The Optical Illusion Causing You to Miss Short Putts

This video breaks down the optical illusion that causes most golfers to miss short putts — learn how to aim putts properly, improve your stroke, and sink more short putts with confidence.
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:45 The Vision Problem
1:20 The Train Track Example
2:33 Ball & Eye Position
3:50 Stroke Bias
4:26 The Solution—Eye Position
6:40 Tools to Help
8:21 Taking it to the Course
12:09 One Last Thing on Aiming
13:20 Summary
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Struggling to aim your putts? Are you missing short putts even with a solid stroke? The real problem might be an optical illusion caused by your eyes. In this video, you’ll learn why parallax vision makes aiming putts so difficult — and how to fix it with simple putting drills using a string line or the One Putt Ruler. Stop guessing, start aiming with confidence, and roll the ball exactly where you intend. Perfect for golfers of all skill levels who want to improve putting aim and alignment.
putting aim
putting drills for short putts
parallax vision in golf
golf putting setup
string line putting drill
how to line up putts
optical illusion in putting
golf putting tips
how to aim in golf
alignment in putting
why putting is hard
how to roll the ball straight
aim vs. stroke in putting
putting stroke consistency
golf putting routine
one putt ruler drill
eye line in putting
common putting mistakes
green reading and aim
“The Optical Illusion That’s Sabotaging Your Short Putts”
“The Hidden Optical Illusion Ruining Your Short Putts”
“This Optical Illusion Is Why You Miss Short Putts”
“Why You Keep Missing Short Putts (It’s an Optical Illusion)
“Why You Can’t Aim Putts (and How to Fix It)”
“This Is Why You Miss Putts (Even When the Read Is Right)”
“Fix Your Aim – The Most Overlooked Putting Skill”
“If You Can’t Do This, You’ll Never Be a Great Putter”
“Perfect Aim in Putting? You’re Doing It Wrong”

You aim here, but the ball goes here. And it’s not your stroke. It’s not your green reading. It’s something that your eyes are doing to you on every single putt. You see, there’s an optical illusion in putting that most golfers don’t even realize is going on or happening. Once you realize what causes it, you can fix it. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do in this video. So stick with me and I’ll have you aiming here and rolling the ball here. [Music] So I’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but the way that we putt creates a vision problem. We’re required to stand beside the ball and putt this way while our body is facing this way. It’s the equivalent of the car going this direction, but the steering wheel is here. And so, we’re driving like this. In other words, the putt line doesn’t look the same back here behind the ball as it does when I set up over the ball to make my putt. In a lot of ways, putting is like standing on a railroad track. Your ball is on this rail and you are standing on this rail and you want to roll the ball straight. But as we look down a railroad track, especially standing over it this way, we have this parallax vision thing that comes in and our body naturally wants to draw those two lines together. The problem is that is a pull or a push. It’s a missed putt. And that’s what happens to us. So we have to learn in our setup to set up in such a way that our feet are on one rail, the ball, the putter is the other rail. And we get our head, our eyes positioned where they are over the ball so that we see the ball on one rail and our body on the rail parallel to that and we’re rolling the ball straight instead of pulling it or pushing it. Let me illustrate this same thing for you another way. So, I’ve got a six-foot putt set up here. And I’m using a string line to mark the start line of the putt. And you can see it’s a little bit maybe one ball outside the cup. This cup, this putt breaks slightly from my left to right. And I’ve got under that string line perfectly aligned with that, I’ve got my one putt ruler. Now, we’re using lines. And then I’ve got the line on the ball. But here’s what happens when we set up to a putt. Okay, here my eyes are too far that way and I’m seeing the line on the ball, not it’s outside this orange line, which is the string line. And what happens is when I set up and look at that, I feel like, oh man, I’m aimed out to the left with my target line. So, I’ve got to push that. And we miss it to the right. Same token, if I set up and my eyes are too far inside the ball like this, then it feels like I’m aimed to the right. And so I’m going to have a tendency to pull that to the left. And what happens with that is we set up that way consistently and over a period of time we get tired and our brain knows that the task is to roll the ball in the hole. We get tired of missing consistently left and so we open the face a little bit and start to push putts to the right. Now, our bad setup and our poor aiming has actually caused us to develop a stroke bias, and we’re a mess, and we’re frustrated and wonder why we’re missing so many short putts. A lot of you know exactly what that feels like. Well, the solution to that is to learn how to aim putts the right way. First thing you do is you make your green read and you pick a target. In this case, my target is represented by this string line. I like to hit putts so that if they miss they go a little bit past the hole. So I put the string line ending here a little bit behind the hole. This is my target. Now along that target line I want an intermediate target. So I normally out on the course I pick an intermediate target along my target line. Like there’s a hole where these greens were punched three or four weeks ago. I might pick that for an intermediate target. In this case, I’m using the one putt ruler to practice with and it has a dot 9 in out in front of the ball for an intermediate target. So, short target, long target, the hole gets in the way in between those. And again, because this putt breaks, it’s not going to go all the way to this target. I’m going to start it here and gravity is going to pull the ball into the center of the hole. Now, once I have that set up, I’m going to use the line on my ball and get over the ball. And I want to be in a position where the string line blotss out the line on the ball. I cannot see the line on the ball. if I’m too far back here. And it’s fine if you need to stand this far away from the ball, but you’ve got to get your head, your eyes in position where the string line, where the string line, the line on the ball, the alignment aid on the ball, and the line on the ruler are all three perfectly