I was watching a video the other day about Paul Skenes and his more intense, two-hour warmup routine. He started doing it in college, said it was the best he ever felt on the mound afterwards, and before every throwing session ever since.
“Eight months out of the year, I do the same thing. Every day. It’s boring. It’s mundane. But it’s what it takes.”
It was a sentiment that struck me as both cool and true, so I started wondering about what the golf version of this is, and I think the answer is putting warmups.
Pros (well, generally the pros who are good at putting) are maniacs about their putting warmup routines. Putting coaches have become a mainstay part of their teams, and their job isn’t just to improve their putting stroke, but to design and monitor their warmups.
Last week, I decided to make a serious effort at improving my putting in the style of what the pros do. I don’t have the time they do to practice, but I can shrink down the same stuff that they do.
So that’s what I did. I budgeted 40 mins a day of putting practice just over a week—all in just over an hour accounting for my travel time to and from the course. It was a 10-30 routine inspired by the pros, and the best part is that it helped more than I thought it would!
Part 1: Find a straight putt and get the stroke dialed (~10 mins)
Most tour pros seem to start their session with some light technical work, usually with the help of some tool.
- String above the ball
- Line on the ground.
- Tees either side of the putter head
- Tees (or gates) just in front of the ball
- Mirror training aid tool
The goal is simple: Stop bad habits creeping into your putting stroke, and make sure you’re starting the ball on your intended line.
Part 2: One ball, 18 different putts (~30 min)
You don’t want to over do the first part. That’s a sync up session, not a grind session. This is the important one: Hitting different putts under pressure, and never the same two in a row, with some stakes attached. Full routine for each one, just like you would on the course.
I leaned on the Stack Putting App for this portion, because its putting program is great and strangely addicting. The Stack started out as a speed-training app, but it’s since expanded into putting and wedge practice.
The putting program is a kind of game: It spits out 18 different putts at random. It’ll tell you to go find a flat, right-to-left 9-footer, for instance. You plug in the results (whether you made it, or whatever combination of long, short, left, right you missed it), then move onto the next putt. Your results are calculated into Strokes Gained, then compared to whatever handicap your goal is.
The whole thing is a great way to practice, for a few reasons:
- Hitting different putts constantly coaches your brain to adapt
- You’re not just practicing your putting, you’re also honing your green reading
- You’re gathering data about what’s going right, and wrong.
- You’re replicating course conditions by practicing under pressure.
“Putting is so variable from week-to-week; day-to-day that you can overlook tendencies,” he says. “It takes something like Stack putting to get some meaningfulness out of the data about your game. You do five sessions and now, all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, I see a pattern.’”
I did nine of these tour-inspired 10-30 sessions over this stretch. I’m a scratch golfer, and as you can see at this I was losing somewhere between zero and 1.5 strokes to a +2 handicap putting per round. By the ninth session, I was consistently gaining strokes. I’ve gained at least half a stroke in my last five of my last six sessions.
My average total feet of puts made per session is trending up now, too.
And because I’ve been tracking all this, it’s been churning out some interesting trends that I wouldn’t have noticed. Mainly, that my make rate on uphill putts is lagging behind where it should be.
Why, you ask? Well, because I’m tending to leave those uphill putts short (negative means short misses, positive means long misses).
Anyway, now I know what to work on, and I know that it is, indeed, working. If nothing else, a little evidence that for the old cliche practicing a little smarter can make big improvements in your game.
