How to Read Greens and Putt Like a Real Golfer

I'm going to show you things nobody's ever told you about putting. Golf and putting starts from the hole back. So let's start closest to the hole. Inside two feet is really the only area you should be taking break out of your putt and hitting it firmer into the back of the jar. Once we go outside three feet, that's when we start having problems of rimming out and leaving ourselves long comebackers when we don't get the line 100% right. But we have to know what two feet looks like. Generally it's the length of your 36 or 35 inch putter up to this bottom of the grip. That's about two feet. So it's a very easy way to judge when you're on the course if you are actually inside two feet. If you're at three feet or beyond, you know, it's kind of risky to take break out of your putt unless it's really minimal break. So inside two feet, the reason we can do this on these short putts is because around the hole there's only allowed to be a couple of degrees of slope because it allows the ball to stop near the cup. If there's too much slope you can't stop the ball at the cup. So if you do have a little bit of break on your two foot putt, take the center line and just go to the high side just a little bit, just inside the high side. You have a putt with just a little bit of break, let's say from left to right, we don't want to ever leave the cup on a two foot putt. So we line it up at the center and we just turn it a couple millimeters to the left, to the high side and start it on the high side. It comes back into the hole. You'd never go outside the hole on a two foot putt, but then we move back to three feet. Now once we move outside two feet to three feet, now the break starts coming into play, especially as the greens get quicker. So if you're playing on green speeds nine or ten, when you have a six foot putt or beyond, you're going to be starting that ball outside the cup to get into the hole. Now when I say starting the putt outside the hole, this may be where a lot of us are missing putts and the reason is we're not starting the ball on the line that we need to start the ball on for it to take the curve into the cup. And this is one of the reasons people miss putts on the low side. The low side is the side of the putt that the ball breaks toward, underneath the cup. So if it's a right to left and you miss it on the left side, it means you're under reading putts a lot of the time. When we envision a putt, we have to see it like a movie, moving out toward the hole and then coming back on a curve into the cup. When we can envision a putt like that or even a chalk line, then we can start to see where to start the ball. Now these are really important putts because from three feet, mostly we're doing about 90 percent, but from six feet out, that's when it starts dropping like crazy. Six feet, we are probably looking at about 60 percent, seven feet is less, eight feet is less, nine feet is even less. So what do I mean when I say start outside the cup? Watch this putt. Watch where the start line actually is. Watch where the ball initially goes toward where my putter is aiming. There, did you see that? So on the six footer with one and a half percent of slope, that's only one and a half percent. We still have to aim outside the cup and it's a lot more than you actually think. This is about half a cup outside the hole to make the putt. Now on a six footer, you wouldn't think there's that much break, but this is the reality. Outside of six feet, from five foot and a half onwards, you basically have to be aiming outside of the cup. This really is very reassuring for you so that when you're reading and you're not seeing that much, you know you should just take a little bit more. Now even on this putt, which is only a half a percent of break, the start line is on the outside of the lip. Without knowing that, we have to go outside the cup. I would miss a lot of these putts probably on the low side because I would just think, oh there's not that much break inside right. Nope, look at that. That's what you do when you go inside right, we miss on the low side. So outside six feet, any slope at all, outside the cup. Easy game. Okay, this is absolutely perfect. My caddie always picks the line that is exactly, in my opinion, halfway between the center line and the real start of the putt. Now if you putt to this point here, okay, let's do that. The straight line we know is not going to get there. Let's putt to that line. You have to hit the ball very, very firm to actually make the putt and if you hit it with correct pace, it can never go in the cup. So what we have to do is start seeing the curve. It's like a car driving down the road and curving with the road toward its destination and the headlights is where the ball is actually rolling toward. Let me show that to you. This is the point where the car will start to move more toward the hole and less away from the line where we start that ball along the orange line and that car starts out with the headlights pointing straight to our aiming point. As it hits the curve, the car starts turning toward the cup and that's where the car starts really moving directly at the cup. This entire way here, it's basically moving away and starts curving toward the hole and from this point on, it's basically a line straight into the hole. That's how you can envision a putt. That's why we have to pick a start line further out. Envision the curve. I'll leave the cars on screen and when you can envision that curve, this line here is the tangent line of that curve so that your ball will start on that curve. So that's why we start the ball out way to the right, we pick that line, we align our putter up to that point and then make a nice stroke with the correct speed and it comes into the hole. And this is 100% why Padraig Harrington and other pros will tell people to basically double the break, but the reason we have to take more break is because we