No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 1082: The Science of Putting with Dr. Sasho MacKenzie

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Dr. Sasho Mackenzie returns to the pod for an eye opening discussion around all things putting with Soly, Neil and Cody. Sasho has developed a Stack Putting app as a companion to his speed training work and the research into rolling better putts led to a ton of questions from us around what differentiates good putters and bad putters, how different putter types and grips affect success, green reading mistakes, putting while looking at the hole instead of the ball, and a ton more. Join us in our support of the Evans Scholars Foundation: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://nolayingup.com/esf⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support our Sponsors: The Stack Rhoback If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Nest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠nolayingup.com/join⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Newsletter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://newsletter.nolayingup.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Podcast channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@NoLayingUpPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be the right club. Be the right club today. Yes. I mean, that's better than most. How about him? That is better than most. Better than most. Expect anything different?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. to the No Laying Up podcast, Sala here, going to be joined shortly by the crew. We had a great chat with Dr. Sasha McKenzie on the science of putting. He shares a lot of stuff in there and how he came up with the stack putting system. You can go to the stack system.com slash NLU code no laying up will get you 10% off that bundle. This entire hour and a half interview, it's not all an infomercial for the stack. Everything, all of his research, we go into great detail about what he's learned about putting and how it kind of funnels down into something very simple for,

that you can use to improve in putting. So yes, this is somewhat of an infomercial if you want to call it that. But let me tell you, I was the one that wanted to do this interview greatly because we talked with Sosho for five minutes last week about putting. And I was like, just stop the convo right here. Let's record all of this.

And let's share it with the people because there's a lot of great information that he's about to drop on all of us about putting. And I'm back getting ready to go try out some of the stuff we discussed in there, as you'll hear very shortly. So thank you to Dr. Sosho for the time. Thank you to the Saks system. Sacksystem.com slash NLU.

Code No Laying Up for 10% off. Let's get to our chat. All right, Sasha, welcome back. We are going to be talking putting today. If folks did not tune in last year, we did a podcast. It was episode 913 is one of my favorites. I get a lot of comments still on that one. We talked a lot of speed in that one.

We are going to be talking putting today. I'm joined by my friends as well, Mr. Neil Schuster. Hello, Neil. Good morning, Sallie. Great to be with you. Doctor, I'm fired up. I love the look at the lab. I'm ready to get into the science of things here.

Cody McBride is here as well. Hello, Cody. Good morning. I am, I'm pumped for this. As soon as we, I heard that the good doctor's coming back, you know, I have my putting struggles. So I was the first one to be like, yes, please send me. I'm pumped.

And so, all right, Dr. McKenzie, if you can give the listeners a quick bio in yourself, your qualification, some of the work you've done around golf in case people are somehow not familiar. I'm sure there's a 20-minute version, and I'm sure there's a closer to 90-second version. Probably vote for the 90-second version here, but I'm sure you've got that rehearsed. Yeah, yeah, no problem. You know, kind of avid golfer growing up, I was more of a hobby, did my PhD thesis in customizing shaft stiffness to a golfer swing.

That got me kind of into the golf industry. Ping bought some software for me around analyzing some stuff, started doing some consulting for Ping, for Footjoy. doing golf instructor education, work for some of the top with some of the top tour coaches like Mark Blackburn and Chris Como, sort of working with individual players and all the while kind of doing lots of golf research, you know, passions around speed, passions around putting, you know, so just trying to solve problems, doing research that has a very practical application. And then, you know, kind of developed the stack system along the way and incorporated some of the stuff

that I've learned into that product as well. Where is the best place you've done this before? You've talked a lot about your findings when it comes to putting. Where is the best place to start? Does it start with what you were curious about before you started researching putting and then getting through what you wanted to prove

or disprove or learn about? Where's the best place to start, do you think, with putting? Yeah, I mean, I just like random questions, things that are bothering people. You know, like my own personal, why I started to get interested in putting, was my fourth year, my undergrad, I got a scholarship to go to grad school at the time. I was in PEI, Canada, you know, you could make maybe $4,000 in the summer.

And my scholarship was going to be a lot more than that. So I said, hey, I'm not work. I've been working since I was, you know, 14 digging potatoes and muscle fishing and all sorts of great stuff in Canada. And I thought, yeah, I'm just going to take four months, see how good I can get at golf. And putting was something that I was like, boy, this is really tough to move the needle on, you know. And, you know, by the end of the summer, it was like, I don't think I can spend my life practicing putting. That is where the, at the time, where I was like, you know, I'm not going to shoot, you know, 62.

At the time, there was a Canadian tour event that would come to my course, Perrier Classic, Grant Waite, actually. I don't have you know, Grant Waite, working with Hovlin of it, a few, a lot of players he actually won that um and shot you know 62 63 64 um so you know in the first three days and so i'm like okay i can't do that here and this guy you know no offense to grant this was a canadian tour i think they made like 25 grand for the season right um so but but i was like this the putting was the limiting factor you know why i wasn't going to be shooting in the low 60s and i just i didn't see a way to get better you know and there just wasn't wasn't, the science wasn't there to answer my questions at the time.

Is the science there now? Like, do you feel like you, you know, as you've, as you've looked into this, do you feel like you can define what makes a good putter, what, what hurt someone, what somebody should be focusing on? 100%. The, the level of clarity I have now versus 25 years ago is vastly different. And my putting is, you know, if I, maybe, luckily, I didn't know these things back them because I might have spent six years of my life trying to become a professional golfer

and I definitely wouldn't. Now I know I wouldn't have gotten there, but so maybe saved me some, some angst, but no, 100% clarity now relative to 25 years ago. Well, I guess my question is what, what do you think is the most common issue that holds people back from being a good putter? Focusing on the wrong things in practice. Okay. So, so, so I look at, um, uh, first of all, I love putting because everybody can do it. Everybody can sink any put. There's not a golf green on the world that you can't put a 30 handicapper on and, you know, say, hey, here's a 100 foot putt, breaks three ways.

Yeah, they can sink it. They have enough clubhead speed and the ability to start the ball on a direction. They can put it in the hole. And also the seemingly struggle, the struggle that the best golfers, have. So if you take someone in another sport and you show them an eight foot putt and you're like, all right, we've got the best golfer in the world. How many times, you know, do you think that, what percentage of times are going to sink this eight foot putt? They'll be like, I don't know, 95. Like it's eight feet here. Like, oh, it's actually just over 50. The best putter on the

PGA tour is only making a putt this length half the time. So those two things, you know, it says to me that it's, that it's ripe for, for research. So when I look at what matters, matters in putting, you have to look at, at, I call it a deterministic model. What determines whether the ball goes in the hole and what can a golfer do to figure out those things? What are, what are we control? You know, we have to read the green to figure out a line and a speed. Those two things marry together. I won't get super into it right now unless we go down the rabbit hole, but I think you need to determine the speed first and then you figure out the line you need to hit to match up with that speed. So something, some people say

they need to go together. I'm very much in the camp of you need to determine the ball speed first. Depending how far away you are from the hole, you might want a different entry speed. The further you get away, the more you want the ball just to stop at the hole. And then you have to act on that read. So you could screw up the read, right? But let's say you get the read right.

Then what is your ability to deliver the putter head to the ball with the appropriate clubhead speed so you get the expected ball speed? and what's your ability to deliver the putter head to the ball so that you started on the correct line. And then now we're getting into a layer of, well, what should I practice, right? So there are four things that I think that are under the control of the golfer that you could potentially practice, right? Green reading aside, that's a big one. 50% of pts don't go in because on the PGA tour because of green reading. That's a whole giant bucket.

But then if we look at the things that outside of green reading, we've got how fast you're moving the putter, right, club head speed, where you hit the ball on the face, towards a heel, towards toe, higher, low. The path of the putter is a traveling, you know, is it cutting end out or, right? And then the face angle. Those are the four things. If you have perfect control of those four things, no variability in those four things, you step up to a putt, then you're going to sink every put. But what happens if we have some variability in those four things?

matters more. And that's, you know, where you can learn that speed is by far the most important thing to get right to practice to improve upon. Then face angle and distant, distant, distant third and fourth are where the ball hits on the face and path. They just don't matter. And how I answered that question is to say, okay, let's take a putting robot. This is one way you can answer that question. putting robot and let's figure out say for a 12 foot put something you got a chance to make but you know if you miss hit it a little bit or whatever you're off that you're probably going to miss well how much can I change my path before that 12 foot put misses you know and let's say it's like it's a big number in my mind it's a big number plus or minus five degrees right okay and then you're

like okay start missing that 12 foot put but then you need to layer over that well what's a golfer's variability in path, what can we expect, right? And it turns out that, you know, if I bring the worst golfer in here into my lab and I measure their variability and path, it gets nowhere near the number we need to miss a putt. Right? So you go right,

so the shittiest golfer that comes in my lab is missing one out of 100 puts because their path is too variable. And you can do the same thing with impact spot. And you're like, yeah, okay, There's a really interesting rule of thumb. I'm going to use Canadian units. But for every, if you take a typical answer style putter, you know, they're all over the place, right?

