As with the full swing, successful putting is largely based on proper setup. If you don’t have a solid setup position, you will overcompensate with your shot, making consistency on the greens difficult to achieve.
I speak from experience. As someone who has struggled on the greens for most of this season, finding out my setup wasn’t correct was a light bulb moment for my game. When I visited GOLF Top 100 Master Stephen Sweeney earlier this summer for a setting the toneThe first things he noticed were my poor setup basics.
“If you look at the work I do with Tour players, a good part of my work is on the setup at the beginning of every lesson,” Sweeney said. “And after we feel good about the setup, we go to the green reading and speed control.”
If the setup isn’t solid, the rest of what you do on the putting green won’t matter as much. That’s why clearing these foundations is so important.
Check out the video below for our full tutorial, or read on for more on how to perfect your setup.
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How to perfect your setup
To put in your best, it is important to get the correct alignment of the eyes at the address. For me, this meant my eyes are more on the golf ball.
After Sweeney watched me hit a few putts, the first thing he noticed was that my eyes were inside (closer to my feet) the ball at address. Therefore, I was unconsciously aiming to the right of the hole and then trying to pull the ball in line with my shot.
“If the players’ eyes are on the line of the ball, they tend to look to the right,” Sweeney said. “When you make your shot, that putter moves in. The goal is to affect the shot.”
To help get my eyes more on the ball, Sweeney took me through a quick setup test trusted by old-school Tour players.
“Simply drop a ball from your eye line and see where it lands,” Sweeney said. “Right now, if you let a ball out of your eyes, you can see it land in the ball.”
With that visual showing that my eyes were so far into the ball, it quickly became apparent that I needed to zip more at the waist and get my eyes further out of the ball. After doing this, we performed the test again and the dropped ball landed directly on the ball on the ground.
“As a general rule, I like to see a two-putter head (width) from the ball to the toe line,” Sweeney said. “Then we’re going to bend forward at the hip until we have our eyes on the golf ball.”
Once I got my eyes on the ball more, it became much easier to consistently hit the ball where I was aiming.