Gatekeeper Resolutions Day 26: Tips for Putting On A Slope
Day 26! Today let’s find a basket that’s on a slope–not so severe that you’re chasing all the way to the bottom, but where you can have an uphill, downhill, and sidehill putt. We’re going to be working on finding the right balance for a variety of stances.
As you’ve probably experienced, it can be difficult to get putts while you’re on a hill to behave properly. Downhill putts tend to sail, while uphill putts play far longer than advertised. For those two cases, I’m going to adapt an idea that Dave Feldberg uses for timing consistency.
On a flat-ground putt for a staggered putting stance, you probably have a “default” distance between your front and back legs. You push off the back foot onto the front while letting your arm finish the putting motion. But when you’re putting uphill, gravity is working against you (meaning that it’s harder to get forward onto that front foot). Feldberg’s solution is to move your back foot closer to your front foot. This makes the weight shift have a shorter path length, allowing you to maintain the timing.
Similarly, when you’re putting downhill, it’s almost too easy to get onto the front foot, because gravity is helping you to get there. Feldberg’s solution is to move your back foot further away from your front foot–you’re moving it uphill, so that your weight shift has a longer path length. In both of these cases, the objective is to keep the lower-body timing the same, so that you can keep the putting swing as consistent as possible.
Sidehills are kind of a different animal. When you’re level with the basket, it should be possible to take a pretty normal stance. But there’s often a tendency–even among the best players–to miss to the downhill side because gravity wants to pull you that way. There are kind of two solutions to this. You can switch to a straddle putt (and if that’s your normal stance, congratulations!), which keeps your body oriented toward the target.
For any hilly putt, and any stance, I highly recommend closing your eyes to enhance your subconscious awareness of how your balance interacts with the slope. Test your range of motion. When you do a practice swing, figure out how much you’ll need to compensate for the slope in order to get a push directly to the basket, and enough power to overcome the slope.
You “win” the game when you can adapt your normal putting stances to adjust to tougher ground conditions. This is very much about feel and repetition, so think of these adjustments more like art than science.
Written By Andrew Fish, PDGA 58320
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