They're kind of the most common blade style putter. For every centimeter you miss hit it towards the toe or the heel, you get a 1% error in rollout distance and a 1% error in directional miss. So for every centimeter, okay? so that means that if you're trying to hit the put a hundred inches okay and you know which is like you know 10 11 feet something like that and you're trying to hit that put 100 inches and you miss it a centimeter it's only going to roll out 99 well it's still going in the hole right or you're only going to miss an inch left or right at 100 inches that's if you miss by a centimeter so then you go well how often would I miss the center of the face by a centimeter?

And for you three on the screen, the answer is never, right? It's like if I had you hit 100 pots, they're all going to be within plus or minus a centimeter. Man, you're giving me a lot of credit. Because I, that's interesting because I feel like I get mad at myself a lot for feeling like it's a bad stroke. And maybe that's a false narrative that I'm telling myself. If you're saying that I shouldn't even worry about that.

it's i mean if you've got eight hours a day to focus on your putting okay maybe but if you've got an hour a week don't it's not even in the ball i put heads up the number of putts that i sink where i feel the face twisting because i've mishit it you know like like a half a centimeter i feel i miss it but doesn't affect the rollout of the ball enough for that to be something that i need to worry about that's so comforting yeah well i guess to nil's point I'm wondering, where we say that was a bad stroke, do we really mean that was bad face control, right? Is that kind of what you're getting at it?

What would feel like a bad stroke to me is really just you did not, because you said the face control, the angle of the face matters a lot more than the path. And the level of, we're building up to that, I believe. So if I feel like I pulled one, that's not really the, not likely to be the stroke as much it is as it is bad face control. 100%. You can. And I can take, there's another way that I approach this. So let's say I'm doing a study and I'm comparing two models of putter for ping. Okay. Let's say we're looking at the effect

of offset and did a study last year where it's like, right, we got, they made identical putters. One's got a lot of offset. One doesn't have much offset and one's in the middle. And I have people come in over a bunch of days. Have 100 people take a whole bunch of puts. And we learn about offset. But hey, I've also got some of those 100 putters that sank a whole ton of puts. They're really good putters. Look how awesome they are. And then okay putters and all the way down to really crappy putters. So I can take that data set and go, right, what matters? Right. So the way I set up a study, for example, I've got like an 11 foot put and it might be 11 feet and the line is, you know, inside right. And I'll have someone hit that put. Then they go over to another part

the green hit a different pot, hit a different putt, come back and hit that 11-footer. So what that allows me to do is go, right, we take green reading out of it. I know that that Solly's coming in and he's going to hit over the course of a half an hour, he's going to hit this 11-foot putt, 15 different times. So what I can see is what are the characteristics of his putting stroke that and say then, Neil, you're a terrible putter. You do the same thing, but you don't sink any of those. Solly sinks a bunch, right?

So I can go right, but I've got a hundred putters that have golfers that have done that. And I can do just correlations. Okay, what was Solie's variability in path? Right. So let's say on average it's zero. But sometimes it was a little bit right. Sometimes it was a little bit left. And I can take that for every golfer.

What was your variability in path and plotted against the number of putts you sink? And it looks like shotgun splatter. So there's like, there's just impact spot on the face. nothing there. Some people hit a toe, heel, especially we've got a lot of putters in an agonish, the putth heads up. You know, they are,

it tends to increase your variability of impact spot in the face. Face angle control, who, that's a pretty strong correlation. Speed variability? Super strong correlation. So the people that have really tight control over their putter head speed

are the ones that are going to sink more puts. That's a factor that helps me determine and there's a correlation between you step up to the putt. You know what the speed is. Can you execute on it? Yes, you're a good putter. You can't, you're a bad putter. Path doesn't matter because it's not changing the direction the ball launches.

Face angle, that's pretty important. So let me ask the question. Just so I'm clear on face angle. Are we talking face angle like open, closed face or like vertically, like where the putter face is delofted or over lofted impact? You're talking about left right kind of. Left right. Okay.

Left, left, right, exactly. So the very, very low signal in terms of the variability in loft. Okay. That'll affect a little bit how far the ball rolls out. Raise your hand if you think that, you know, ball, the backspin on the ball matters in putting. You want to get that ball rolling sooner. See anybody in the, yep. For sure.

So here's a little thought experiment. Okay? So I measure this and I can get the data and be like, yeah, it doesn't seem like there's anything there. But here's a thought experiment. Let's say you've got a 40-foot putt, we'll call it, right? And we're just sitting on the fringe, but just on the fringe. So as soon as the ball leaves the fringe, it's going to start beyond the green. Okay.

And you've got Jason Day with his 54 and his putter. So it's a 40-foot putt. And you're going to have him hit 10 of these with his 54, right? and 10 of these with his putter. And let's say we got yellow balls with the 54 white balls with the putter and he's going to alternate. What do you think the dispersion pattern would look like between those two conditions? You think Jason Day with his 54 degree wedge, do you think, you know, 40 foot, just a flat, maybe a little bit uphill? Do you think he's got a pretty good shot at sinking that 40 footer with his 54?

You know, as much. It's kind of, it's one of those ones where you go. But not like over 50%. it depends on what you say like good chance right yeah yeah one in ten i'd say 10 percent sure but right how many times is he getting up and down uh i'd say yeah 40 50 percent is that maybe all the time 80 yeah 9 out of 10 okay so it's 54 not with the putter yeah right but so you think number of times tour players are like yeah maybe i put it maybe i chip it it's like 50 50 I still feel like a pretty good shot that maybe I could make this.

I'm definitely, you know, getting up and down. Okay. And if you actually do this, I've done this. I've done this with James Ridyard. I don't know if you know what James Richard is. He's a short game coach in the UK. Lots of players, good players. And then you look at the dispersion patterns or their distance control.

It's just as good with the 54 as it is with the putter. In many cases, it's better. Okay. Now, you go, okay, if spin is super, important we've got like if you launch a putter with a lot of backspin like you crazy yeah look at that this is terrible you can hear like across the green we're talking 50 r pms of backspin that's like wow that was terrible right you want to launch it maybe with like 10 r pms of top spin you know to get it rolling nice and smooth jason day with his 54 he's getting like 2,500 rps of spin so you

can go from zero to 2,500 and have almost no difference in distance control. In fact, we would be like, yeah, I want to get a little check on this and really help me control my wedge shot here. So if you can go from zero to 2,500 and see no discernible difference in being able to control distance, why would you care about going from zero to 20 with your putter? Got it. Or zero to 50. So that's just a thought experiment, right?

So, so I want to just to emphasize for people listening at home, probably not, you're not saying hit your, you could, for you as somebody sitting at home, 54 and a putter in that situation are going to give you the same results. We're talking for a tour pro. Like it would be different for a 10 handicap. Yes. Right. All we're doing is trying to show what is the effect of spin. Yes. Launching with backspin does it create chaos?

No, it doesn't because we can go to the extreme. And even with that tour pro, you've got all sorts of like, you know, contact issues that are. coming into play with the putter versus the wedge. Despite all that, right, we're still seeing, you know, yeah, he's getting up and down just as often as he is with the putter. So it's just my way of saying that it's a really small knob, right? Whether, you know, how you're getting that ball rolling. It can have a, it can have a, you know, a qualitative effect on the person.

You don't like to hear the ball skidding. You like to see it rolling pure. Fine. No problem. Now you speak in my language. But it's not something you should grind on, right? if you can in my lab and we're launching it with 50 r pms of backspin, that's all right.

Let's keep working with that, but let's improve your putter head speed. You know, let's control, let's work on getting that putter head speed. If you read the green correctly, can you execute on that putter head speed? That putter head speed is going to have such a large influence on ball speed

that where you hit on the face, whether you launch it with a little bit of backspin or not, just doesn't matter because you're, the average golfer's variability in club head speed. washes all that stuff out. Okay. And you're saying there's a, in the lab, you see a big, I don't want to say dispersion,

but I'll say dispersion with putter head speed. People cannot have a, a lot of people don't have a consistent putter head speed, which leads to problems with speed, like reading the speed of a putt properly. It's not even whether they have, that is the biggest differentiator between successful golfers in my lab. If you're a good putter,

you can step up to a putt. You have an idea of how hard you want to swing this putter to get the correct ball speed. And if you're able to do that repeatedly relative to somebody else, you're going to sink way more putts. If you are really good at zeroing out path, like if I put two gates together and you're like, I'm never touching these T's,

that is not predicting your ability to sink more putts at all. So why would we practice it? If you're like, look at me, like I can hit the center of this putter face every single time. don't care it's not really something that's going to matter so don't practice it okay so how do you work on yeah like putter head speed like what would be a way that I could work on that at home or you know the consistency of that like to drill you one guess well yeah of course but no but no no but yeah but but that's that's exactly what stack putting does and I'll tell you why

I was working with a mini tour player. Most miniature players want to grind on their swing. Just give me 30 seconds here. They're like, oh, can you look at my swing? You know, I got one of, and I'm like, okay, send me your stats, right? Yeah. Oh, look, your strokes gained approach is pretty darn good. What's your strokes game putting?

