Ask any weekend golfer what they work on when they practice putting, and you'll hear the same things: stroke mechanics, green reading, alignment. Ask a tour pro what actually makes putts go in, and you'll get a different answer entirely.
Speed.
It sounds almost too simple. But after tracking over a thousand putts through Putty Golf, the data tells a story that's hard to ignore. The average amateur misses 20-foot putts not by inches, but by feet — 4.2 feet of speed error, on average. That's not a line problem. That's a distance problem. And almost nobody is working on it.
There's a reason speed is so hard to improve on your own. Unlike aim, which you can check with a string or a laser, speed is entirely feel-based. Your brain is doing complex math — factoring in slope, grain, firmness, distance — and translating all of that into a single physical motion. Without feedback, that calibration never gets better. You just repeat the same errors, round after round.
The numbers bear this out. Golfers consistently underestimate how fast a downhill putt will roll by about 22 percent. They overestimate uphill speed by 18 percent. And on lag putts, the ones that really determine whether you're two-putting or three-putting, most amateurs leave the ball six or more feet from the hole. That's not a tap-in. That's another chance to miss.
Tour players have understood this for decades. Dave Pelz, whose research on putting mechanics is still considered the gold standard, built much of his coaching philosophy around a single idea: the ball should finish roughly 17 inches past the hole. Not two feet. Not six inches. Seventeen inches.
At that speed, the cup's effective width is at its maximum. The ball has enough momentum to hold its line through any imperfections in the green, but not so much that it lips out. Hit it softer, and the ball starts wobbling off course in the last few feet. Hit it harder, and the margin for error shrinks dramatically.
It's a narrow window. But once you start thinking about putting as a speed problem rather than a direction problem, everything changes.
The simplest drill for building speed control is one you can do in fifteen minutes. Place four markers on a practice green at 15, 25, 35, and 45 feet. Roll one ball to each distance. The goal isn't to make anything — it's to stop the ball within three feet past the target.
This is a ladder drill, and it works because it forces your brain to recalibrate with every putt. You're not grooving a single distance. You're training your internal speedometer to adjust on the fly, which is exactly what you need on the course, where no two putts are the same length.
Do this for thirty days and you'll notice something. Your lag putts start dying closer to the hole. Your three-putts drop. You're not hitting it better — you're hitting it smarter.
Routine matters too, more than most golfers realize. Under pressure, your brain craves structure. Without a repeatable process, every putt becomes a fresh decision, and decision fatigue is a real thing on the back nine of a close match.
A good putting routine doesn't need to be complicated. Read the slope from behind the hole. Read it again from behind the ball. Identify the low side and the fall line. Pick your start line and a spot just in front of the ball to aim over. Then commit and roll it.
The whole thing should take fifteen to twenty seconds. Not forty-five. Not a minute. Long routines don't make you more precise — they make you more anxious.
This is where technology gets interesting.
Traditional green reading is an art form. You're trying to detect subtle elevation changes with your eyes and feet, calculate slope percentages in your head, and then somehow visualize how gravity will curve the ball over thirty feet of grass. Some people are naturally gifted at this. Most of us aren't.
Putty Golf was built around the idea that your phone already has the sensors to do this work — and an AR overlay can show you what tour caddies spend years learning to see. Slope direction, break severity, a recommended aim point based on your selected speed. You hold up your phone, look at the green through the screen, and the information is just there.
The AI caddie takes it a step further. It learns from your putting history — how you tend to miss, which distances give you trouble, whether you're consistently short on downhill putts. Over time, it gives you speed recommendations tailored to your actual tendencies, not generic advice.
After ten rounds of tracking my own putts, the data surfaced a pattern I'd never noticed: I was dramatically worse on downhill putts than uphill ones. Not slightly worse — 61 percent worse. Once I saw that, I started practicing downhill putts specifically, and my scores dropped by two to three strokes per round.
That's the thing about data. It doesn't lie, and it doesn't have blind spots. You do.
None of this is magic. Speed control is a learnable skill, and the fundamentals haven't changed since Pelz wrote his putting bible. What has changed is how fast you can learn it. The feedback loop that used to require a coach standing behind you on the practice green now fits in your pocket.
Great putting isn't about having a perfect stroke. It's about making better decisions before the stroke begins — reading speed accurately, choosing a realistic line, and committing to the putt without second-guessing yourself on the way back.
The golfers who figure this out don't just make more putts. They stop wasting strokes on the easy ones.
Will is the founder of Putty Golf and a 12-handicap golfer based in Virginia. Download Putty Golf free on the App Store to get AR green reading, AI caddie recommendations, and performance tracking across 30,000+ courses.