Why is putting so hard

Which is why I found this chart from Odyssey Golf, which the company unveiled as part of its rollout for its forthcoming line of Stroke Lab putters, so interesting. A key piece of technology driving the Stroke Lab putter is its combined steel-graphite shaft. By replacing a large portion of steel with lighter-weight graphite, they save about 40 grams, which they then redistribute into the head and butt of the club — a move the company says makes the club more stable, and crucially, decreases the amount of face angle variance.

Controlling your face angle is a hugely important part of putting. The most important part, according to many teachers , and the chart helps illustrate why. If you can control your speed more effectively on the greens, you will get the ball closer to the hole. This means less three putts and much better scores. While we already covered green reading in a separate article, this is all about getting the right speed for your putts. Because even if you read the green correctly, without the right speed, your chances of making it goes down significantly.

Keep reading to learn how to pick your speed strategy and some of the most effective drills to help you become a master at speed on the greens. When it comes to the right putting speed, you have two basic approaches. You can die it in or choose the Tiger Woods method and hit it firm. There are pros and cons to both depending on the speed of the greens see our article on the Stimpmeter , types of putt you have, and the slope of the greens.

How beautiful is it when you see a putting roll into the front edge of the cup on a left to right swinger or a downhill sidewinder? It looks great and usually makes you feel like a PGA Tour pro when you pull it off. I like to think of this as the trickle approach.

The trickle in approach not only looks great but it makes the hole a lot bigger. Because as a putt is dying in it can enter the hole from all sides.

You might get a putt to fall in the front, sides, and usually have fewer lip-outs. Seeing that on a consistent basis can be frustrating and hard to score low on a regular basis. The trickle approach is basically pairing the perfect speed with the perfect read.

Each read of the greens is dependent on speed. With the trickle approach, you need to add a little bit more break to your read because the putt is coming in slow.

This is exactly the reason why we struggle so much with putting speed and distance control. The size of the hole is the same all over the world. It measures approximately While the actual size of the hole does not change, the effective hole size varies depending on the speed the ball is traveling. In case you believe the best thing to do, is never to leave a putt short, keep in mind, that by increasing the speed of your putt, you also increase your chances of a lip out.

The reason for that is the so-called free-fall-condition. This condition needs to be met, in order for the ball to stay in the hole and it is met, once gravity takes over. A slow traveling ball will therefore be more likely to fall into the hole, than a fast traveling ball.

Of course, there are more factors, such as off-center hits, that have an impact on the formula, but for this context, it is enough for you to know that once the condition is met, the ball will inevitably fall into the hole. The question you will have to ask yourself is when is the effective hole size biggest? And what happens, if you miss the hole? But there is more to it. As you can see, there is quite some room for error that you can have on both sides of the ideal line.

On top of that, no matter which line your ball ends up traveling on, if you manage to get the exact same speed every time, then your ball will end up inside 3 ft in case you missed the putt. This is very important information as from a distance of 10ft, more often than not, amateurs miss the putt.

So when making a decision about your putt, you should always consider where your ball will be if you miss the putt. Or in other words, how far can you afford to be away from the hole to feel comfortable on your putt coming back.

On the other hand, if you look at the second picture, you can see the speed errors you are allowed to make and your ball will still go into the hole. You can immediately tell, that the room for error is significantly less than what you had with the initial ball direction. This becomes even more evident if you look at the two pictures on the right side of the graphic.

Here you can see the results of missed putts. Again, you can see, that having the right speed, but being slightly off-line, produces a far less significant error, than if you hit the ball on the right line and vary in speed. Especially, if you think back about what we have established earlier on the effective hole size.

A fast putt, will not only make the hole smaller for you, but a mistake will also result in a long putt coming back. But what should you do with this information?

Think about it rationally. If we combined what we just learned, you know, that if your ball is traveling on a rather low line, you would have to get the speed exactly right in order for the ball to still fall into the hole.

However, if you overread a putt, you could still have some speed errors and your ball might end up in the hole anyways. Therefore, it is always better to aim higher, rather than lower, especially since most amateurs tend to under-read putts anyways. While break increases on the green, your margin of error in your initial ball direction increases too. In other words, the more slope you have, the more you can be off on your initial ball direction.

In terms of putting speed errors, it is a totally different story and quite the opposite is seen in the data. As seen in the graphic below for a level putt you can misjudge the speed by This is an incredibly low number, and it explains why break putts are so difficult. You have almost no margin of error when it comes to speed, the more slope you add. Making mistakes much more likely.

You might ask yourself now, how on earth you should ever be able to judge speed on a green this precisely. And the answer is that there is no one way to do it, but we will get back to this later. The same holds true in terms of perfect putting speed. But again, there is no perfect putting speed and this is something highly individual. Of course, for that speed, the effective hole size is statistically speaking the biggest, but what happens if this leads you to leave your putts rather short all of the time?

Or, if you think to yourself I have to be more aggressive and get the ball to the hole, but end up with those dreaded footers coming back and missing them as well?