You're losing two putting, you know, and then I'll say, okay, well, how do you practice putting? And the first question answer is, how many unique putts do you see in a half hour when you're on the green? How many different putts do you hit? I'm like, uh, I don't know. I spend 25 minutes with the gate and the mirror and then like, I don't know, maybe I don't even see it. I spent the whole morning and I saw two different putts. That is not going to help you with your speed control, right? You need to be the best thing that you can do to get better at controlling your speed for a given put is to hit lots of different puts.

And then where the speed matters and where you enter it to say that speed sucked. And also you need to be able to differentiate between did I misread the speed, right? If you want to get better at executing the speed, you have to determine, do I suck at determining what my intended speed should be or do I suck at executing on that intended speed? Those are separate skills and you need to be able to identify which ones the issue, but both of them you work on in stack putting. because in 50 minutes you see 18 different putts where speed really matters, right? And that's the best way to get better at it is is practicing different puts. There's lots of research on blocked versus random practice. You know, if you say, hey, I'm going to give you a, let's say I took a group and we're only going to hit 15 foot puts on this particular green, hit 15 foot puts.

And all we care about is your speed control, right? Let's say we'll even take it away from putting. We're trying to get this ball to end up exactly at 15 feet on a line on the green. Okay. And then another group practices 10 footers, 18 footers, 12 footers. And we go, okay, they maybe never even hit a 15 footer. And then we have them come back and we're like, all right, here's the test. Let's see you can stop the ball at 15 feet.

The people who hit all the other putts are the ones that do better trying to get to stop at 15 feet. And that's, I mean, golf, we don't even, we're not even trying to optimize for a certain specific distance put. Right. We have all sorts of different puts. And it's important not to train the skill in putting in isolation, right? It's like, okay, this one is two inches outside left to right. It's eight feet, slightly uphill. I need to read that. So that's an important thing that I need to work on.

But also can I figure out the speed when I'm hitting that put? And that goes into your memory bank or you put it in the app and you get a different put. downhill right fall golf is here and you already know roback is our go-to for polos hoodies joggers pants crew necks like the one i got on right here all of it best fit best feel it's as simple as that the roback delta pants are our favorite pants the stretch elastic waistband is a game changer i've got every single color they have on the website literally everyone i told them send me every single one this is what i'll be wearing on the golf course gives you that extra room for some added comfort but it maintains the best fit possible the fabric is smooth it's wrinkle resistant

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That's R-H-O-B-A-C-K.com. Use code N-LU at checkout for 20% off your first order through the end of this week. Pants, hoodies, vests, Kroenex, you know it. Robeck has you covered. It's amazing to me what I'm hearing is, and it's counterintuitive of like to get more consistent with your stroke, you need to up the variability of your practice. Do you see how it's, in my head, that sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense hearing it, though. Like to get a more consistent club head speed, putter speed, you should hit as many

different putts as you can in that 30 minute practice session. Because I think that people would, like, it's a, the word feel, I think comes in right here to what Neil's asking there. Because what you're describing, all the calculations that are going into this club head speed, ball speed, a putter. I couldn't guess within how many miles an hour of what my putter head speed or my ball speed is. I've never mentioned. I don't know what that. is right it's all it's a there's a feel aspect of that and an eye aspect of looking at the i don't know if it was a 28 foot or a 32 footer that i just hit how does that kind of uh you know blend into it as well okay well that's the other super valuable thing about stack putting is that if if you can

give an extra bit of information like i visually can look at this and i will tell you with certainty this is 25 feet maybe it's 26 maybe it's 24 it's definitely not 20s definitely not 30. That is a super valuable piece of information that you need to internalize to start assessing your your putting. Think about this. We go out into a field in the middle of the night, right? And I'm like, all right, guys, I'm going to put a spotlight down here at the ball. I'm like, all right, grab your 60 degree wedge. I want each you to carry this 60 yards. You'd all have a pretty good shot at doing it. Right? You're like, all right, because you've lasered 60 yards a bunch and you've associated that distance with a feeling.

If I took you onto the putting green, and I said, all right, non-descript putting green, right, and no holes or anything. And I'm like, all right, Solly, put this 27 feet. You'd be like, what am I? I don't even know. Where am I? What am I doing? You don't have that sense. That's, that's really unfortunate.

We, it's so clear how we lean on that with a wedge shot, right? We're like, right, I've got that internalized. 60 yards. This is what it feels like. You don't have a club head speed number internalize. You have a feeling, right? You've calibrated to that. So with stack putting, when you go through the 18 holes, you need to step out.

This is 28 feet, right? This is 14 feet. It only takes four or five sessions. And then you're like, you can just like my 14 year, my 15 year old kid now, I'm like, all right, this is 19 feet. He just looks at the hole, backs up a bit, drops the ball down. He knows what 19 feet is. so then that bit of information when he hits it

every potty hits in practice and on the greens that he's playing on in a tournament he's like I now know that was 19 feet and I associated with an effort and I also associated the dew on the green all that stuff gets internalized just the same as like a quarterback like the speed the ball comes out of a quarterback's hand

how critical is that to try and have the ball intercept with the trajectory of the wide receiver wind, temperature, how fast the receiver's going, is the quarterback moving backwards. All those variable factors all over there's with all those repetitions has given him amazing speed control, right? And the more information you can feed in there, like knowing how far the putt is, the better off you're going to be. So you have like, you know internally, oh, 10 feet flat, I know what that feels like, right? Yes, it's helpful to look at a distance and judge the feel from that. distance. But boy, it's nice to confirm that to be like, well, yeah, looks like 12 feet,

but I know what that number is. Just like, how terrible would your wedge game be right now if I didn't allow you to go out with range finders, right? And you're like, well, you're looking at the height of the pin. You're like, I think it's 60. Well, actually, it's 54. Well, you know, you just airmailed the green, right? Well, God, training your eyes, this is, that's really interesting. It's like becoming better at spotting how far putt is. Because yeah, we all say like, oh, that one's yeah about 15 feet from the hole it's like we go 15 20 25 well if you get better at gauging that like you know by training your eyes like that I can see how that can make a massive difference yeah that's a that's a data point 15 feet 1% uphill that's an effort level that I've

know right or I'm going to adjust a little bit because it's due here because it's into the grain right but blindly practicing we're not we're not getting any any benefit right from that practice. The other thing that I'll add to that in terms of determining what's really valuable stack putting is that we differentiate between misread errors in speed and execution errors and speed, right? So if we all go to a par three, it's 150 yards and, you know, it's slightly downwind. We think we're like, it's kind of swirling. You know, maybe it's like 12 at Augusta. You're like, all right, I'm going to, you know, hit a hard wedge. Okay. So you hit your shot. And you immediately assess, okay, you know, did I chunk that?

Did I, did I hit it thin? Did I do what I intended to do? And then you look at where the ball lands. And if it sails over the green, you go, I underestimated the wind. There was way more wind up there than I thought. And you immediately bifurcate and go, that was a misread in terms of the conditions, not a, not a mis-execution. Or you hit it fat and you go, nope, my, I,

probably read it right, you know, the wind conditions because I just ended up a little bit short, but I chunked it. We don't do that. The average golfer does not do that with their puts. They hit a put and it goes short and nine times at a 10, they go, oh, I didn't hit it hard enough. Well, or did you misread it? Did you not realize that it was up slope? Did you not realize it was into the grain? You need to, as soon as you hit that pot, it needs to be part of your system to go, is that a misread or did I not execute? And if you're not doing that in every put, then you're not getting better. Like, imagine if you did that on your shots into the greens on one,

you know, you're like, oh, who cares? I'm long. I must have hit it too hard. That was the wind, you know, and then you go to the next hole. And now, you know what I mean? Your distance controls get ate better because you're not separating between execution errors and read errors. That's such a good point of the average golfer not understanding what their baseline is for

putting. We just came back from a member event this last weekend. And there's people that come from all over the world. and it's in, you know, outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we're, you know, it's not Bermuda greens, so they're like, they're minivert. So there is a lot of grain in there. You got people coming from Canada. We got people coming from the UK.

And they're like, these greens are fast. And we are saying, well, they're not really fast. They're actually kind of slow. They just don't have an understanding when they're trying to figure out what the difference is of what their actual baseline is. And you see them as soon as you add more. little like data points to their own equations trying to figure it out they default back to well they don't even know what a 15 foot putt is they just know at their home course this is a

stroke that they make and it's going away further past the cup than what they're used to yeah because it seems like if i was to process everything you're saying right now i would say man i should especially with that's what you know stack putting is training you on i should know these distances Like, that's a really good takeaway, I think, from this. Because I do not walk away from the saying, I need to know my ball speed and my clubhead speed of my putter. Right? No.

