When I learned my putting stroke as a 20 year old — and I have to admit I was a great putter as a kid, it came natural — but my mentor Mr. Lanning, and his friend, Jim Tom Blair, they gave me a putting lesson when I was 20 years old, that kind of shaped much of what I’m sharing with you.
One of the phrases they would use would be “putt with dead strength.” And to be honest, I didn’t really know what that meant. I thought that man hit it solid, roll it nice. But as I’ve become a teacher and ask more questions to myself and other smart people around me, particularly one tool, called the SAM Putt Lab kind of gave me the identity of what dead strength meant.
It’s really the idea of letting dead weight create the momentum and the clubhead speed to cause the ball to roll different distances.
So my challenge to you is to get you to identify dead weight and dead weight would be swinging a pendulum. And you notice if you swing a pendulum, the putter head kind of swings through exactly the same length and it’s swaying back. But if you use the pendulum stroke and rolled a pull, what would happen is the ball would interfere the pendulum swing and the through stroke would actually be smaller than the backstroke.
For you to do that, it’s going to help you end up having better distance control. And if I said what’s most important distance or direction with your putts? I would say distance is far more important to lag putting and making your next putt easy.
So begin to understand dead weight and letting the pendulum swing free.
