LONG GOLF: Long's Putting Stroke

by Steve Long

Long Golf

These techniques are reviewed and developed at the blog, Golf Discoveries, at http://golfdiscoveries.blogspot.com/

Address Position

In the picture above, you can see the address position for Long's Putting Stroke.

Notice how far the torso leans forward. It is uncommonly far over.

This address position increases directional accuracy in a remarkable way, and it determines the entire stroke.

At the end of this article there are some additional tips that can be used with any stroke.

I call the amount of leaning over the "torso angle." It has to be fairly exact. I will explain how to find this angle and how to refind it whenever you wish.

And there is one more thing that must accompany the increased torso angle, and that is a more certain ball position. You must always have the ball in this certain relationship to the torso, and preferably under your eyes. After an initial analysis, you can find the ball position easily at the same time as you find the torso angle.

Technically speaking, what is required then is that the arms, club, ball, and torso should always be at the same relative positions to each other at address, and that the torso be at a special angle to the club shaft.

Here is why the angle is so important: at a certain angle, the most difficult task of physical coordination in putting, the movement of the shoulders, suddenly becomes much easier.

In the usual putting setup, the shoulders move diagonally. To see this for yourself, stand in front of a mirror or window so you can see your profile. Assume your normal putting address position, then slowly stand up straight while keeping your arms and shoulders locked in position in relation to the torso.

When you reach the standing up straight position, most likely the clubhead will still be lower than your hands. (If it is horizontal, you are already doing a version of Long's Putting Stroke.)

Now do your putting stroke in this standing up position. Look in the mirror and notice that the shoulders move diagonally, meaning up and down at the same time as forward and backward. One goes up and back while the other goes down and forward, on the backswing. On the downswing they reverse direction.

Your diagonal shoulder movement varies a little or a lot from stroke to stroke, and every time it varies you get a different clubface direction. The up-down movement has to be timed exactly with the forward-backward movement, because together they control the clubface direction.

If your shoulders are not moving up and down, but only forward and backward, and the clubhead is lower than the hands, then either you are not doing your real stroke, or you are flexing your elbows, which means the angle between upper arm and forearm is changing. This elbow flexing is really difficult to control.

Another control problem is that the diagonal shoulder movement rides on the torso. For most golfers, the torso turns right and left during the stroke, contributing additional movement to the forward-backward shoulder movement. The shoulders also have there own forward and backward movement independent of the torso. So the forward-backward movement of the shoulders is actually made of shoulder movement and torso twisting. Any one or a combination of all three elements, the torso, the left shoulder, and the right shoulder, can be moved off their respective intended paths and, bam, you have an opened or closed clubface.

No wonder it is so difficult to hit straight with a normal putting stroke!

That's why I was happy to discover this new stroke. Here's how you can discover it too.

Again stand in front of a mirror or window reflection so you can see your profile. Stand upright, straight up. Grip the putter with your regular grip and position, but raise the club and forearms until the shaft is horizontal. Then swing it back and forth horizontally.

The clubface should be vertical and stay that way throughout the stroke. In order to keep the face vertical, you will have to abandon any diagonal shoulder movement. This means you must keep the shoulders at the same level. If you see the putter face close on the backswing, you are still using the diagonal shoulder movement. The muscles that move the shoulders up and down on the rib cage must become static and quiet. This new movement eliminates the complexity of shoulder movement. If you now move either shoulder forward or backward, the clubface does not open or close, it moves left or right in the same direction as the stroke. Lifting or lowering of a shoulder of course still opens or closes the clubface, but this movement is no longer used, except by mistake, and the mistake is easily avoidable.

Basically then, if the new stroke is done right, the opening and closing of the clubface due to shoulder movement is eliminated, accuracy is vastly improved, and the mind is then freed to concentrate more on the rest of the stroke.

If you now have the correct shoulder movement, you can almost do Long's Putting Stroke.

The next step is to bend over until the putter touches the ground.

This is a slightly tricky move. As you bend over, you must preserve the 90 degree angle between the putter shaft and the torso. The shoulders and elbows should be "locked" in position. If the putter doesn't reach the ground no matter how far you bend over, start over with the arms extended out more, but the shaft still at 90 degrees from the torso. It is more likely that the putter will touch the ground too far out, because you were standing with your arms extended in your old stroke.

With the putter head on the ground, you could begin putting, but there is one more requirement for good putting. The ball should be positioned directly below the eyes.

