Lower Body Stability with Putting

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Okay, so the first key to starting a putt online is having a stable anchor or

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having

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lower body stability.

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And basically what I mean by that is I don't want your hips or your pelvis or

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anything

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below your waist to move during the putting stroke.

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If you take a look at YouTube and you look at some of the best putters in the

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world,

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what you'll see is that they're going to keep their hips relatively square or

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relatively

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stable during the entire putting stroke.

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What I typically see with a lot of amateurs is as they take the putt, sorry in

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the through

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stroke or the down stroke, the lower body is actually going to lead or open up.

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What that'll do and what that is akin to is if I had this putter swinging and

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here's my

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stable center that it's swinging around, if this stable center is rotating as

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it's swinging,

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I'm going to have a lot of inherent variability to where the face is going to

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be pointed.

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That's why it makes it so difficult to get the ball to start online.

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So most of the time I have players who can resolve this issue simply by

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increasing the

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amount of feedback because you may not be aware that your lower body is moving.

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So the first thing you want to do is you want to check in a mirror.

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So I'm going to pretend this camera is my mirror and I'm going to get this out

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of here.

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I'm going to get set up so that I would be facing and putting towards the

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mirror.

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You can do this if you have a full length mirror either in your bedroom or in

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hotel room.

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And what you're going to do is you're going to kind of take notice of something

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in the

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background and you're going to see what your thighs are pointing at.

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So in this case from the camera's point of view, they're pointing more or less

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at this

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black line.

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So then when after I take my stroke, I'm going to check in this follow through

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position that

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they're still pointing at that same place because if they're rotating open

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either in

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the backswing or in the follow through, again that's going to cause some of

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this inherent

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inconsistency.

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Some other ways that you can practice it are to increase the level of

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sensitivity for

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your feet.

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So any unstable object is going to make you more aware of when you shift weight

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.

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So here I have a couple of these dina discs that you can get at perform better

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or any

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other sporting goods store.

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So you would stand on here, now it's going to be very difficult for me to have

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perfectly

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stable lower body.

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But in the follow through, if I were to shift, I would have to have a much

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major adjustment

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and so therefore you would see and you would feel that your lower body was

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moving.

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You can also use either a half foam roller to stand on or one of these swim

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noodles works

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pretty well.

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I love these because they fit in your golf bag and they're just about the right

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density

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that if you place them under your arch, you will feel if you go heel toe or if

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you have

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any type of forward and backward movement, a little bit less sensitive on the

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side to

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side.

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So you can put this in your bag and you can practice either when you're on the

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road or

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beforehand.

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Just try to find a stable position to put from and then go ahead and take

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practice strokes,

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making sure that you're not feeling any weight shift.

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Another option that you can do is you can take shoe boxes and fill them with

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golf balls

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and stand and practice in your bare feet because then you get a lot of

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sensitivity.

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But because you can't really do that one on the golf course, I tend to prefer

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these

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too.

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So give that a try, double check your lower body stability and don't move on

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until the

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next step until you can consistently, at least half the time, we'll call that

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consistently,

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you can consistently keep your lower body stable during the pine stroke.