But I think I walk off the greens. I can be a very good putter at times. At times, I could be quite mediocre. But it feels kind of random, right? And I don't, I'm not doing any processing of the information. It's totally like, today I was hot and this day I was not. I would be curious if I went back through all the putts I hit this past weekend, how many were misreads and how many were bad execution?

ones. I should be, it's hard to say that some people don't want to play golf this way. Like, I should be logging this. But that's kind of what the next step would be. If I actually wanted to improve on this, I would need to be logging this information. Yeah. Imagine how terrible would you be if you didn't assess whether you hit it fat or whether it was into the wind. You know, you never get any better distance control, right? You know, like that's in a scramble. We're playing a scramble and someone hits it and you see where the ball ends up and you're like, that's the first question you ask is like, hey, you know, you hit that how far do you think that would have went you know like i kind of chunked it okay that's really

important information it's important in putting too but we just we don't use it to to help ourselves get better i don't this is i don't know how much time i want to spend in this rabbit hole because i don't know if i want to walk away from this podcast feeling like i should be putting with my eyes on the target you do i know that that is the conclusion but i don't know if i'm ready to commit to that right i want to get back into some of this face stuff into that but kind of talking about this feel thing i want to marry these two link these two things right because sure you have studied the effects of um heads up putting i'll let you describe what that what that is and and uh and how how that works and why you the data overwhelmingly says that most golfers of most golfers of most

skill levels are better off looking at a target not necessarily the whole but the far away target that they're aiming at. Yeah, exactly. So it stems from the same fundamental understanding of putting, right? You have those four factors, right? You got control of putterhead speed, where the ball hits on the face, path and face angle. And what we're trying to do is reduce variability in those things. If we reduce the variability in those things and also with speed, we have to get the right

speed, hit the intended speed, right? The other three, we're trying to get zero, ideally, zero path, zero face, hit it at the center. But speed, we have to get that number relative to what the hole is. That's the only one that really changes. You know, hold a hole is like, I need a different putterhead speed in this one. You don't want to change your face angle. You know, you want your face angle relative to your body be the same every time, your path and your impact spot. So if I look at other sports, I'm a big fan of sports get insular, traditional, and they don't always necessarily optimize, right, for what they should be doing. So let's back out and look at what other sports are doing. Okay, basketball shooting,

I clearly look at the hoop, what I would call the far target, right? But it's, you know, basketball is different than golf because I'm holding the ball, right? I don't have to, you don't have to hit this thing. But if you go, okay, what about like billiards? Now I need to hit a cue ball to go hit another ball. Well, in billiards, you don't look at the cue ball. You look at the far target, right? Hockey, no hockey player. I'm watching my nine-year-old play hockey yesterday. When he's going in a breakaway, he's looking at where he's shooting the puck. He's not looking down at the puck, right? So there's an inherent advantage in looking at the far target, right? Basketball, hockey, billiards. So then in golf, you have to ask the question. This is the question I asked when

I started researching this. It must be, my hypothesis is that, you know, if we don't look at the ball, we really screw up impact spot, we really screw up face angle, we really screw up path. Because all the available evidence says we're going to be better with putterhead speed executing on the speed if we're looking up. There's also some just general research in this area.

If we close our eyes or put our head down, our ability to remember how far away something is decays exponentially. Yeah. Right? So, so, you know, even the best putters that putt heads down, like Aaron Ball, I remember trying to film him at Whisper Rock on the putting green, and I missed the first two pots because he started his stroke before his head ever got down to the ball, right? His head's coming down and his stroke's already starting, right? So as soon as you put your head down, we start to forget about how far that way.

And what we're always trying to do because putter head speed is so important, right? we're trying to marry that distance, that information with an effort level. And if I put my head down, I start to forget about that information, then my ability to execute in the speed gets suboptimal. So start doing studies. Turns out that's true. Our ability to execute the intended speed goes way up when you put heads up. That makes sense, right?

Because I'm actually like I'm trying to hit it with this much effort to this. I'm not forgetting about that. impact spot variability goes up a little tiny bit but we already learned that that does not matter so who cares right and face angle doesn't change path doesn't change so when I bring people in my lab and I give them a half hour lesson and heads up putting and I say look and usually these people who put heads down for the last 20 years of their life and they're not bad putters and they're coming like what you this is crazy what am I so they're already like super skeptical and like you're wasting my time I'll say look nothing changes

in your setup, you read, everything's the same. Normally what people do when they go to hit a put is they get lined up and they pick a spot that they want to a line they want to start the ball on, right? Like if we were playing a scramble and we're like trying to decide, I'm like, what do you think? Ball outside right? And everybody's like, yeah, yeah, okay, ball outside right.

That means I'm starting the ball. If there was a laser line coming out of my face at impact, it would go through that spot, ball outside right? right? So I'm like, all right, nothing changed. I get them to hit a couple of puts in a normal way and I'll actually go down by the hole with my putter. I'm like, all right, this is where the direction you want to start the ball on. Yeah, yeah, right there and then it'll fall into the hole. It's going to break a little right to left.

Okay, great. Then on the third or fourth putt, I'll say, okay, just before you pull the putter back, everything's the same up to this point. But just before you pull the putter back, I now want you to imagine a laser line coming out of that ball going right perpendicular to the putter face. It's going along the green, and I want you to stop at that spot where it gets closest to the hole. So that laser line is going to pass. Usually where you put your putter down, if you're like, hey, do you think you're a caddy, right? We'd be like, hey, right here.

You stare at that spot and you say, all right, I'm going to hit the ball over that spot. And you just hit your put. You're like, I'm just going to roll it over that spot. That's what you do in curling, if you're familiar with curling at all. And so your ability to execute on the intended speed goes way up. So on flat putts, there's not much of a difference. difference between heads-up, heads-down. As soon as you start to get breaking puts, where speed becomes more and more important,

heads-up putting starts to really clearly become the better method. So 80% of the golfers that come through my lab, clearly put better heads-up. Without having practiced. Well, the analogy I would use is, you know, I think the stats prove that, you know, shooting free throws in basketball underhand, you know, granny style, as they say, is more effective than you know traditional like how how we would all shoot a three-pointer but is it a like why are why are more players not doing this is it is it kind of a like they're it's embarrassing it's different you know it's a tradition because it's not traditional yeah but you see like some

players like v j sing done it's usually it's because it it signifies that there's something wrong with me yeah right it would take a player like uh like a like a like well jordan speed did it's someone who just, you know, doesn't care what other people think. He did, when he putted his best, he was putting a lot of his putts heads up. I don't like they didn't have a systematic approach, really. Some of them he put heads up. Some of the put heads down. I don't think he really wrapped his head around the science just to confirm, like, this is why it's better.

You're like, let's get out the, you know, the Tommy system, the CAPTO, something like, when I'm like, I'll prove to you why you're better. Your putter head speed controls better. Let's just commit to it. But Kagan's done it a bunch this year, right? He's hit a bunch of putts heads up. Johnny Miller won a tournament doing it. Sergio and Highsmith,

they both put with their eyes closed. I know. But so if you're going to put with your eyes closed, like just a, you know. Well, yeah, we were talking about that. He was like, it's the same as speed looking at the halls. Like, I don't think that's not to me the same thing. But the heads up thing is interesting.

Also, you are, there's a whole lot of benefits that go along with just the narrow context of what we're looking at. So I track head movement when people do it. There's less head movement. And there was actually studied by a Canadian motor control person that showed that the best putters have what he called an allocentric head movement where your head moves on the backstroke slightly towards the target and then on the downstroke slightly away from the target.

And when you put heads up, you get more golfers falling into that pattern. It's a very small movement, right? And also the overall movement is less because the ball's coming in division. You never like, I wonder where that's going and look up. Also, the whole psychology around worrying about impact. A lot of people get the yips because they anticipate, they can see that putter head coming in the ball. They're like, ah, something bad's going to happen.

