 Hello, I'm Jacob Schultz, PGA professional here to give you some tips for putting instruction for the National Disabled Veterans T Tournament presented by Veterans Affairs and the DAV. Alright, so we're back with our putting lesson today. The first thing I want to show you is the grip. So it all starts here. Mainly what we want to look for. Starting out, you're going to have a traditional golf grip, right? So get your hand situation on the club like so. Usually I just start with my left hand. I'll kind of cradle the grip and my fingertips here. And then I'll take my right hand and put my pinky finger just right over my left pointer finger. And it's going to look like this. So both thumbs are going to be on top of the putter. Alternatively, you can interlock your grip if that feels comfortable for you. If you do that for your normal swings with your driver, with your irons, with your wedges. Some other putter grips that are also fairly traditional, you can put one finger down the side of your grip. For a lot of people, this gives you a feeling of a little bit more control, a little bit more stability with your hands. Last but not least, there's one being used on tour right now for a fair number of people who use longer putters, belly putters. It's called the pencil grip or the claw. So you usually just grab normal with your left hand like the traditional grip. Then you bring your right hand over like you're going to grip a pencil or a pen. And you can go ahead and release just like this. And that's the claw grip. It's kind of fun. It's not really my style. But those are the grips that you can use traditionally for the putting grip. So a few of the ideals of the golf grip include not hinging your wrists or promoting any extra face movement. So if you kind of look at my putter here, I'm going to go ahead and hinge my wrists. You can kind of see how the rolling of your wrists and hedging back and forth can cause a lot of up and down motion and a lot of side to side motion. That and the putter, you'll be very inconsistent. So if I go ahead and hinge my wrist back like this, I'll hit a lot of putts left and a lot of putts right. It just kind of depends on how I deliver the face. So you see how loose my wrists are here. What we want is just a little bit more rigid grip. So you're going to be moving a lot with your shoulders and with your arms. And a lot less movement with your hips and your feet and your waist. So when you go ahead and line up your putt, you want to stand tall. One thing I've always learned, the tallest you can stand if possible on the putting green, the more accurate putter and the better putter you're going to be. So just take a regular athletic stance like you would for any other sport, golf included. Go ahead and take your grip and then try to stand just a little bit taller, stand up straight. Bend your knees a little bit and it's golf, so you got to remember just to relax just a little bit. Go ahead and make your stroke. Yeah, it wasn't too bad. Just remember, just keep your wrists fairly straight and all you're going to want to do is roll your shoulders, not your wrists. So next we're going to go over your posture. The posture is really, really important. Not only with your driver, your woods, your irons, your wedges, but most importantly it's going to be your putter. So like I said before, you want to stand as straight as you possibly can. Get your feet shoulder length apart and you're going to want to situate your golf ball somewhere in the middle of your stance. Preferably just a little bit more forward, so a little bit more towards your left foot. So as you go ahead and take your aim, make sure you aim the face of your putter right at your target. So right here we have a cup in front of us, so I'm going to go ahead and aim the best I can. Situate the ball right in between my two feet here. Then I'll go ahead and take the putter back straight back to the target and straight through to the target. Really the next part we want to go over here is to reinforce your posture. So with your shoulders you want to do a small amount of rolling with your shoulders here. So just moving back and forth. So why don't you go ahead and take your putter and just repeat this motion. So just back and forth. You really don't want to include too much rotation with your hips or your knees or your feet. So try to keep your lower half still. It still is a statue. And just go ahead and just make this motion back and forth just like a pendulum on a clock. So if you got that motion down, go ahead and make sure you line that putter up. Line that face that putter so it's facing at your target. Go ahead and take that putter back straight away from that target and straight through to that target. The next part we're going to go over is aim and speed. To be able to make a putt and to be a little bit more accurate so the ball is closer to the hole. You want to make sure you take the putter back just enough but not too much. And you want to make sure that you're aiming. You take a look at the green. The lower you can get on the green to aim and kind of see the contours of the ground. The better chance you can kind of see the natural line or the slope of the green. You can go ahead and make that roll. So I'm going to roll a few right now just to kind of see how the putt curves on the ground. So we see a little bit of break from right to left. So I'm going to go ahead and place a T in the ground here. It's kind of an aiming point. So I'm going to go ahead and put a T in the ground here. I'm going to take a few balls and see if I can get the speed right here. I'm going to go ahead and aim that T and see if I can drop a few. So let's see here. So I go right at that T not quite enough. Just a little bit more. All right. The last part I want to go through here is being able to go through some drills where we can take the putter back back and forth straight back and straight through to your target. So in order to do that, it really just requires a few T's. So they're normally very inexpensive. So it's a good way without having to wrap up a whole bunch of money and costly putting aids and things online. So go ahead and set a few T's in the ground like this. You're going to want to be able to fit your putter through this little gate that we've made. And I'll put one just about six to seven inches behind those two T's. And what that's going to do is going to give me a little bit of a scope to see how we're going to take it straight back and straight through. So I'm going to take this putter back right in between these T's. And all we need is just to go back to this T and you're going to want to have a full follow through with your putter just past your left foot. So I take it straight back and