Medicus Putter Trainer II

Article 2 in the Series: How to Cut 10 Strokes Off Your Golf Score Using Medicus- Gaining Skill With the Medicus Putter Trainer- The Short Putt Drill

Medicus Driver Article Index

Medicus Driver Improves all aspects of your swing from the takeaway to downswing.

Above- The Medicus Putter Trainer attached to a normal putter.

Background on Putting Advice- The Dave Pelz Influence

We’ll talk about 2 putting drills in this series of articles you can do on a practice green with your Medicus putter trainer and then your regular putter.  One drill will be for short putts, and another will be for distance control.  The short putt drill will be described here and the distance control drill in a subsequent article.  To seriously improve your putting, you need to do each of them.  Both of these drills were explained by the famous short game guru, Dave Pelz, in his excellent book, “Putt Like the Pros”.  Any golf nut would really enjoy this book on top of learning a lot.

First a little background about Pelz.  He wanted to be a PGA Tour golfer when he was a young man, but as a college golfer at a Big 10 school, he couldn’t beat a certain player from Ohio State: Jack Nicklaus.  Realizing he just simply could not compete with Tour pros, Pelz went on to literally become a rocket scientist, and had a career at the Goddard Space Center near Washington, D.C.  Pelz subsequently went back into the golf business and has had a hugely successful career as a short game coach.  The reason this is mentioned is because Pelz approached the problem of putting like a scientist.  He designed machines that would roll perfect putts, and he made meticulous measurements to understand how many putts golfers can realistically expect to make, the obstacles in accomplishing this, etc.

Knowing distance control was critical in successful putting, Pelz determined that the ideal putt should be hit with a force that will take the ball 17 inches beyond the hole.  This amount of force will allow the greatest number of putts to be holed, and it applies to putts of any distance and any lie.  Most golfers think that having the ball die at the hole is the ideal distance control, but Pelz proved this was not the case.  The reason for this is the “lumpy doughnut”.  This is a term Pelz coined to describe what happens around a golf hole during a day of play.  Golfers are stepping on the green near the hole, tending pins, picking up golf balls, marking balls, etc. Basically they make hundreds and hundreds of heel prints, and these prints have a significant effect on a rolling golf ball and on the number of putts that get holed.  If hundreds of heel prints have been made around a hole, a ball needs to have enough force to stay straight when rolling through all this.  To get all the details, I recommend the book described above. 

The Short Putt Drill

Enough background… let’s get started with the short putt drill.  If you are going to improve your score, you need to have confidence to hole putts of 3-5 feet.  If you can hole most of those, you have a good chance of eliminating most of your 3 putts and of getting up and down from chips and short shots just off the green. 

The first thing to consider is putter alignment.  Most people don’t realize it, but they are probably not aligning their putters where they think they are.  In other words, if you are trying to hit a straight 10 foot putt, you may think you are aligned properly, but in reality you are probably off.  To compensate for this, you brain makes you adjust your putting stroke.  Without even knowing it, you are compounding one error with another.  The best thing you can do regarding alignment is to copy what the pros on TV do.  Mark a straight line on your ball and line it up with your target.  You can then line your feet up with the mark on the ball and swing your putting stroke parallel to your feet.  When using the Medicus putter trainer, at least you will not be able to break your wrists and cause problems in that way, so you are probably eliminating some bad habits. 

Here’s the short putt drill-

Place 4 balls 3 feet from a hole, one ball on each side of the cup.  Behind each of those balls place 4 more balls 4 feet from the cup, and then 4 balls 5 feet from the cup.  Start with the 3 footer and then hit the other balls in each line.  Try to hit the balls with enough energy to go 17 inches beyond the hole.  So you have hit 12 putts in total.

Now repeat the above two more times for a total of 36 short putts.  Now take three balls and place each of them 3 feet from the hole around the cup.  Go through your normal alignment routine and start your stroke.  But before impact close your eyes.  If you hit all 3 balls into the cup with your eyes closed, the drill is finished. 

If not, go through the 12 ball exercise again before trying 3 balls from 3 feet with the eyes closed at impact.  All this should take about 15 minutes.  If you don’t succeed in sinking the final 3 balls from 3 feet, go work on something else and try it again another day.  Once you have done this with the Medicus putter trainer, repeat the entire drill with your regular putter.  Of course the feel will be different, but hopefully the Medicus putter trainer has helped you have a better stroke.  Also, hopefully you are using a modern putter with a high MOI (moment of inertia), as described in the previous article in this series: Medicus Putter Trainer

Our next article in the series will be about a great drill for ideal distance control.  And of course you now know that that distance is 17 inches beyond the hole.

Check out the Medicus Putter Trainer by clicking here: Medicus Driver Improves all aspects of your swing from the takeaway to downswing.