You look up, mechanical thoughts go out the window. Yeah, I have that. That's a problem for me as well, Cody. I feel like I'm anticipating a bad stroke and I put that. Impact spot, path. Those things don't matter. Yet we see the putter. We're like, oh, look, you start your backstroke.

can you see the thing go out to the, you know, outside or inside? You're like, this is going to be terrible. What am I going to? Oh, all of a sudden I hit the ball. This is tragedy. You don't see that. You know, like if I now try to put heads down, it feels the same way as if each of you turned around,

crumped up a piece of paper and tried to shoot it into your garbage can and looked at your feet. As wrong as that would feel, that's how it feels for me now trying to put, you know, heads down. In Canada, we do scrambles. A lot of hockey players. players in Canada, right? So we're doing a scramble. You'll get to a practice green, you know, between, you know, the ninth hole and the, you know, as you'd round the turn. And they'll do like,

you know, when year-long pizza, if you, you know, uses hockey stick to put the ball in the hole, everybody in my group who puts heads down when you put a hockey stick in their hands, and now you got this ball rolling around on the blade, they look heads, they do heads up. And I'm like, why are you doing that? Like, why just, you know, it feels so wrong. for them to look down kick because you have no idea how hard to release this ball, you know? Well, one thing I like about the, the stack putting stuff is that the ability to log these so you can actually test if, like I was messing around with the claw grip earlier this year. And, you know, the two sessions I've done with stack putting is like one I did with my

traditional grip, one I did with the claw. And it actually gives you, I know two sessions isn't enough relevance, but it is nice to be able to isolate a variable like that and tag it in the app. My question for you is, does you see any noticeable difference in different types of grips? You know, we see a guy like Justin Rose switched to the claw and it's really helped him or like arm lock. Like, do you see any grip, one grip to rule them all, I guess is my question. Like the best way to hold the putter. Yeah, definitely not.

Okay. Definitely not. Yeah, there's no. And we can look at that. So we've got over a million puts now. So we can sort by grip type. We can sort by if you've switched from standard grip to clawed, grip. If you've switched from, you know, what happens? No, there's no particular, there's no

particular grip. The only thing that I would say my research with grip is sometimes it's nice to marry that up with a putter type. Yeah. Okay. So, so in like a style of where the center mass is on the, the putter head relative to the shaft, or the alignment of the grip, I should say, in the case of lab putters. So if you are someone that has a lot of rotation in your stroke, right the face likes to open and close a lot that's a signal that that you actually like to feel where the face is okay you're you're you're you're like I want to and you can get a sense of where the faces if you move the putter around right you get the the torques in your hands are changing quite a bit and you that gives you a signal of where the face is lots of golfers like to feel

where the faces that's especially if you put heads up there's actually last research study I did on this heads up putters did better with toe hang putters it gives them a sense of where the faces. Now, lots of golfers who do not like to feel the face, right? And if you don't want to feel the face, go to a zero torque, go to a face balanced. And those are the ones that are going to be better off using something like a claw grip, pencil grip, something where they're like, I don't want to feel this thing turning in my hands. I don't care. I want to set up. I want to know where the face is pointing at address. And then I just want to swing. I don't want to feel anything changing. I just, please just bring this thing back to square.

You know, so like someone like, you know, like Adam Scott would be on one end of the continuum of that and then Phil Mickelson might be in the other. But then putting is so tough. You see lots of people experiment, right? And it's not necessarily maybe the right thing that they should be doing. That's where, you know, stack putting comes in. It was like, try it out for you. Do five sessions this way, five sessions that way. And then you know. I wish Shoffley would have done that a few years ago when he was testing. out the arm lock right yeah lots of people were like hey this is kind of like cheating you know um i think horsha was almost like let's ban it um but it's like well there's not really

have any evidence there for that and also maybe just tried out yourself well yeah and it seemed like windham and and ricky went that direction and they've i think rickie's moved away from it you know there's i was talking about the honeymoon phase with with putting grips and differences there what about um any evidence of like a consistent routine like and and what do you how do you feel about pre shot and if i'm trying to improve if i'm i'm it's about the winter in new jersey if i'm trying to improve my putting inside at home is there anything i can do with a mat that that isn't around like it's going to be hard to find variable putts on a mat like anything you can do there to improve your putting yeah give me a minute and a half or i'll describe the importance of set up repeatability

Okay. So it doesn't really matter if you set up the putter that's, you know, two degrees open or two degrees closed, right? Or you always have it set up with a lot of loft, but then you deliver it with less loft. The how you set up is not really important. It's that you set up consistently the same way. Okay. So let's go back to the studies I do where I'd have you hit an 11 foot pot where you know the break. Then you go around the green hit a bunch of different putt. You can back in it that same 11 footer, right? One of the things that I was really interested in is, okay, what leads to variability in face angle, right? And I thought I would see really good putters would be able to set up whatever way they wanted, you know, coming kind of from a hockey background, you can score top corner facing this way or that way. Lots of guys are like, you know, even now faking the direction they're going to shoot and redirecting puck is really important in NHL now. So I'm like, yeah, a good putter could set up with their feet, you know, three degrees close this time, three degrees. open next time but deliver the putter, you know, putters open at address, putters closed

out, but they always deliver it square. That was my hypothesis, right? We'd see a lot of variability in set up, but everything, variability and face angle would like get less and less as you got closer to impact. So I bring up these curves. So let's say, all right, there's Neil. He's hit this 11 foot or 10 times. Let's plot his face angle for all 10 of these puts. And I thought I would see very, so picture these graphs, the way the graph would go, face angle starts about zero opens up on the back swing then closes on the down swing right yeah i thought i would see big variability at the start at address a little bit open a little bit closed and then all these curves would like get tighter together towards impact right they would all like the best golfers

we'd all see zero no i pull up this first person like my initial flinch is like these curves look so wrong i've there's i've done something wrong with you know my marker sat or the data collection it looked like I actually thought I brought up my putting robot and it looked like I'd taken the putting robot set it up made a stroke and then twisted it at a degree made another stroke then closed it made a stroke all these curves were like copy paste shift down copy paste shift down if you were off by a degree at address open you were open a degree at impact it's like wow so it really shocked me that on the same put

over and over again we don't have much ability to realize that we've now set up our feet and I have markers on the feet so I can measure the stance angle relative to the intended line of the ball and everybody knows what the intended line is because they've seen this put

there's no green reading error here right we're just like to a large extent we're like putting robots we get in there if we set up open or closed our putters following what our body lines are. So the ability to get into your correct setup is super important. And so I presented as an aside, this was part of a PING putter study that I was doing.

But as an aside to some of the engineers that are my presented, hey, by the way, here's an amazing thing that I've found, you know, for your own putting. And all the PING engineers are very much into, you know, golf themselves. So they were doing a little putting competition where they had to hit a bunch of different putts. And so one of the engineers was like, all right, once he sank one putt, he's like, I'm not moving my feet. So he started raking the balls in

because he knew like, all right, this is my good setup. And he ended up winning. And then that was a trend. It was like, all right, if once you, so it was just highlighting that it's a real thing. Yeah. You do want to be particular about, you know,

if you set up and your feet are, usually three degrees open to your putter face or whatever or square, get good at doing that. Get good at making, don't be half hazard about how you're setting up to your put. That really matters. That's going to dictate what your face is doing at impact. See,

that's actually really comforting because that's a controllable. And I found that even in the both wing, the more focus I put on set up the, you know, and less on like where my hands feel at the top or just these like mid-swing things. and putting i feel like i've focused more on like you know making a good trying to make my path a zero and it's like well you know you should just focus on like making sure your eye line and your feet

and your shoulders and everything before you take the club back is in the right spot yeah so i'm a big fan of you know every once in a while using a putting mirror and some strings and stuff to make sure that you're still calibrated and also from left to right puts or right to left putts but that's not the bulk of your practice. That's like, oh, something's got, I had a bad putting day or I'm not feeling comfortable. Okay, do some of that work, you know, but it's not, it's not something you grind on

as much as, you know, controlling your putter head speed variability, right? It's something that you could take a look at if putting's not going great, but it's not the main focus of your practice. Can I, I'm sorry to back up a little bit on this with the heads up putting here, because you're very conclusive

that this is the best way to put. And we do not see, many golfers do it and we do not see the best players in the world put heads up almost entirely do you have different conclusions that you've reached regarding skill level of where that pays off the most right can you argue at the professional level it may not makes the improvements may not be tangible enough to be measured versus like if you're a 10 handicapped this is very clearly what you should be doing i'm just curious if the heads up model kind of depends on your skill level how much that might be an improvement for you

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't. And that's a great thing about doing this research. There are lots of plus two or three handicaps that I've measured who are better putters than the average putter on tour, right? So that's more what we're talking about is not like, you know, they don't hit the ball, you know, 320 yards and their approach play's not great. But I can measure their stuff in the lab and they're like, yeah, you putt just as well as, you know, Sam Burns, right?

And those variables still improve for those golfers. So it's not skill level related, but it is related. to your ability to retain an image. So if you have, like, I think Tiger, would Tiger have put better heads up? I don't think so. I think, you know, that famous put that he sank at Sawgrass.

I think you could have like turned the lights out, you know, sent him home, had a drink, came back, and set him up over the putt. He probably would have still sank the putt because that image was just burned into his brain and he had such a strong association with that. And there are probably lots of golfers on tour. I don't think that's a skill unique to golfers.

