Golf Tips: Practice Drills to Improve your Putting Game

This one is one you are going to need a fair amount of golf balls for. Make a circle with four golf balls, evenly spaced out two feet around the hole. You can go back to four feet for your next circle, and six feet for the last circle if you are feeling frisky.

The goal here is to knock all of the balls in, with one putt apiece. If you miss a putt, you have to put all of them back and start over. One nice part of this drill is that once you complete “a level”, say the two foot circle, that one is complete. Even if you miss the first putt in the four foot circle, you can remain at four feet, putting those until you have made all of them.

For increasing the challenge or the difficulty of the task, add a third circle or get rid of the level completion. If you miss a putt, start all the way back at the start. The third circle will stretch the limits of your confidence, forcing you to focus and make four putts in a row that no longer feel like gimme’s.

This is going to work on a couple different areas of putting. One is the gimme. If you are playing with anything on the line, have a registered handicap, or want to be serious about your scores, you should hole out all your putts. None of those “oh, its within 2-3 feet, and I would make it anyway so it’s good.”

The first circle is going to help you immensely with that. Once you get through the first circle a handful of times, you are going to be putting pressure on your playing partners for them to knock in their gimme’s.

The second area is those five footers that can weigh heavily on your score. Think how impressive it is when the person you are playing with bangs in one after another, never seeming to miss from five feet. Inserting the clock putting drill into your game can help turn you into that golfer.