Trial and error seems to be the best way to find the required ball position. Go back to the starting position of standing straight up with the putter shaft horizontal, but extend your hands further from your body to the point you think will work. Bend over again, with the club locked at 90 degrees, and see where the putter contacts the ground. Repeat this until the position "seems" correct. You may notice that how far you bend over is also controlled by how far the ball is from your feet. Now you will need to know whether this position is exactly below the eyes. If it is way off, you can tell immediately. If it is close to correct, you won't know for sure, so you have to check it by dropping a line toward the center of the earth. This could be a plumb line or you could use your putter.

Finding ball position

Hold your putter at the top with a couple fingers of one hand and let it hang between your eyes. Look down to see where the sweet spot hovers over the ground. The ball should be to the left of this point. If the putter swings too much, touch it to the ground repeatedly until it stops swinging. Somehow remember the point where the ball should be. If your doing this on a carpet, find a mark on the carpet or lay a coin. Now start over from standing straight and see where the clubhead contacts the ground. If it is sitting within one half inch of the point you found by plumbing, that is probably good enough. Re-do the bending over and the plumbing to verify it. Then take a few strokes. Can you stroke it without any shoulder movement errors? Hit some balls. Can you hit straight each time?

If you have trouble converting to the new shoulder movement, read this paragraph. Stand upright and let the arms hang with no club. Move one shoulder forward and the other backward, without raising or lowering. Then reverse the direction. Then try purposely lowering or raising the shoulders. Keep comparing the raising and lowering vs. the level motion until you have it down pat. Next make the same level shoulder motion with your hands clasped together in front of you, as in a putting stroke. Now bend slowly over while continuing this motion.

Next you must be able to repeat the address position without going through the elaborate finding process. On numerous occasions, especially at first, you will need to check your torso angle to make sure it has not changed. But a quicker method is needed. So once you have found the torso angle through the full process as described above, and you are in that position, place a straight left arm (for right handers) so that the left hand contacts the left leg. This contact will probably be just above the left knee, but different bodies will vary somewhat. Remember where the hand touches. Perhaps you can rest your hand on your knee as in the above photo "finding ball position." Then when you bend over, you can check your torso angle on your leg, adjusting as necessary. You can hang the putter at the same time to check the ball position.

Then set the clubhead down and move the grip to the address position with the right hand. Move your left hand to the grip without allowing the torso to move up or down. Place the left hand into the address position on the grip. Then place the right hand on the grip. Adjust the ball position toward or away from the target, if necessary, keeping the same feet to clubhead distance. This can become a smooth and quick motion so that you could do it on each putt if necessary.

Even the amount you bend your knees makes a difference in the torso angle, so bend them the same amount each time.

One More Thing -- The Elbows

In the control of direction, there is one more failure mode, and for some of us at least, there is a way to deal with it. Even with the setup as described above there is still a way to open or close the face. To see this, setup in Long's putting stroke position. Concentrate on either arm. If you try, you can move the elbow left or right without the shoulder moving. This movement causes the hand and clubface to rotate. If both elbows move in the same direction, the effect is worse. You must avoid these movements. They can happen in almost any putting stroke setup.

If you have perfect coordination under extreme performance pressure, you don't need this technique. But if you are like the rest of us, here is what you do.

Just try to keep your elbows in close to your ribs so your elbows or forearms rub your torso a little when you make your stroke. I hope your body shape and putter length allow you to do this. This stops each arm from being able to rotate toward the body. The arms can still move away from the body, but this becomes much less likely.

One way to test this technique is to putt only with torso twisting, and without shoulder sliding. This will put your arms through a perfect arc and show you how much out of round your swing will have to be to use this technique.

If you can't keep both elbows close, keep one close. I think it might be easier to keep the left arm or elbow in close, compared to the right. If you find it interferes on longer putts, try it only for shorter putts. The shorter putts are more amenable to the delicate control required to keep the elbows on path. In addition, the elbows/forearms don't have to actually touch, but the closer they are, the less room for error. I don't know what happens with a large belly. I don't have one to experiment on. If your belly is very flat in front, your left (target side) elbow or forearm may tend to lift away from the belly on the backswing. If this happens, it might still work fine, as long as the elbow returns to the belly by the time of impact, as that is when the face needs to be square. You can test for smoothness by locking the shoulders and turning only with the torso. If one or both of the the elbows don't touch in the right spot, you can experiment with a different hand positions up and down the shaft on the putter so that the elbows rub in different places, to see what works best.

This concludes the basic elements of Long's Putting Stroke. Below are some additional recommendations for putting and the putting stroke.

Additional Tips

To groove your stroke quickly, use a routine similar to the Special Swing Exercises. Swing back and forth continuously while working on the proper line and getting everything right. Use different lengths of stroke. Start short and grow longer. Then do the backswing continuously, then separately. Then some normal strokes. Just like the Special Exercises.

