AimPoint Practice Thoughts - 11.7.12

I think most of my readers understand what AimPoint green reading is about. And I know many readers have gone to AimPoint clinics.

With that, I want to focus my AimPoint posts on practicing AimPoint. Obviously, all of us have some time constraints. The idea is to find ways to effeciently practice AimPoint and get more and more adept at it over time.

One of the issues I've found is that golfers who often go to an AimPoint clinic will give it rave reviews, but fail to bring AimPoint on the actual golf course. That's exactly where it's needed.

With all of the talk about anchored putters being possibly made illegal, the metrics show that none of the anchor putters will make a Tour player a great putter or even a really good one. At best, the long putters have improved Tour golfers putting, but that still doesn't make them a great putter. Furthermore, on average the Tour player with the long putter takes about 4 years for them to make that noticeable improvement in their putting.

But what I've seen in the metrics for putting, AimPoint has had a tremendous effect on a Tour player's putting. Somebody like Scott McCarron, who would be labeled as a pretty good putter on Tour, ranking around 50th to 60th in Putts Gained *before* AimPoint, has now turned into a top-10 putter after AimPoint. The same for Bo Van Pelt, who was at best an average putter on Tour. He went from 144th in putts gained to 11th.

Even better, I have found that it takes about 1 full year for AimPoint to really kick in and effect a Tour player's putting tremendously.

I think the main key is that we have to replace our typical practice green putting with more AimPoint centric practice green putting. And while you're waiting on it for the winter, there are other ways to practice AimPoint as shown in this video by instructor, Matt Dynda.



I believe that being able to decipher the amount of slope is one of the key elements to becoming more accurate with your AimPoint reads and to make those reads quickly.

You have to actually practice and train yourself to identify the differences in slope.

You can measure the slope using a Husky Digital Bubble Level, an Excelys Breakmaster (which has an iphone app) or use my preference, the AimPoint Bubble.



When it comes to practicing how to determine the amount of slope, I would recommend going to different points of the practice green and guess how much slope there is using your feet. Then measure the slope and see how often you were correct.

You may want to write down your estimate vs. the actual percentage of slope. I believe if you do this enough times, you'll start to see some sort of trend. For me, I've found that I tend to over-read too much slope.

For example, I had a tendency to read a 1% slope as a 2% slope and so on.

I will have more of these as I go along...








3JACK