aligned with each other. That’s when you’re set up and when your eyes and your head are in the right position. And you want your dominant eye there. Like right now, I can see the string line here and the line on the ball there, which means my head’s too far out. I need to get in about there over the ball. And you work on that over and over and over so that that becomes second nature. And the cool thing is that the stringline putting aid from Putt Line Golf, who also I collaborated with for the one putt ruler, has a cap on it where you can set it up inside and you don’t have to worry about the prongs going into the floor. It’s made for indoor or outdoor use. Awesome. There. You don’t have to have one of those, but something like that, some type of a string line helps. Some people use a putting mirror for this. If that’s the case for you, you should set up over the mirror where when you look down, you see the ball and you cannot see your dominant eye. You’re blocking out your dominant eye with the ball. Then your head, your eyes are in the right position. And you go, well, how does that what does that have to do with aiming? And the answer is everything. This is why David Adele has discovered in his lab and in his research and has been documented by others. 93% of golfers can’t set up and point the face of the club straight at the target. And he’s done that with lasers and mirrors to demonstrate and prove that to people. It’s because they don’t set their eye perfectly over the ball every time. Now, I will say it’s okay if your eye is very slightly to the inside, but it’s better to have your dominant eye directly over the ball. So, set up where the string line is blocking out the line on the ball and you have that perfect. Get used to that. Get comfortable with that and you’ll hold a lot more that way. So, you’ve practiced and you’ve got this setup and aiming and you want to take it to the course. You go out and read the green and you pick a target beside the hole. Use a blade of grass or an old ball mark or something that pick an actual target and then draw a line with your vision with your imagination. Back up the line that your ball is going to start on and pick an intermediate target eight or nine inches out in front of your ball on that line. And if it has to be 12 in or 18 inches, it’s okay. And then your thought process is set up that same way and roll the ball over that line. Now, a couple of things that will help you with that. Use the line on the ball. I know some people don’t like to use the line on the ball. I just point out to you, the pros do it for the large part, the vast majority of them use that. And they are the guys who are practicing two hours a day and still want to use that alignment aid on the course. There’s a reason for that. So, unless using the line causes you to become so line dependent that you can’t control speed and distance, you ought to use the alignment aid on the ball. Now, I realize it’s very difficult to get that line on the ball pointed exactly at your target. Several little tricks to make that faster. Trick number one, use one of those balls that has the wider alignment stripe on it. That seems to be faster and easier. Trick number two is you can take a coin like a ball marker and draw a straight line across it. Mark your ball, pick up your ball, look at the target line that you want, and then you can twist or move that coin with the line that you’ve drawn on it to be pointed on your line. But there’s a trick here. You cannot move that coin with the ball gone. So if you’re going to do it that way, mark your ball. Pick up your ball. Look at the coin. See your line. Put the ball back down. Then twist and rotate your coin. Then put while the ball is there. Line up the line on the ball with the line on your coin. Then pick up the coin. It’s a process. But you can’t move a coin like this directly on the ground. You’re breaking the rules there. A way to do that without breaking the rules is to use an alignment ball mark. Alignment ball mark has these two little prongs that push into the turf. And then once it’s set, you can move the top portion of it with the line to the line that you’ve chosen. Then you line the line up on your ball with that line. Pull the ball mark. Perfectly legal. I know some of you are going to try to argue in the comments and it’s not. Don’t the manufacturer has letters from the golf industry, the rules committees that it’s legal. So out on the course, you pick a target by the hole. You pick an intermediate target on that line. You point the line at your ball. Or if you don’t use the line on the ball, you point at it. And you can do what Bryson Dambo and a lot of other golfers do. They use the line on their ball or the ones that don’t. And they’ll put their putter here on their one of their belt loops right under their dominant eye and they’ll sight to the ball self the center of the ball or they’ll sight to the line on the ball and make certain that they’re lined up on their target line. That’s a fast and easy way to do that. And then you stroke the putt on that line. All that’s left is controlling the speed and making a good read so that you know what that line is. One last thing related to aiming and start lines and the way you set up to the ball. You see this every time you play, and I do too. People are set up. I’ve got a putt here that breaks a little bit left to right. And they will set up and they’ve got the ball on the right line and that type of thing, but they’ll set up with their body aligned to the hole. And in this instance, I’m now crossing my train tracks. I can’t point my body at my hole and the putter at the line. Be certain that you set up where your train tracks, if you will, the one under your feet and the one under your ball are parallel to each other. Same thing with hips and shoulders with very, very few exceptions. And you have to make some accommodations if you’re making those exceptions. Much easier. If your line is left of the hole, then set up parallel left of the hole. If your line is straight, set up to the hole. But on a breaking putt, don’t set up to the hole. Set up to your target line. And some of you make that mistake and don’t even realize that you’re making it. So fix this optical illusion and parallax error by learning to set up with your eyes, your dominant eye directly over the ball and your body square to your target line and rolling the ball over an intermediate target 9 in straight out in front of you. If you got some help and value out of this video, you know the drill. Like, subscribe, comment, share, put your questions below. Check out this video on the screen now. And here’s to you making more putts.