Most amateur golfers spend 80% of practice time on the range hitting drivers and 7-irons. The data says 80% of the strokes you can save are within thirty yards of the green — and a big chunk of those are putts.
The math is honest, even if it's uncomfortable: your scorecard hides where the strokes leak. Three-putts. Lipped 4-footers. The lag putt that left you a knee-knocker for par. A tee shot you can hit five times and call practice. A 6-foot putt you make once feels lucky. The drills below close that gap.
This isn't a list of generic tips. Each drill is a structured rep — what to do, how to score it, and what improvement looks like. Pick three you can do at home in ten minutes, run them daily for six weeks, and the next scorecard will tell on itself.
Why Drills Beat Random Practice
If you spend twenty minutes on the practice green dropping balls and hitting putts in no particular order, that's not practice. That's putting. The two are different.
Deliberate practice has three things random putting doesn't:
- A defined target. Not "make this putt" — a specific outcome (10 of 10 in a row from 4 feet, or 8 of 10 inside a 1-foot circle from 30 feet).
- A rep count. 50 putts in a session, not "however many until I get bored."
- A scoring rule. Miss → restart. Make → continue. The scoring creates pressure, which is what you're trying to train.
The drills below all have these three components built in. That's the difference between practice that shows up on the scorecard and practice that doesn't.
Drill 1 — The Gate Drill (Face Control)
The gate drill is where pros start. Tommy Fleetwood, Jordan Spieth, and Cameron Young all use a version of it. The idea is simple: place two tees just slightly wider than your putter head, six inches in front of the ball, with the gap pointed at your target. Hit putts through the gate. If your face is open or closed at impact, you'll clip a tee. The feedback is instant and physical — there's no debating whether your stroke was square.
How to score it:
- Set the tees just wider than your putter head — about 1.25 inches wider total.
- Start at 4 feet. Make 10 in a row through the gate without touching either tee.
- If you clip a tee, restart the count.
- When you make 10 cleanly, narrow the gate slightly and start over.
What it teaches: face control through the impact zone. If you can't get the ball through a 1.25-inch gate from 4 feet, you have a face-angle issue, not a read issue. Most amateurs blame reads when their face is the actual leak.
Golf.com's roundup of 10 PGA Tour-player approved putting drills features versions of this gate drill on most pros' practice routines.
For a deeper breakdown of the gate drill including Tommy Fleetwood's specific setup, see our piece on Tommy Fleetwood's gate drill.
Drill 2 — The Distance Ladder (Lag Control)
Three-putts almost never come from a missed first putt. They come from a first putt that finished four feet long or four feet short. Distance control is the lag-putt skill, and it's the most under-practiced putting skill at the amateur level.
The ladder drill fixes it:
- Pick four target distances: 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet (or your mat's equivalents — most home mats are 9–10 feet, so scale it).
- Hit three putts to the 10-foot target. The goal isn't to make them — it's to leave each one inside an imaginary 1-foot circle around the hole.
- Move to 20 feet. Three putts. Same goal.
- Continue through 40 feet.
- Score: 1 point for each putt inside the 1-foot circle. Maximum: 12. Target: 8 of 12.
What it teaches: feel for the difference between 30 and 40 feet. Most amateurs have one putting speed — "hit it." The ladder drill forces you to dial speed by distance, which is the actual lag skill.
The science behind it is straightforward: stroke length, not stroke force, determines distance on a putt. Butch Harmon teaches a pre-round lag putting drill built around the same principle. A pendulum stroke that travels six inches sends the ball 12 feet on most greens; a stroke that travels nine inches sends it 20 feet; twelve inches sends it 30. The ladder drill teaches your body to associate stroke length with distance — without consciously measuring anything. After a few weeks, you'll set up to a 35-foot putt and your stroke will calibrate itself.
If your mat is shorter than 30 feet, run the same drill on the practice green before a round. Several tour pros use a version of this with five distances.
Drill 3 — The Pressure Make-Streak (Mental + Technical)
You'll never miss a 4-foot putt on your couch with no one watching. You'll miss them on Sunday because the situation is different. The make-streak drill imports the consequence into your home practice.
Setup:
- 4 feet from the hole. Standard putt.
