Much like with the full swing, success in putting is largely predicated upon a proper setup. If you don’t get into a solid setup position, you’ll overcompensate with your stroke, making consistency on the greens difficult to achieve.
I speak from experience. As someone who’s struggled on the greens for much of this season, discovering that my setup was not correct was a lightbulb moment for my game. When I visited GOLF Top 100 Teacher Stephen Sweeney earlier this summer for a putting tune-up, the first things he noted were my poor setup fundamentals.
“If you see the work I do with Tour players, a good chunk of my work is on the setup at the start of every lesson,” Sweeney said. “And then once we feel like we are good on the setup, we move on to green-reading and speed control.”
If the setup is not solid, the rest of what you do on the putting green won’t matter as much. That’s why getting those fundamentals ironed out is so important.
Check out the video below for our full lesson, or read on for more on how to perfect your setup.
To putt at your best, it’s important to get your eye alignment correct at address. For me, that meant getting my eyes more on top of the golf ball.
After Sweeney watched me hit a few putts, the first thing he noted was that my eyes were inside (closer to my feet) of the ball at address. Because of that, I was subconsciously aiming to the right of the hole and then trying to pull the ball back on line with my stroke.
“If players’ eyes are inside the ball line, they tend to look out to the right,” Sweeney said. “As you make your stroke, that putter is moving on the inside. The aim is affecting the stroke.”
To help get my eyes more on top of the ball, Sweeney ran me through a quick setup test trusted by old-school Tour players.
“Simply dropping a ball from your eye line and seeing where it lands,” Sweeney said. “Right now if I drop a ball from your eyes, you can see it’s landing inside the ball.”
With that visual showing my eyes were so far inside the ball, it quickly became apparent that I needed to hinge at the waist more and to get my eyes more out over the ball. After I did that, we conducted the test again and the dropped ball landed directly on top of the ball on the ground.
“As a general rule of thumb, I like to see a two putter head-(width) from the ball to the toe line,” Sweeney said. “Then we go into forward bend at the hip until we get the eyes over the golf ball.”
Once I got my eyes more on top of the ball, it became much easier to consistently hit the ball where I was aiming.
If you’re someone who struggles with consistency, give this setup test a try and see where your eyes are relative to the ball at address. Once you get them into the right spot, it becomes much easier to hit putts where you are aiming.
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