I just think that there are some golfers who have that ability and they can put heads down and it's not going to affect them very much. But then the traditional thing and admitting that you're probably a, you know, it's a weakness. I'm putting heads up now. Something's wrong. All eyes are on me. I think that's something that tour players do not want to go towards. A practical thing is that there is more movement around the green, a tour of events. defense, you know, but it didn't seem to affect speed, so there's that.

I don't have to ask him, hey, you know, like when you were putting heads up, did that bother you? Everybody's pretty still. That's the only thing that I might think maybe don't try it is because, you know, you're looking at the hole or up around the hole and someone in the background moves or sneezes or something and maybe that distracts you. But I think that's a pretty small factor. For most cases, you guys have also been to a lot of tourists. People are in general when someone's about, there's not a lot of movement. People are kind of, you know, and a catty could control. all that. It's also, Solie, is that people

don't do stack putting like activities to know if there's a difference. Like we're talking if you do take 18 putts in stack putting and every time you put heads up you sink one more put that is massive. You just gained a stroke

like an eight footer let's say. You just gained a stroke on your putting over the course of five sessions. That is a massive shift. But if you're not tracking that, you're not remembering that whether you miss or make one eight footer right that's not going in it's like it's such a fine line with putting you need to collect the data over a number of rounds and say look this is this is clearly better it's going to have a meaningful effect on your score tour players don't do that there's a lot of scenes as if you know i wish they would you know you'd see more people doing it for sure i think i've heard i forget if this was speed that said this but i've heard he has talked about he does it on short putts because he can kind of see the hole out of his periphery when he's looking at the ball

and that can kind of mess him up in terms of I know where the hole is but if it's in my periphery I need to look at it but if it's not in my periphery it may not have been speak that said that but I I know as you're talking I can convince myself that if you made me pick out a spot two feet in front of my target

and look there I could be like that that I think I'm putting my best one I'm putting like looking like six inches in front of my ball and if I, all right, if I hit that mark, I'm good, I feel the most freed up for that. I guess I'd have to test more to think about looking all the way at the finished target. And what you've done,

you've taken a small step to convince yourself that you don't need to look at the ball, right? Go the whole way and you might as well look at that distance so you can take all that in, right? So it's like saying a free throw shooter is going to look at the, you know, I'm not going to look at the ball when I shoot, but I'm not going to look at the hoop either. I'm going to look at the ground a few feet in front of me.

So what you've done is you've proved that probably you will be a great heads-up putter. Take advantage of all that information. The same way a quarterback, right, or any time we're executing where we got, where you look, you see all that information was in. You feel the wind. You see the speed, the angle of the wide receiver running. All that goes in and it comes out as a feeling, right? That's the same way.

You don't need to grind on, I like, you know, you read the pot and everything. But when you get over it, that information, is still coming in. You still see the dew, you see the slope, you see the grain, you feel the wind. It's impossible to aim point your way through all those variables. There's a double breaker.

Aim point can get you close, but in the end, it's still that feel, that, you know, visceral thing of like, I'm reacting to this environment when I hit this ball, right? Why would you not want that in your brain, right? You wouldn't want the quarterback when they see, go close your eyes,

and then I'll try to remember how fast he's, moving and you know you get that information in real time and react to it it's not as as prolific anymore but that's like such a great example a quarterback running an option and they just know based off muscle memory where their guy's going to be when it's when it's there doc I have a question though I don't want to call him the yips but if I if I have a two and a half to three foot put and the hole is in my peripheral vision there is something that happens to me where i can do my exact same routine step into it make sure everything's fine and there's like this internal clock that starts that i know that i am going to make a bad stroke if i don't get this put off

in five four three to oh my goodness i've missed this left And then I have to go hit this faster to get it in the hole. It is such a mind-crushing thing where I don't know what is going on. But I've noticed it specifically. Like when I look down, if the cup is in my view, that is when it happens. And I don't know how to break myself out of it outside of just closing my eyes and hitting the same pot that I do all the time. I mean, I love the shore putts. with heads up because it just becomes very reactionary.

You're never looking, if it's inside three feet, you're always looking at a part of the cup. You need to be on like a 5% slope or something where you're like, I need to look outside. So even on the craziest breaking pot, you're still looking inside right, you know, and you stare at a little blade of grass and you're like, I'm just going to hit the ball at that.

Don't even look at the ball. You're like, I'm just hitting the ball at that. that is that you know there might be some deeper stuff going on there but I would give that a go welcome well I have a question about green reading so I traditionally have for whatever reason I've always liked to look at the peak of the arc so if it's a downhill and it's breaking left to right and let's say it's two cups I like to look at a point like in the arc of that put maybe halfway or whatever on a 15 foot or where I think it's going to break at its most and then start turn and right from how you just and i talked to max home about this he's a big laser two cups out he he reads putts on a straight line and then they move two cups any science or any thoughts on what's better both like to me they're not they're the those venn diagrams completely overlap you know it's not one or the other i need to see the curve i'm not i don't see straight lines i don't putt in straight lines. I need to pitcher and I will like pick out like a little

imperfection of the green. Okay, halfway of the hole the ball has to be high of this line, you know, has to miss this mark high. You know, I will 100% when I'm reading the green, I first say how fast, well, back up a second, how fast do I want this ball going at the hole? That's, I always decide speed first. If it's a, if it's a lag pot or super slick downhill, you eventually default where all putts you want just dying at the hole. You want to center your dispersion at the hole. So a breaking pot 20 feet and longer, 100% I think I need to pick the highest line possible that can still get this ball to the hole. But that's based on the speed. I've decided I need zero ball speed at the hole, right? Then once it gets

inside putts that become, you know, more makeable, then now I want more, more, more and more ball speed at the hole, eventually where I get to a point where I never want the ball going past two feet, right? And I just decide on that speed, right? So once I decide on the speed, how fast I want this rolling by the hole, then I know the speed, then I pick my line that will allow that speed to go through, get the ball to go through the center of. So I'm totally picking curves, right? Like when I decide on a 25 footer, you know, I'm trying to lag up there, I need to see the curve of the put. But then once I decide on that curve, then I pick what what direction do I need to start the ball on so that it follows that curve

and it's only at the very last part of it where I go okay I see a straight line where I'm going to hit that but the whole rest of the time I'm reading the pot I'm seeing curves but for you with the eyes up you're thinking about at the very end you're thinking about a point next to the hole not you're not looking at the point halfway there unless it's Yes, unless it's like an extreme two-tiered green, you know, where you got like a 7% slope or something. And I'm like, all right, I got to dye this at this point on the tier and then it's just going to fall down. Unless it's really extreme like that, which is like one out of every hundred puts, you know, I am looking at the spot that's going to pass close to the hole because that's how I'm going to internalize my speed best. If it's super extreme putts where I need to get the ball to actually almost stop, you know,

then I'll be like, I want to stop the ball here and I might look short of the hole, you know. But usually if it's super downhill, even those cases, I'm internalizing that slope and the distance. And that's why I'm still picking a spot near the hole. I'm like, okay, this is how far I want this ball to go. And I'm internalizing the slope, the wind, the grain, and I'm reacting to it. it yeah don't i don't want to walk this into aim point but do you just like people not having an understanding of how far putts are for them like what their actual distances do you think people would have a better understanding if they knew the actual percentage of grade that their putts is

on yeah 100% i i think um i think aim point is probably the best green reading system out there but maybe it's given too much credit for the precision required to make a put some of the assumptions, it gets so still dependent on your inherent ability to go, okay, is that 1% the whole way? You know, like, what if it's like, I see so few pots, like a 15 footer that it's like, oh yeah, it's 1% from my ball to the whole. So you're still like, well, it's like two and a half for this bit and then half here. And also because of my philosophy, my ball speed changes, right?

I'm like I don't want the same ball speed at the hole right I I I'm changing that depending on how long the pot is right then that starts fucking with the aim point but but I think it's super important to use aim point to know like 1 2% 100% that is very helpful overall this thing is kind of like at 2% so it's definitely breaking right to left it gets you in a ballpark and also I don't think enough people use aim point speed is more important than the line and not enough people who are using Aimpoint, use Aimpoint to get the slope in the, you know, the uphill or downhill, which to me is way more important. No one, if you looked in the PGA tour this year at all the three putts, right? And three putts because the lag puttut was shitty, but not because they missed a two-footer, but you just said, all right, look, it's not because they had poor line. They had poor speed control. no one three putts because they you know their line was off a foot left or right they three put because they left it eight feet short or they blew it past 10 feet because they had a speed issue yet you see you know someone's got a 50 footer and they're really honing in on the line no one's ever like standing this direction to the to the pot to try and figure out whether it's on average this is 3% over this 40 feet uphill or no this is actually on average it's flat you know that's

where more effort should be put. I like Aimpoint because your eyes can fool you. You need to be able to feel the ground under your feet. You need to be able to classify one, two, three, for sure. I just don't know if it, I wouldn't rely on it. Not shitting at any point. To the point where it's like, I know that I need to hit this ball four and a half inches outside right. I think there's just too much going on.