are putting to the apex and not into the curve. Now what you can do when you get on the course is start reading putts and adding break. Whatever you see, just add double and start playing around with that to discover the perfect break for your speed. Because when we read break, we read it automatically with our speed in mind and practice this starting it on the line. So add some break to your reads, but the most important part is to actually align to where you want to hit the golf ball and aim your putter directly there. I'm going to show you that but we're going to move inside for that. So in this video we're talking about the speed and the read combined together to give you the curve that you're going to see for your putt. And then we need to aim that club face to the starting line that we select. It's a very key part of the putt and it's a place where a lot of us go wrong and this is what I practice when I'm at home because I can't really practice that much here in Thailand. Not many green complexes around to practice on and it's also 100 degrees every day. So I like to practice at home on my mat and the most important part about aligning your club face is that it's on the line you want to start on. So if I want to start this ball toward that cup, I can just put my club face down and have a look. It looks fine to me but what I can do to improve this is put something on my line to know that's where it's aligned to and I keep my aim of my club face sharp. Now this is actually something to practice because eventually you get automatic. Once you can start aligning your club face to that little thing in front of your ball, you can extend that out further to start understanding if you're aligned to the hole. And that is normally with your head and your neck. If I line this up to that ball marker, to me that looks like it's going a little bit left. So I move my head over toward my backside. Now that looks dead at the cup. Perfect. Another way to do that is to take a tee and put it down even on a practice green or on your putting mat like a prime putt at home and make sure that that tee is lining up at the hole because a lot of the time you feel like you're lined up but your putter face is actually aligned very far from where you're intending to go. This is going to make it more difficult to start the ball online because your body and brain connection know it's not in the correct place. So it's going to make adaptations. If you're aiming out to the right, your body knows it's going to pull the putt around. If you're aiming out to the left, it's going to push the putt open. So you can train these things at home super easy. That's what I use this mat for. I mean, they've designed these cups in the prime putt mats so that they actually simulate a real golf hole. Tons and tons and hours and hours of testing to be able to create a hole that actually functions like one on the golf course, which is absolutely amazing. The more you hit the ball online, the more you hit it at the center of the clubface, the more you line your clubface up to your target, the easier it's going to be for you to recall it in the future on every length putt. I like to do this 15-20 minutes when I get a chance, 10 minutes when I get a chance. It's always in my house. I travel so much, you can unroll these things, even driving with them for 10 hours in the car and it's ready to putt immediately. But what I love about this is that I discovered something by using Jack Nicholson's idea of having your eyes over the line of the putt to be able to see where your putter is aimed. So once you've practiced aiming your putter, you want to be able to confirm it's aimed in the correct place by using your eyes and your brain and body connection. Now I'm pretty sure no one else is going to show you this one. I read Jack Nicholson's Putting My Way and something he quoted in there was having your eyes over the line of the ball. So imagine my vision directly out of my head, 90 degrees to the back of my head. That vision, if we can move that vision over the golf ball, when we look at our target, we just swivel our head as if there's a stick through the top of our head and a stick through our neck and we swivel our head to the target. Do you notice how it goes on a straight line to the target? But then if I look down my cheeks, stand a little tall, my 90 degree gaze is now two or three feet away from me. Watch what happens when I look at the hole. It's almost like an arc. Can't see anything out of here. Oh, I made it. And I believe that this may be one of the reasons that a lot of golfers align to the right and pull their putts toward the target just because of this single difference. Straight versus down your cheeks and around. Check the Prime Putt Mat out at the link in the description. Absolutely money. One of my favorite training tools when I'm at home and not able to get to a golf course, which is most of the time. Let me give you a little hack I picked up when I used to practice a lot and play when I was in university. I used to always be drinking or, you know, waking up late and getting to the golf course just before my tea time and have like two or three minutes to use the practice green. So I had to develop a little routine that was quick to pick up the speed of the green for the day. So what I decided to do was get a generic putt that I use on every green when I get there and just swing to the outside of my right foot with my tempo. And wherever that ball ends up, that's kind of the green speed for the day. Just a quick feeling for the green. So that helps anywhere I go. I just do the exact same thing, same tempo, same distance backswing. And wherever that ball ends up, that distance, that's kind of the green speed for the day. And it's very good because it calibrates very quickly with your brain. So that's all rolling to the exact same distance, as you can see. Then what I'll do, I'll take my ball and I'll put another golf ball down and just put