indoor putting green, there are some things around the home that you can use to help you with your putting technique:-
Skirting boards
One of the most important parts of the putting stroke is the ‘impact zone’. This is approximately 6 inches behind the ball and a similar distance after you’ve struck the ball. Through the impact zone, the putter should be moving in a perfectly straight line, and using a skirting board can really help you work on this. Take your putter (without a golf ball) and simply practice moving your putter back and forth for around 12 inches with the end of your putter slowly and gently running along a skirting board to ensure it’s moving in a straight line – this is a really good golf practice drill to give you the confidence you are swinging the putter on a straight line and one that you should practice as often as you can.
A glass of water
Again to start with work on this without a golf ball or you may spill the water! Place a glass of water on the floor and then imagine a golf ball is approx 6 inches in front of the glass. Now make some practice strokes ensuring you don’t touch the glass with your putter, and ensuring that they follow through is at least as long as the backstroke – ideally a little longer. This is a great golf practice drill to ensure you are accelerating the putter head through the impact zone to ensure a good strike on the ball. When you feel confident move on to working on this drill with a golf ball on some short putts.
A mirror
Our golf putting DVD has full-length lessons dedicated to many topics including ball position, alignment, and stance. However – once you understand these things you need to ensure your setup is correct. Using a mirror is one of the best ways to check these…
So – now you’ve worked on some golf practice drills without a golf ball, you’re ready to work with a ball.
Work on short straight putts gradually increasing the length of the putt, and ensure on every putt you’ve got the basics (grip, stance, alignment) right.
As you improve and can start holing longer putts with consistency, start putting pressure on yourself by counting the number of consecutive putts you can hole without missing. When you miss a putt re-set your count to zero and see how many you can hole in a row. As you hole more the pressure starts to mount thus starting to mimic game-like pressure! team building events click here.