- You must make 25 in a row.
- If you miss at putt 24, you start over at zero.
- If you miss at putt 7, you start over at zero.
It sounds simple. It is not. The pressure builds with the count — at 18, your stomach tightens. At 23, you're holding your breath. The miss usually comes between 20 and 24 because the brain stops trusting the stroke and starts trying to "guide" the ball.
What it teaches: how to repeat a stroke under self-imposed pressure. Tour pros do this drill with 100-in-a-row at 3 feet. Working up from 25 at 4 feet is the amateur equivalent — and most amateurs can't get to 25 on the first try, which tells you everything about why we miss short putts on the course.
For more on practicing under pressure, see our deeper guide to clutch putting under pressure.
Drill 4 — Tempo / The Two-Beat Stroke
A consistent stroke has a 2:1 ratio — backswing takes twice as long to start moving forward as the forward swing takes to reach impact. Most pros tempo around 0.4 seconds back, 0.2 seconds through. Most amateurs have no consistent tempo at all.
Tempo drill:
- Find a tempo cue. The simplest: count "one" on the takeaway, "two" through impact.
- Hit 20 putts at the same target with the same count out loud.
- Listen to the sound the ball makes hitting the back of the cup. When tempo is right, the sound is consistent across all 20 putts. When tempo varies, the sound varies — soft thump on slow strokes, hard click on quick ones.
What it teaches: the rhythm that lets your hands repeat the same stroke without thinking. Tempo is what separates a Sunday round where you "feel it" from one where you don't. The good news: tempo is fully trainable in 50 reps a day.
You can read more about tempo drills as part of a structured 5-minute daily routine.
Drill 5 — The One-Hand Stroke (Path + Release)
Take your bottom hand off the putter (right hand for right-handed players). Hit 10 putts from 6 feet with just your top hand.
Then switch — top hand off, bottom hand only. Hit 10 putts.
What you'll feel:
- Top hand only: the stroke wants to go straight back and through. The path naturally squares.
- Bottom hand only: the stroke wants to release and rotate. You'll see how much the bottom hand contributes to face rotation.
This drill diagnoses your stroke type — straight-back-and-through (SBT) vs. arc — and shows where the energy actually comes from. It's also a brutal test of grip pressure: if your hands are death-gripping the putter, one-handed strokes feel impossible. If your grip is light, you can do this drill all day.
What it teaches: hand isolation, grip pressure awareness, and a feel for the path your stroke wants to make naturally. Pair it with our guide to putting grip styles if you suspect your grip is too tight.
Drill 6 — The Mirror Setup Check
You can't fix a stroke if your setup is wrong. The mirror drill catches setup errors before you ever swing the putter.
Place a small mirror flat on the ground (or a putting alignment mirror — they're under $30 from any golf retailer) just in front of the ball. Set up over a putt and check, in this order:
- Eyes directly over the ball. Drop a second ball from your dominant eye — it should hit the practice ball. If it lands inside or outside, your setup is misaligned.
- Shoulders square to your target line. Most amateurs aim with their feet, not their shoulders. Shoulders dictate stroke path; feet don't.
- Putter face perpendicular to the target line at address. Use the mirror's alignment lines or a chalk line on the ground.
Hold the setup for five seconds. If anything feels uncomfortable, that's a setup issue, not a stroke issue.
What it teaches: the static foundation that determines 70% of your putt's outcome before you even take the putter back. For more on alignment fundamentals, see our deeper guide to putting alignment and setup fundamentals.
Drill 7 — The Read Drill (Green-Reading)
Every other drill on this list assumes you've read the putt correctly. The read drill trains the read itself.
How to do it:
- Pick five putts on the practice green with visible break — left-to-right, right-to-left, uphill, downhill, and a flat one.
- Read each putt from behind the ball, then again from the low side.
- Pick a specific entry point — the cup edge where the ball will fall in. Not "the cup" — a specific point.
- Hit the putt. Watch where it actually entered.
- Record: was your entry point correct? Were you high (over-read), low (under-read), or right?
After 25 reps across 10 different putts, you'll see your bias. Most amateurs under-read break by 30–50%. They aim where they want the ball to go, not where they need to start it.