straight through to the target. So you want to go straight back and straight through to your target. So I just go back to this T. I'm going to follow through just past my left foot right at the hole. All right. That's pretty close. So I'm going to try one more here just to show you at home. So all this requires is about three golf T's. If you want to make this tool a little bit longer you can go ahead and add T's right. So here's one you can use with four. And all you're doing is this is just going to help you create that straight back straight through motion. And if you start banging into T's you know that that club heads moving a little bit. So try to just get this club head right in between the T's and go straight back and straight through to your target. That's going to really help with your aim, with your posture. Good. Okay. So we've went over posture. We've went over grip. We've went over the curvature of the putt, the alignment that you need to take to roll the ball to the hole. The next part I want to show you is uphill and downhill putting and also how to read a green. So you hear a lot. You have to read the green. So what exactly does that mean? So you have to see whether the green goes up or down. So if the slope is going up you need a little bit more energy to get the ball up the hill to go under the hole. If the ball is going down you need to ease up a little bit. Take a little bit less forceful stroke. And just barely touch it as it goes down the hill. So this is a downhill putt. You can kind of see I missed the hole there and the ball is going three to four feet past the hole. To be able to control that you still want to take the same posture grip alignment that you had before but just go a little bit slower. So go ahead and rehearse this here in your living room if you want. Take that putter back and forth but instead of that more back and forth that tick tock motion we want to go just a little bit slower. So it's almost like your clock is running out of batteries here. So take that slower stroke here and just tap it towards the hole and I made one. So go ahead and try that at home. Just take it a little bit slower. It's really important on a downhill putt that you remember that it's not going to break as much because if the ball is going to go ahead and go through that break it's going to be a little bit more speedy. So go ahead and just repeat that just a little bit slower. Make sure you stand nice and upright and tall. Get that same exact grip and put that ball in the same spot every single time as you're putting. So just right in between my two feet here a little head of center. Just go ahead and make that slow stroke down the hill and just let that ball roll down into the cup. Okay so we're at the 17th green at Blue Top Ridge and I'm now facing this huge uphill putt after hitting a great drive on the green. So we're going to go ahead and take a look at this putt because this is now for eagle. So I need to make sure I get this ball all the way up the hill and not come rolling back down at me so I don't have the same putt over again. So with uphill putts it's all about getting to the hole and if you're a little bit past that's great. You already see the line for when you come back and take that one foot putt back for birdie. So let's go ahead and line up one more time. You got to remember the three things. So first is your posture then you get your grip and then align yourself to the hole and make sure you visualize that putt going in. So with uphill putts we want just a little bit more energy than those downhill putts. I'm going to see a little bit of a left to right break up the hill and as the ball slows down it's going to break just a little bit more. So you got to remember on those uphill putts it's going to break slightly more since the ball is slowing down it's going to roll. So go ahead and I'm going to stand nice and straight. Knees flexed don't forget to relax and go ahead and take that putter back straight back and straight through to your target and get up that hill. Ooh pretty close. We'll try one more time here nice and straight straight back and straight through to your target. Ooh just missed it. Alright so one last tip of the day for putting if you're into putting as much as I am you really want to get down into the nitty gritty the scientific part. Really when you're choosing a putter for your own if you have if you want a putter that's you know makes more putts for you or if you just want to buy a new one. Take a look at what your local golf shop has typically most golf shops are going to have a blade or a mount style putter. What that means is a blade is going to be just one long piece of metal and a blade is going to be more oval shaped and it's going to more look like a hammer. So essentially with a putter what you want is something that's going to feel comfortable in your hands. There's a number of grips that do that for you as well. The length is probably the most important part of a putter so if you're a really tall person you're going to want a couple more inches up here for that putter to come to you. So when you're getting fit for clubs especially for irons and wedges in your driver you always want the putter to come to you or the club to come to you and not the other way around. So being able to stand up straight and still have that putter rest just right here as you drop your arms is really important. So should you choose a mallet or a blade so for me I actually have a mix of both so it's the best of both worlds. All putters have some type of an alignment aid on them whether it be a dot or a line or some other form of marking on the putter so make sure that you're always striking the putter just right in the middle. So as I line up that putter there you can see that line so each time I take the putter back straight back and straight through I'm going to line it up directly on that line and I'm going to go ahead and go ahead and make that putt coming up hill there. The last part is you want that ball to roll. What I mean by that is true roll so when you first make that stroke there's a certain percentage of roll that that ball is actually going on the green. To do that you want to make sure you take that putter level to the ground and you follow it straight back and straight through as I brought back earlier in the lesson. You don't want to have too much hinging with your wrists. What that does is it picks the putter face up and down and that really really kills your roll and as you make your putt here you can see how low to the ground my putter is. You take it back straight back and straight through from your target and try not to pick it up off the ground. You're going to make more putts that way. Thanks for watching.