It's like a quarterback being like, you know, right, compute. No, react to what you're seeing. React to, how do you factor in grain? How do you factor in wind? how do you factor in is just I want that as a feeling calibrate that feeling to a speed that you execute to you know I know mark Brody's done a lot of analyzing you know strokes gained obviously comes from him and whatnot what what what puts matter for people that are listening to this right where what puts should you be practicing uh I think a lot of people throw balls down the putting green and hit 25 footers uh on repeat what's the best you know other than just strictly

stack putting. What is the best length of putt for people to be practicing? Well, look, this is, we used Mark Brody's research, strokes gain putting to define the premier putting session, putting distances. It comes from Mark Brody. He did a presentation number of years ago, World Scientific Congress

golfer, he said, all right, what put distances separate out, actually it may have been at a golf magazine Top 100 Summit that he presented this at. He said, all right, what past distances in strokes gain terms separate out someone that's really good at putting from someone who's really bad at putting

and it's it's really important like zero to three feet doesn't matter four feet to seven feet that's where you get a big differentiator right that that's what's going to determine and then next most important is like seven feet to 12 feet you know and then by the time you get to 30 feet it's like yeah this is not if you if i was going to have a putting contest right against Sam Burns, and you're like, all right, you get to pick three putts. I'd pick three 35 footers, right? He's not going to make him. I'm not going to make him, but we're both probably going to two putt.

I am not picking three eight footers. I'm losing. I'm probably also not going to pick three 60 footers. He's probably got, we're going to end up with an eight foot or ten footer after that. And so in stack putting, you get a high percentage of putts. Your highest percentage of putts are between four and seven feet. Next highest percentage are between seven and 12. And then we throw in a handful.

the lag putts up to 30 feet, you know. And then if you really do suck at lag putting, you know, then you can do creative and do some lag putting. You know, it's interesting Mark Brody in that same presentation, a huge fan of Mark, we're good friends. He does this. You guys are familiar with the book, Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Common?

Not. Fantastic book. Great way to think, lots of biases. So Mark does this example at the top 100 something. And he says, hey, okay, everybody, write down all the words you can think with that start with K. I'll give you a minute. Okay, so everybody, you know, kite, kaleidoscope, people are writing out of it. And he goes, okay, there's your list.

Okay, now I want you to write down every word that, where the third letter is K, right? Everybody's like, oh, you know, like a few people write down to acknowledge, right? And then he goes, okay, who wrote more letters down that start with K? You know, everybody raises their hand. And there's a few people, like, I've already familiar with this. So I had a list of like 40 letters, 40 words that the third letter was K. Bike, rake, hike. Oh, yeah.

And if you look at the, you know, the English language, there's way more letters with the third letters K. And he relates this to a, to a bias that we have. And he tells a story about Luke Donald, who, phenomenal putter, went to Mark Brody with his coach. And they were like, look, putting's gone down. I need to be one of the best putters in order to succeed out of your putting's gotten worse. My three putting is the issue, right? And so Mark takes a look at his statistics from the years that he was putting really well compared to the years that he wasn't. And he's like, well, yeah, you three putting maybe a little bit cause of your drop and strokes gain.

But your one putting is the biggest issue. This is you're not sinking enough one putts. That is, but we don't, so he was having the conversation with me. He's like, all right, think back to the, you know, recent tournament you played in. How many one putts did you have in the first round? He's like, oh, takes a minute. He has to go through every hole and he's like, I had six one puts. Like, okay, how many three puts?

I had two, three puts. Knew it right away. Right off the bat. Right off the bat. And so he, you have two, three puts in a round and you're like, like rage, right? Like, this is one of the best putters in the world, why am I three putting? So then you get a little more tentative on that 15 footer that's downhill right to left. You're like, and you walk off.

So he actually compared two of Luke's rounds, one where he had, you know, eight one puts and two, three puts. But that was six birdies. Okay. And versus two bogeys. He was four under versus another round where he was one under, no three puts, right? But he only had a couple of one putts. You know, but it's that bias that we have. Probably thought he got putted great that round compared to the other one.

Right. Well, and it's approach skill too can affect some of this too. You know, if you're hitting it to 25 feet and not make anything, it's different than if you're hitting it to 10 feet. And then you might have a putting problem if you're not making any 10 footers, but you're not supposed to really make the 25 footers. Right. So that brings us back to Luke needed to focus on making more four footers to 12 footers.

That's where it wasn't lagging it up from 30 feet. Those are the important putts to differentiate. Luke, get better at sinking those, those puts that matter between four feet and 12 feet. Don't worry about getting better at your lag putting. It's not going to move the needle. That's what I always take away from the Brody research that I've always stuck with is like basically the theory of,

especially from off the green, chip it close or it doesn't matter. I think is good advice for higher handicapped players, mid-handicap players that when you're in a difficult spot, If you're in a green side bunker with a bad angle, if you're 30 yards away, whatever, to a tucked pin, whatever, you are better off making sure you do not make a giant mistake. If you need to hit this to 18 feet to 15 feet to 20 feet rather than trying to get it really close, like there's no point in trying to hit it to eight feet. Essentially is what the numbers shake out to. I know literally being eight feet away is better than 15, but if that involves extra risk of getting there in any way or brings in a ball rolling back to your feet,

It's 100% not worth it. Yeah, what would I tell the folks that I work with if we look at a shot, especially good golfers are arrogant and they're like, I can pull this shot off. Yeah. Like, yeah, you can. How many times out of 100? I'm going to give you this shot 100 times. You're going to try to hit the high flop over the bunker, super tight lie.

How many birdies are you getting? Let's say it's a par five and you know, they're, you know, they need to get up and down for the birdie. Out of 100, how many birdies are you in? I could probably get 10, you know? Like I probably, if I had 100 shots, 90 of them, I'm getting birdie. I'm like, and all right. and how many times are you blading it over the green in the hazard or leaving it in this bunker short that's really tough to get up and down from probably 20 like all right well there's 20 doubles gone are your birdies right now let's play the regular back in your stance low wrist shot where you're going to land it at the pin but you're going to have a 25 footer how many of those are you blading over one how many of those you're leaving in the bunker one all right and you're probably still going to make a couple of those 25 footers for birdie maybe you three putt once a

in a while get a bogey, but there are zero doubles in this equation. Zooming out a little bit on green reading, anything in your data that shows like golfers have a tendency to overread versus underread? Like, is there any correlations with like how people read greens and biases there? Yeah, they certainly conceptually underread, right? So in terms of amount of break, if you say, you know, let's say in reality, the aim point line is two feet. Well, they're going to tell you a foot, but they're probably going to play it at two feet.

Okay. So they're probably more like you, Neil, well, they're looking at the apex, but in reality, when they set up and hit it, they're actually starting it,

you know, a lot higher than what they're telling you. They're going to start it. The other thing is usually they're just underreading speed. If it's a makeable put, most people are underreading speed. So it looks like, this is what's also important about the stack app,

and I love watching tour players, who are missing like maybe a 12-footer. If you have like an up, let's say it was one round, I tracked Rory doing this in the first round of the first FedEx Cup event. He'd hit a pot and it would roll out like, let's say a 12-footer. It'd roll out like six inches past the cup but on the low side, right?

Just miss on the low side. And I asked my kid, we're watching the other. I'm like, is that a speed error or a line error? He's like, speed error, right? Because I'm hounding him on this. But most people want to say, no, no. if he had aimed that a little bit further left, it would have fallen in the middle.

Like, yeah, but he doesn't want that ball just like ending up six inches past the cup, right? He wants that thing going 12 inches minimum, probably 17 inches past the cup. You know, pretty much everything inside 30 inches is a gimmie for a tour player, right? They're making 99.95% of them. So you want to have the optimal ball speed to, you know,

not have it affected by the irregularities in the green, but also maximize, cup size, and that means that that ball should have been rolling at least 17 inches past the cup. If he had to hit that put a little faster, it goes in. That's a line error, not a speed error. So to get back to your question, Neil, most golfers are underreading perceptually if you try to communicate with them, but they're actually executing on the correct read, but they're not hanging it hard enough. So it's going to miss low and it's probably a speed error, not actually a direction error. Can you tell us a little bit about what,

the types of conclusions you can reach about your own putting through the stack putting app like if I'm looking at my numbers right here kind of jumping off the page and I have not done enough sessions I got super motivated after talking to you about this last week and did go out and do one immediately but uphill left to writers I would have said are no problem for me and it is telling me I miss them and I miss them in a particular fashion pretty consistently and I just had never thought of that until I looked at it and smacked me right in the face yeah yeah so with every put you hit we walk you through it you first decide on a speed and a line right and you commit to that and then you execute on it and as soon as you hit as soon as the put's over ball rolls by you need to tell the app did you need to first think did i executed the way i wanted to yes then it wasn't um and you missed then it was a read error you hit the put did i started on the line i wanted did hit it hard i want it yes yes it missed read error okay and then then you go to what the physics had happened it missed

