Did you know the most common putting aid on the market are the indoor putting mats.
These are usually about 6-feet long with one, sometimes two, cups cut into one end. Often they are slightly uphill as this is usually to accommodate the hole.
These are useful putting aids to use but there are a few things that you need to consider when using a putting mat.
The biggest drawback to indoor putting mats is the limited variety of putt that you are able to practice.
The design of the mat is pretty straight forward, as we’ve already said it’s usually about 6-foot long and straight.
So you get to practice straight putts from up to six foot – whilst those putts are important to practice, think about how many times on a course do you actually get six foot straight putts.
One real downside to using putting mats is there is the danger of you getting in the groove.
What we mean by this is you will invariably learn the pace and line of the putt and then switch onto auto pilot.
You will then forget about setting up properly, your putting grip, the putting stroke and the putting strike, especially if you are making putts all the time.
You may have heard the saying that ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ – well we disagree.
We believe that ‘Practice Makes Permanent’.
If you keep coming up short in your putts – practising the same thing will enable you to keep coming up short in your putts!
We like putting mats, we use them all the time but we like to add a little variety to them.
We also like to use putting mats for our chipping drills. We place our putting mats on the floor and stand about 4-6 feet away from it and then play a chip shot onto the mat and aim to get the ball in the hole.
All the while we are trying to get the golf ball to release just like a putt would.
Once we get good at it we then place small objects between the ball and the putting mat, maybe a book, that we then have to chip over all the time still trying to get the ball in the hole.
In summary, we think putting mats as aids for putting training are a useful tool.
But we don’t want you to only putt from 6-foot in a straight line and we’ve told you how we use our putting mats, so that should give you an insight to how we would recommend them.