What it teaches: the difference between aim and start line. The hole is rarely the start line. For deep coverage of green reading at the tour-pro level, see our complete green-reading guide.
Drill 8 — Indoor Practice on a Mat
The drills above all assume you have green access. You don't always. Indoor practice on a quality putting mat is the bridge between range and course — it lets you run face-control, tempo, and pressure drills daily without going anywhere.
The setup matters. A bargain mat with a rolled-up edge or inconsistent surface trains the wrong feel. A tour-grade mat (10–11 stimp, flat, with a real cup) lets you practice at the speed your home course actually plays. Reps on a bad mat are reps that have to be unlearned on real greens.
What works at home:
- Gate drill (Drill 1) — fits any mat 6 feet or longer
- Make-streak (Drill 3) — 4 feet is well within any mat's length
- Tempo (Drill 4) — sound feedback works on a real mat with a real cup
- One-hand (Drill 5) — works at any distance
- Mirror setup (Drill 6) — anywhere
The lag and read drills need real green or a longer mat. For more on indoor home practice including space-saving setups, see small-space drills for apartment golfers and our complete putting mat guide.
Common Drill Mistakes
The drills work — when you run them honestly. The most common ways amateurs sabotage their own practice:
- Quitting on the count. The make-streak drill is designed to test you at putt 22. If you abandon at putt 8 because "I'll just start over," you never feel the actual pressure the drill is built to import. Stay with it. The miss at 22 is the data.
- Practicing only what you're already good at. If you make 9 of 10 four-footers cleanly, your weakness is 6-footers, not 4-footers. Move to where the misses live.
- Skipping the setup check. Five minutes on the mirror drill (Drill 6) is worth thirty minutes of stroke work over a bad setup. The stroke can't fix what the address position broke.
- Treating tempo as optional. A correct stroke at the wrong tempo will still miss. Most amateurs ignore tempo because the gate and lag drills feel more "real." They're not. Tempo is the silent variable.
- Skipping reads on the practice green. Pre-round practice is where your read calibration happens. If you skip the read drill on a Sunday, you're guessing on every break for 18 holes.
One honest hour of drill work — gate, tempo, make-streak, and a setup check — is worth a week of unstructured putting. The catch: the work has to be honest. There's no audience. The only way to know whether you did it right is what shows up on the next scorecard.
How to Build a 10-Minute Daily Routine
You don't need to do all eight drills every session. The compound advantage is in repetition, not variety.
A simple 10-minute weekday routine:
- Minutes 0–2: Mirror setup check (Drill 6). Slow, deliberate. No putts yet — just setup reps.
- Minutes 2–5: Gate drill (Drill 1). 10-in-a-row from 4 feet.
- Minutes 5–8: Tempo (Drill 4) OR one-hand (Drill 5). Alternate days.
- Minutes 8–10: Make-streak (Drill 3). Goal: 25 in a row at 4 feet by the end of week 6.
Weekend (when you have green access): lag ladder (Drill 2) and read drill (Drill 7) for 20 minutes before your round. These are course-specific skills that don't transfer cleanly from home practice.
Six weeks of this routine produces roughly 1,000+ structured reps. Tour-level putters do 5,000+ a week. The amateur compound advantage is consistency, not volume.
What Improvement Looks Like
The honest scorecard data after six weeks:
- Three-putt rate drops by 30–50%. Most amateurs three-putt 4–6 times per round; expect to halve that.
- Make rate from 4 feet climbs from ~50% to ~75%.
- Lag-putt distance error (how far past or short you finish) drops from 5 feet to 2 feet on 30-footers.
- Total putts per round drops by 2–4. That's 2–4 strokes saved without changing anything else in your game.
The drills aren't magic. They're math. 10 minutes a day × 42 days = 7 hours of focused stroke work, structured to move the metrics that actually show up on the scorecard.
The course shows you where you are. Home is where you earn better.
About Chiputt Golf
At Chiputt Golf, we make tour-grade putting mats and chipping mats designed for golfers serious about closing the gap between range and round. The drills above are the same ones we recommend to every Chiputt customer — and they're the ones we use ourselves. If you're ready to put the reps in at home, our Tour-Grade Putting Mat gives you the surface to do it on.
