Putting Drills and Practice
Putting accounts for roughly 40 percent of strokes in a typical round of golf, yet it is the area most recreational players practice least. The reasons are understandable — beating balls on the range feels productive, while rolling putts on a practice green can seem repetitive. But the short game is where scores actually get made, and putting is its heart. A structured practice routine, built around a handful of proven drills, will sharpen your pace control, tighten your start line, and — perhaps most valuably — give you something concrete to fall back on when pressure tightens on the back nine.
Why Random Practice Fails
Most golfers who do practise putting wander onto the green, drop a handful of balls, and putt from different spots without any particular structure. This is better than nothing, but research into motor learning consistently shows that blocked, purposeful practice leads to faster and more durable skill acquisition than random hitting. The putting green should be treated like the driving range: you arrive with a plan, you work through it, and you leave having accomplished something measurable.
The other habit that undermines putting practice is practising from too close. It feels good to drain putt after putt from three feet, but that builds a false sense of security. Spend the bulk of your time on mid-range putts — twelve to twenty feet — where the most shots are saved in real rounds, and use the short putts as a finishing drill to close the session on a positive note.
The Gate Drill for Start Line
The most reliable drill for improving the direction of your putts is the gate drill. Push two tees into the green just wide enough apart to allow the ball to pass through but no wider than the ball's diameter plus about half an inch on each side. Set them up about eight inches in front of the ball and directly on your intended start line. Then putt through the gate from six, eight, and ten feet.
This drill provides instant, unmistakable feedback. If the ball clips either tee, you know your face at impact is open or closed. You cannot argue with the result, and after twenty or thirty repetitions your brain starts to organise the stroke to consistently thread the needle. PGA Tour coaches including Butch Harmon and Dave Stockton — one of the finest putting instructors of the modern era — have long used variations of this drill at the highest level.
The Clock Drill for Short Putts
On any green, find a relatively flat spot around the hole and place balls at three feet on all four compass points. Work around the circle, holing every one before you move on. When you can hole all four consecutively, move out to four feet and repeat. The goal is to develop the automatic confidence that short putts demand — you should not be thinking about your stroke from three feet, you should simply be hitting the putt.
The psychological value of this drill is at least as important as the technical. Holing twenty consecutive putts from three feet creates a memory of success that carries into competition. Players who fear short putts have usually trained themselves to fear them by missing from that range in practice and moving on without consequence.
Pace Control: The Ladder Drill
Poor pace is the root cause of most three-putts. The ladder drill addresses this directly. Place a tee at five feet past the hole, and another at one foot short of the hole. Your goal is to roll a sequence of balls — starting from around twenty-five feet — finishing in the zone between those two markers. The ball should die near the hole, not race past. When you can land five consecutive balls in that corridor, move back five feet and repeat.
The key insight this drill teaches is that pace is controlled by the length of your backswing, not by hitting harder through impact. Tour players like Brad Faxon, widely regarded as one of the best putters in PGA Tour history, have consistently emphasised that reading green speed and committing to a specific pace is the foundation of low putting averages. The ladder drill builds the kinesthetic feel that makes pace control instinctive.
Reading Greens Away from the Ball
A significant part of putting practice should happen before you even take your stance. Reading greens is a skill that rewards deliberate development. Many club golfers read their putt only from behind the ball; better players walk the full line, crouch from the low side, and look from behind the hole as well. The low-side read is particularly valuable because break is easier to see from below the hole.
Spend five minutes per session simply walking around the green, looking at putts from multiple angles without hitting them. Build a mental model of the slope. When you put this into practice with the ball, your brain already has a three-dimensional map of the ground between you and the cup.
The Thirty-Ball Speed Circuit
This is a comprehensive practice session you can run in under thirty minutes. Drop ten balls at varying distances — roughly eight, fifteen, and twenty-five feet — from a single hole. Putt each one with full pre-putt routine, reading the break and committing to a line before you address the ball. Track how many times you leave the ball within a putter-length of the cup. At the end of the session, write down the number. This gives you a trackable benchmark. Improvement in that number over weeks and months is reliable evidence of real progress.
Open the map to explore courses around the world — every one of them rewards a golfer who shows up with a trustworthy putting stroke.
Pressure Putting and Competition Drills
The difference between practice and competition is pressure, and the best way to simulate it is to make your practice putts matter. One effective method is to set a rule: if you miss a putt in the clock drill, start again from the beginning. Another is to play a game where you must hole a ten-footer to finish the session — if you miss, you putt three more balls, and cannot leave until one goes in.
Some coaches use scoring games between two players on the practice green, making small wagers or simply keeping score across a series of putts from predetermined spots. The simple act of keeping score turns routine practice into something with consequence, and that consequence engages the same mental processes that fire on the course when a three-footer means bogey or par.
Integrating Putting into a Full Practice Session
The most effective approach is to build your practice sessions so that putting comes last, when you are mentally fresh in terms of technique but beginning to feel some fatigue. Start on the range, move through the short game area for chipping and bunker work, then finish on the putting green. The transition forces you to shift your mental gears — from full-swing mechanics to the quiet, unhurried process of reading a green and rolling a ball.
Ben Crenshaw, winner of two Masters titles and arguably the finest instinctive putter of the twentieth century, always maintained that putting is an art form that cannot be overthought. His practice sessions were long, unhurried, and focused on feel rather than mechanics. While not everyone can reach Crenshaw's level of sensitivity, the principle holds: practise putting with patience, track your results, and trust that the repetitions will gradually translate into a lower score.