A putting practice recipe 🧑‍🍳

Golf Digest

How do you practice your putting in a way that actually helps?

I thought I knew...that was until world class putting coach Phil Kenyon came along.

Phil has an astonishing track record of improving players' putting, and now he's developed a new app called Captured Putting to help the rest of us do the same.

His approach is informed by the same approach he uses with tour players, and the philosophy is simple:

Break putting into its component parts
Practice each part individually
Measure each one

It's a question of organization, in many ways, but that's how you spot the root causes of your putting woes. And then, begin fixing them....

I thought I was misreading putts. This was the real problem

By Luke Kerr-Dineen

What You Need to Know

The magic of the Internet Invitational isn’t the golf.

It’s the characters in it. My favorite is Kevin Kisner, playing the joint role of makeshift rules official and tipsy Southern all-knowing genius.

My favorite moment of Kiz's came in the finale. Salim kept missing his drives left, and before one of those drives, Kisner explained exactly why:

“Dude, look how far forward he has the ball in his stance. He can’t hit it anywhere but left.”

There's a good lesson there.

The club moves on an arc at the bottom of your swing—from in, to square, to in—which means the clubface goes from open, to square, to closed. When the the ball is too far forward, that means pairs two "lefts" together. The clubface is closed, while the club is moving left. If you're missing left, that may be one reason why.

Inside takeaways are caused by one thing:

Adding extra movements

Erik J. Barzeski is a Golf Digest Best in State Teacher and the co-author of the book Lowest Score Wins. He's a really smart guy about a wide range of things in golf, which is probably why this takeaway tip really clicked for me.

If you suffer from an inside takeaway—like I and so many others do—a common issue is moving your arms too far around your body, pulling your arms behind you, or rotating your wrists too much.

Measure the movements on GEARS, as Barzeski has, and he explains the recipe for a really has just three ingredients:

Hinge the club up ⬆️
Turn your thumbs slightly to your right ↗️
Turn your body 🔄

Blades Brown is destined for the very top.

After his first (of many) PGA Tour wins, I called up his coach Golf Digest Top 50 Teacher Justin Parsons, to learn more about his golf swing.

A big point of focus for the pair was adjusting Blades' right hand grip. They extended it more down the club, with the feeling of a slightly longer right thumb.

This helped Blades work the club more around his body on the backswing, which prevented him from needing to stand up too much through impact. The strikes were more consistently solid—and the results prove it.