left or it missed too fast so all that information is going in the app and it takes you know half a second to do it and we can't track that throughout the putting session internally we don't know what's going on but as soon as the session's done we show you what percentage of your misses were fast or slow and what percentage we got these two clear little lines they're like hey you've got a right miss bias or a slow bias and there's enough random where one session maybe you don't know, but after you accumulated a few sessions, it becomes very clear that folks have systematic biases. And we also track on a clock face, or you can use words like uphill left to right, or it could be from like, you know, uphill left to right would be from like

eight o'clock on the clock face, 12 o'clock straight downhill, six o'clock, straight uphill, you know, nine and three directly across the slope. You can use a clock or uphill, downhill, left to right stuff you want. We know if you have a tendency from one of those, particular positions you can break in the graph in the app there's insights that come up with a spider pot that will show you that and a conversation i was having with mike where he was using stack putting and he was like god there's a graph that's like oh my left to right pots or just are my Achilles heel i'm missing all these left to right pots and his initial reaction was there's something wrong with my stroke you know like i'm i'm setting up left or i'm pulling it or whatever

let's go work on the stroke and i'm like i just actually scroll down one more graph we have your misreads, right? And so in real time, he's entering the information, but it's not, he's not, I can't analyze it all. It's too much data. But the graph is like, hey, on these left to right puts, you're misreading them all. You decided on those left to right puts in real time, you're just, it's a misread. And so he was underreading the left to right puts. So then he didn't have to work on a stroke. He's like, all right, I got a left to right put consistently underreading it. I'm just going to aim a little bit higher. You know, so then the app will tell you what, what that issue is.

That's where I wish I was more diligent about entering variables when I first started doing this. I could probably go back and edit it, but I look at my, I struggle more on uphill putts, but I also look at I've been putting exclusively on Bermuda greens doing these. And I find, it's consistent with like,

I find uphill puts harder on Bermuda greens because the grain in my theory, I was hesitant to talk to somebody with a PhD about things like this. But my theory would be that they're harder to make than they are down. the ball seems to stay straighter on Bermuda greens when it's downgrained. And it break gets exacerbated into the grain. So, you know, that's kind of a, I guess a benefit of all of this in here to be able to, when the greens are, you know, you entered your green speed in when you estimate a green speed in there. Like on fast greens, if you have 100 sessions logged of all these things,

you're going to get some serious conclusions about what you tend to do. It's really fascinating. Yeah. Stack putting is it's about giving you the best insights, but also giving you the best way to practice. Yeah. All right, we have thrown a lot to you. Anything else before we let, we let Sasha go? Well, a couple of myths.

I have just a very general question. Do you think like anchoring belly putters, you know, they got banned, anchoring got banned. Was it an advantage? No, no, I, oh, I'm super passionate about this. I got a love-hate relationship, mostly hate, I guess, with the USDA and RNA for a game that's so quantifiable, you know, and should be based on reason. And they actually in their white paper about why, you know,

you can't anchor the belly putter, they actually said, we don't think this is a question you can answer with science. So we're not, we're not. It's like, so then that there's no, okay, well, what are you basing it on? You know, like it's like that catch-all. It's not in the tradition of the game. And then they, but then they,

reason, even though science answers all questions, you know, then they reason that, well, it gives some golfers, this is their main point, it gives some golfers an advantage, but not others. That's their main conclusion. You know, Adam Scott can't anchor because it's giving Bernard Langer can't anchor because it's giving him an advantage with that particular putter. That is exactly what we try to do in golf, is we try to figure out a grip that works for us, a putter style that works for us a ball type that works for us it gives me an advantage that it doesn't give someone else and that's why i do it and that's why you see all the myriad of techniques and clubs and pre-shot routines heads up versus heads down so by the same logic they could say no more

heads up putting they could say no more warming up golfers are not allowed to warm up because it's clear that some of these golfers that warm up get more of an advantage from warming up than these other golfers. That's the whole point of using different equipment and doing all the shit we do is to get an advantage. I need to figure out what's best for me.

And they know that, or I hope they know that they've done a little bit of research to know that across the board using an anchored putter anchoring anything is actually more detrimental. There's lots of evidence of motor control that if you remove degrees of freedom, it makes the skill harder to execute at the elite level, right?

If you take, there's a million examples, pistol shooting is a good one. So if you look at elite pistol shooters compared to amateur pistol shooters, where we're talking high precision here, right? Like, you're trying to, do you guys remember that pistol shooter from the Olympics? I was going to say, it's a guy like his hand in his pocket, that t-shirt. Yeah, that guy's moved. Yeah, he got a lot of phone calls, you know, about extra work after that. So if you looked at him compared to one of you guys that went and tried to learn pistol shooting for a couple of months,

you would see that you guys would lock out everything, right? And you might just have a little bit of movement in your wrist joint, right? All the other joints, he, you would see all these joints moving, but all that variability cancels out. It's called the on-controlled manifold theory in motor control, where it's like, it's good variability. It's like if you look at Steve Nash shooting free throws, right? Ball's kind of coming out the same way every time. But if his shoulder starts to extend a little too soon, then he's going to compensate with variability at his wrist and elbow.

In golf, you'll see it with squaring the face. So you'll see someone, you can square the face with like internal external rotation at the shoulder or pro nation supination at the elbow. So you might have a pro golfer or Scotty Sheffler that's like, man, this guy's nails, it's squaring up the face. Wow, his variability and internal shoulder rotation is really high compared to Salis. So is his pronation, supination. But when he's less internally rotated, he's more supinated.

So that cancels out to give you more control over the club face. Stuff happens in our environment, on the back swing, down swing. We need those degrees of freedom to adapt. So there's a whole list of with Sneed, putting side saddle, or putting crow like we're making 50% of our puts from eight feet once someone starts making 99% of their putts from eight feet then I might say okay you know like this is probably going to ruin the game it's not great but if you go from 50 to 52 because you put croquet style or side sale or use no putter you can put with both sides of the face like what

they're doing to bryson that's what makes it so interesting is that someone comes out with a new technique, a new something, and it's like, wow, this is great. Look at the innovation. It would stifle innovation, you know? Yeah, I'm glad I have. That's fascinating. It's passionate. And from a biomechanics standpoint, they completely made up the term anchor.

What, like, what the hell does that mean? What does anchor mean? They're like, oh, if it's touching any part of your body. Well, but the hands don't count as part of the body? Like, I mean, I hold the, how's that not anchored? like what does anchoring mean like why why would I want to pin it against my chest like oh I'm going to you know make my hand my signature really accurate I'm going to pin the the pen to my chest and watch watch how super accurate I can write my signature here like what are so they made up the term anchor

you know like the forearm doesn't count as an anchor it has to be the body anchor away Let's see what happens. I'd love to see. Yeah, give me a break. And it becomes so impossible to judge. My most hated sport, it shouldn't even be a track and field sport. Track and field's so pure. You measure everything, right?

We've got lines, we can tell, we've got timers. Racewalking. Who, you know, where it's judged now. So now you need, if you look at racewalkers, half the fields done, because they've got to get out there during the racewalking. and they've got to look at the ground and be like, are both feet in contact with the ground at the same time?

Okay, no, you're DQed. Why does someone need to be zooming in a Bernard Langer's shirt to decide whether, you know, it's an impossible rule to enforce? If he's got a puffered vest on, we don't even know it's, maybe it's pin, maybe it's not. It's like this is so inconsequential to everything and it even hurts. And at best you're saying it's because someone gets an advantage

but somebody else doesn't, like what we try to do with everything in golf, you know? Yeah. That's a fascinating answer. Well said. That's good stuff. All right. We're going to let you go.

This was really, really fascinating. I know I, like, triple checked with you that I should go do heads-up putting. And I still, like, I don't know if I go to the putting green next. I'm going to go try it. I love it. I just love learning about it. So that was a fascinating discussion. This is some great.

content. Go do a session heads up, session heads down. The next, Mike Weir used to spend most of his time practicing putting for a stint, putting heads up to improve his speed control. And he never put it in play, but he was actually better at it. So just do it. And find a block of time. If you want to do it scientifically, find a block of time where you have 25 minutes. Do a stack putting session heads up, then do one heads down. The next time you have 25 minutes, start with heads down, then heads up. and do that for three or four sessions where you do both, one and the other way, starting, ending, that way all the variables are controlled, and then just hit the statistical comparison button on the app and there's your answer. Yeah, we got our homework.

I'm afraid of the answer as well. I know what the answer is going to be. I'm afraid of it. So, wait, we greatly, greatly appreciate your time and ability to bounce a bunch of questions off of you. It's, I hope, I know people are going to really enjoy this one as well.

So we'll be checking them with you, shorter more quickly than the last time you visited but really appreciate your time doctor okay thanks guys it was enjoyable