it at a random distance after feeling that green speed and try to get it to just touch that little green ball there. Let's say it's not the same length putt as I just hit. And I want to see if I've got the green speed correct. There we go. Just touched it. So that's what I really like to do. Maybe you can do the same thing on your greens. But I've got the speed and I'm ready to hit the first tee. After how long did that take? I don't even know. Three, four minutes? Easy game. So how do we develop touch around the green to actually get the ball to stop in a decent distance from the cup or the right speed to go in the hole? When I used to practice a lot, I used to hit a lot of balls. I'd hit like 10, 11 balls to the same hole. But what I started realizing is some of the balls would stop in front of the hole and I actually start playing a game like, not bowls, but you want to get the ball to just touch that ball and drop it into the cup. And I actually started using that as a bit of a drill to get the, you know, pace control by focusing on that task instead of the fear of hitting the ball too hard. So now I'm more focused on just trying to tap that ball into the cup instead of worrying about not finishing close to the cup. Look at that. Perfect pace control. I promise, this is a beautiful thing you can do. We want to get that speed control correct and we want to tap that ball into the cup. The other way we can do this is, Caddy, can you come stand? My Caddy's going to stand here, two feet beyond the hole. I don't want that ball to hit her shoes. Caddy, stand over here. Right over here. Right over there. Perfect. Perfect. Now, I don't want the ball to hit her shoes too hard. They may be able to kiss her shoe, look at that, and then doesn't touch her feet. And that's not a problem at all. If I had got the line correct, I would have touched that ball, got it in the hole, but our speed control is absolutely money. We didn't push the Caddy over the cliff. Brilliant. According to the electronic level on this six footer, we have 2.5% slope. So on the edge is 1%, 2% in the middle and 3% is one cup outside. So you can see a six footer, which doesn't seem to have that much break, actually has a ton of break. This is just to prove to you that with all these breaks at six feet, basically all of them are outside the cup. This is to illustrate what happens when you go too high on a break and too low on a break, to show the differences in how far the ball ends up from the cup. The basic premise is that if you go a foot higher than the actual starting line, you should end up about half that distance from the cup on the high side, because the ball's moving on the way to the hole and stops on the way to the hole. Opposite way is that if you miss it by a foot left, because it's coming down the slope, you're actually going to triple that distance to maybe two, three or four feet. So if you miss it a foot lower than the actual starting line, you're going to finish triple that distance low. And if you miss it a foot high, you're actually going to only finish about half that distance, six inches from the cup. This is the correct break and capture speed for this cut. Let's see what happens if we go high. So we're actually finishing with a good capture speed. We're finishing from this angle that's only about two to three inches. Let's say we go halfway between that break. We only see a foot of break and we miss the break by a foot. Now you see with the same capture speed, we are increasing the distance of our next putt because the ball is actually traveling down the slope. If you don't go high enough on putts, you're going to leave yourself a lot more long comebackers. A three, four footer is much more difficult than a little one foot, one and a half foot tap in just behind the cup. So on these long putts, the idea is always to go a little higher than you think, so that the ball stops on the way to the hole. Now, most people under read their putts and I figured this out by playing with caddies and playing with other people who always under read my putts considerably. And I could never understand how they could see one ball when I'm seeing two balls. And I finally understood it when I asked my caddie who's very good at reading putts. She's very good, but she tells me the apex. So when I see the apex and I want to aim to the apex, I'm going to miss all my putts on the low side. And we've been told growing up playing golf or reading instructional stuff that you have to hit to the apex. And from the apex, it moves toward the hole. I've got an orange line down there or yellow line. That's basically the perfect line. Look where the line actually goes to two cups to the right. I'm seeing like, okay, that's not two cups to the right. There's no way. And that's why we always miss the putts on the low side. If you actually look at the real start line, it's often nearly double. So we extend the start line all the way out to the hole, and we can see how much different it is compared to the apex line. If I hit this on the apex line, let's see what happens to the ball. And we're always missing low by a lot, but you can see the ideal line actually breaks a little bit before that. And if we extend that line all the way through to the hole, we actually see how much further out. That's the white line. So let's say I start this on the white line, goes over the apex and into the cup. That's how it works. When you add more break and you see the start line is much further out to the right, you actually hit it the correct pace. Your brain lines up perfectly and it goes in the hole. It does hit the apex, but it starts out outside the apex and then rolls over the apex into the cup, missing low every time. You cannot make the putt on the apex line. It's almost impossible if the green has any break on it. So now we're going to go along the white line, over the apex and into the cup. It's so important to get this geometry right when you're reading greens.