In The Sweet Spot: What Is It and Where Do I Find It? we discussed how important it is to consistently strike the golf ball out of the sweet spot of your golf clubs. This is more important than ever with the putter.
Striking the ball just fractions of an inch away from the sweet spot of the putter will damage your distance control, because it reduces the efficiency of energy transfer from the club head to the ball.
You can have perfectly controlled stroke speed through impact, but you’ll never have good distance control if you can’t consistently find the sweet spot, since the energy transferred to the golf ball will vary from one stroke to the next.
The closer to the sweet spot of the putter face that you can consistently strike the ball, the more consistently energy will be transferred to your putts. Maximal energy transfer occurs when putts are impacted precisely on the sweet spot, and the variability of energy transfer is minimised when putts are struck close to the sweet spot. The further away from the sweet spot that you strike the ball, the more drastic the loss of strike efficiency, and the more variable the energy transfer, and thus putt distance, becomes.
Distance control, or touch, above all else, is crucial to good putting – you can never be a great putter without finely-tuned touch.
Just as importantly, striking the ball off-centre will also cause the putter face to twist during impact, which will alter the spin axis of the golf ball. With other clubs, this will change the direction of the lift provided by the spin during the ball’s flight, causing it to curve through the air. With a putt, the effect is much more dramatic, since the ball is in contact with the ground, and even the tiniest change in the spin axis of the ball will quickly send the putt off-line. Once again, the further from the sweet spot that you strike the ball, the greater the effect – the more that the putter head will twist and the more the ball will be thrown off-line…
or Log In
…This article forms part of the Golf Loopy Putt like a Champion series, the sensational new putting game improvement system that will help you to improve every aspect of your performance on the greens. The improvements will be dramatic, and they will be permanent.
