You gotta get worse before you can get better.
And this week, that’s going to be especially true. I went out to see Christopher (CS) at Pumpkin for our weekly meeting and we focussed a lot on my mechanics, or lack thereof.. Basically, thus far I’ve been putting like a madman. A very subdued madman, for sure, but a madman nonetheless. I have no consistent pattern to my swing, and really have just been focussed on my stance for the first two months of The Plan. So, just when I was getting comfortable with my stance, it’s time to focus on my mechanics for the next couple of weeks.
Looking at my swing on CS’s computer screen, it’s pretty obvious what I should work on. I have a tendency to pull the club back far on every putt and then slow the putter head down going into impact. I also flare the club outward on my backswing and then swing in towards my front foot. And.. I’ve been aiming the putter face slightly to the left and then correcting for that (or at least at times correcting) through the swing. All of these things have been working fairly well to this point, but to get to the level I need to get to I will have to adjust to a more repeatable and solid stroke.
This week I have a bunch of new goals pertaining to my putting stroke. First, I’m going to try and start with my putter floating instead of grounded. I feel that it’s a bit easier to start fluidly when I do not have the putter grounded, so hopefully this will help with keeping my backstroke from flaring out. Then, I’m going to work on the ratio of my backswing to my followthrough and try and put a bit more followthrough in as related to backswing instead of the other way around as it is now. And finally, I need to work on making a bit more of a crescent shape during the swing.
After the first two hours of working on these things, I can tell it’s going to be a frustrating road ahead for these next few days. This time, though, I’m going to enter the week knowing that my percentages are going to be much lower and just try to take it one hour at a time..