Winter Weather Practice
As winter settles in, the days get shorter, the weather turns nasty, and it’s difficult to find the motivation to get outside and work on your game. Unless you are a penguin, no one likes to be cold and wet, and that’s generally the conditions this time of year.
So what can your junior golfer do to stay sharp on their game? For me and my boys, we are focusing on putting until we can get back out on the course.
There are hundreds of putting mats available on the market today, ranging from under $50 to the thousands, and we’ve used them all. What we have found that works best for us is the Perfect Practice putting mat. The mat itself is a heavier material which provides a smoother roll, especially if your floor is not 100% flat. We have our mat setup in our basement, which has a tile floor. With less quality mats, you can see the slight variations between the tiles, which can dramatically influence your putt. The Perfect Practice mat has been able to hide these imperfections leaving us with a better putting experience.
In addition to the Perfect Practice putting mat, we also use the Perfect Practice alignment mirror and a WellStroke putting mat. The purpose of these two additional aids is to engrain the proper stance, posture, and stroke while putting. Here is how we use all three tools during a typical session.
Our Perfect Practice putting mat is 8 feet long, fully extended. At the end of the mat, we lay our alignment mirror. At this station, we are focused on the proper stance and posture. We do not use a golf ball, instead just focusing on standing in a position where our eyes are directly over the “line” and holding it in this position while we make several strokes.
Next, we move to the WellStroke putting mat. We lay our WellStroke mat directly in front of our alignment mirror. Along with the mat, we also use Gate Drill Weights by WellPutt. We place the weights along the path of our putter at each end of our putter face to create a “gate” for our putter to pass through. We use 8 weights in total. We place two weights at the initial address, two are placed approximately 4 inches ahead of the ball and two weights are placed approximately 4 inches behind the ball. These weights create a gate for our putter to pass through as we draw the putter back, and then press our putter forward and make our stroke all the way to the follow through. If our putter is off-track, these weights will create instant feedback as our putter will hit them. Similar to the alignment mirror, we will stand here, without a golf ball, and attempt several putting strokes until we are able to swing the putter through the gates without hitting any of them.
We place the last two weights at the front our our WellStroke mat creating a gate for our golf ball to pass through. Once we are confident in our stroke, we will add the golf ball to the drill. The goal is to make the same stroke as before, without hitting any of the weights, and putt the ball through the gate at the end of the mat. The purpose of this drill is to focus on having a square putter face at impact. If your putter face is not square at impact, the golf ball will hit one of the two weights at the end of the mat. The WellStroke mat has several alignment aids along the swing path to assist with squaring the face. While you are practicing your stroke, you can check your face alignment along the way.
Our typical practice drill:
3-5 strokes on the alignment mirror.
3-5 stokes on the WellStroke mat, without a ball.
Add the golf ball and make a putt. The only goal is to make the ball pass between the gate at the end.
Repeat step 1. We do 5 repetitions of this before moving on.
Once we’ve completed the above drill, we then move to the 3 foot mark on our Perfect Practice mat. We attempt to make 5 putts in a row from 3 feet, before moving on. Once we’ve made 5 putts, we will repeat the drill starting with the alignment mirror. In total, we will do this 3-5 times during each session.