I highly advise the use of locked wrists and elbows with this stroke, and especially with this stroke, because the shoulder movement is so accurate. Why introduce errors back into the stroke? Tiger Woods uses locked wrists and elbows, which is a good recommendation, but the strange thing about pros is that they often can make anything work. The greater the talent, the more difficult a move that can be performed. On the other hand, the easier a move is to make, the better the result, even for a pro.

Some people find that wrist bending gives greater control over speed than unbending wrists. You could test this for yourself by hitting the same putt over and over, using wrist bending and locked wrist in equal amounts, switching numerous times between the two. You need plenty of repetitions to make sure that your body has learned the swing speed that is required. This is a test of your body's ability to produce a certain swing speed. If you find no difference in the two methods, definitely go with the locked wrist. With both methods your brain still has to learn to estimate what will produce the desired distance for a given putt, so if you change from your traditional method, there will be a learning curve as you learn to use the new stroke. Hopefully it will not be more difficult than adapting to fast or slow greens.

Control over distance with Long's putting stroke is improved by more solid contact with the ball, and because fewer muscles are used to produce the club speed.

The biggest factor in distance control is judgment. You brain has to somehow figure how long to make the backswing and how much force to apply on the downswing. I have found a large difference in my mind's ability to judge the required speed depending on how well I slept the night before.

Some golfers always use the same forward swing acceleration and only vary the backswing length. This has the advantage of making it easier to keep the swing as a one-piece movement.

Another factor for distance control that is probably not understood well, because it's pure physics, is the effect of the soft face inserts. Use the softest face insert that is legal for a putter. By doing so, you gain the advantage of using a greater force increment applied by your muscles to get a given increment in putter speed. This means that it will be easier for you to produce the ball speed you want because your muscles are using bigger differences in the neuron volleys for given increases in clubhead speed. It becomes easier for you to produce the force you want. This is especially noticeable on short putts but it works throughout the spectrum.

I believe you can help your mind perform the task of distance judgment by making practice strokes at the speed that "just sort of happens," except that after each stroke you wonder for a second if it is too hard or too soft. If you decide to change the speed, make a new practice stroke at a new speed and see how that seems. Finally choose a practice stroke as the one that is best and then copy that stroke in the actual hit. You might at first find yourself changing your mind during the actual hit, but eventually discover that it is best to stick with the practice stroke. This also reduces mistakes caused by sudden changes during the stroke. If you do adjust your speed during the stroke, I think you will find that it is easier to do so with this Long's Putting Stroke than with others.

As mentioned, the movement of the shoulders is partly the torso twisting and partly the shoulders moving forward and backward (in relation to the rib cage and spine). You can adjust the relative contributions of these two movements if you want to, to see what you like, or you can just let them happen. Either way, these two contributors to the stroke eventually will be automatically controlled, and you will have the simplest and most reliable putting stroke possible.

On a slope, when the ball is higher or lower than your feet, the setup is almost the same except for one thing: the arms are extended less or more so the clubface reaches the required height. Theoretically the torso angle would change slightly to get it perfect, but the adjustment is very small and probably not worth worrying about.

When putting uphill or downhill, you can lean right or left so as to keep the clubhead arc in the same tangency relationship to the ground.

When address is incorrect, you will notice the "groove" is gone or changed. The body movement feels different. The putter may want to go a different way. That is why it is important to set up accurately-- so you're ready to make the move you have learned, learn it better each time you use it, and not start learning a new stroke in a new position.

An important part of the stroke is control over the eye movement during the stroke. I see at least three ways to do it. I don't know which is the best yet. The common one is to watch the ball until it is hit and then keep looking at the spot where it was. The problem with this is that the eye tends to follow movement, in this case the ball and clubhead, and perhaps to move the whole body toward the hole too soon, causing a pull, especially under pressure. Another method might be to look at a spot near the ball, to try to avoid catching the eye. Another would be to follow the clubhead during its movement. I have found that this makes a smooth stroke but is not as accurate as the eyes steady method. Another method I will be testing is to watch the back of the ball until it is hit and then gradually move the eyes to the stopped clubhead. This has the advantage of teaching a movement that is not so extreme as looking at the hole but at least is a move, so under pressure there may be less tendency to look all the way up.

I personally use two methods of beginning the stroke. One: prepare to begin by repeatedly touching the ground. This prepares your body to carry the weight of the putter with good coordination and to make a smoother takeaway. As the stroke begins you lift the putter first and then begin the backswing. The second method is to just hold the putter head in mid-air behind the ball until the stroke commences. I use this second one when I'm having trouble with my physical coordination during times of sleep deprivation, sleepiness, or fatigue, because it seems to force me to be more conscious of and restrained in my movements.

I wish you increasing success on the greens.

If you have any questions or comments, please email me at the address on the home page.