I’m learning how to use a GoPro camera. Here’s most of a PP360 session before the camera, for reasons unknown to me yet, stopped recording at the 11:47 mark and automatically started a new file for the rest of the round. Weird. That makes this chunk of video Part 1 and I’ll upload the smaller Part 2 sometime later. Looks like I get to hunt around settings for half an hour and figure out how to make this not happen. Oh joy, I so love pissing away time learning hidden things in new tech…
Anyway, here’s a very good PP360 round for me. Just a couple of putts off my all-time high of 237. Yep, the scores sure do inflate once you bring the basket indoors! I was averaging over 50 points less when I did this a whole bunch last April outdoors. Half of the time there was at least a little snow on the ground, plus some blustery winds to boot. In here it’s perfect for practicing my muscle memory and not worrying about anything else.
For those of you unfamiliar to the PP360 app, it’s a putting practice game you keep score on your phone. You do two rounds of 50 putts totaling 100. In each round you do 10 from five increasing distances: 10′, 15′, 20′, 25′, and 30′. You get bonus points for making the first and last at each station, which puts some added pressure on certain putts and makes it life-like for the stress of an important putt in a real round. You also get bonus points for making all of the putts at that station. A perfect score is 360.
The short game is my relative strength. I usually make all my 20-footers and am around 75%-80% from 25′. This isn’t great for a pro, but I’m not a pro. I play in the MA-40+ division, which is essentially Am-1 for old guys. If I’m making all my 20-footers, 75% of my 25-footers and 60% of my 30-footers (as I usually do), then I’m gaining strokes among my competition. Or at least getting them back from when some of them outdrive me on longer open holes!
This winter I am focusing on doing better with the straddle putts. So I do 5 regular (to me) putts with a staggered stance, rocking back and forth as I deliver the stroke, and I compliment those with 5 straddle putts.
I’m quite a bit weaker at straddle putting, and last year there were a few easy putts I had to straddle around bushes and whatnot and missed them. I wanna lock in that muscle memory this winter, so half of all my pp360 putts will be straddle putts!
My go-to putter for my regular stance is the XT Aviar. I prefer the understability of the Prime Burst Deputy for straddling. This is because I don’t get to rock back and forth with the straddle stance and more of the energy is coming from bending my knees, pushing upward with my legs, then releasing. The release involves more arm and wrist than what I do with my standard putt, so having a less stable putter (the Deputy) means I can get it to go straight with less pop from my hand. At least that’s where I am right now.
Putting is fun! And it helps those of us who aren’t good at driving to hang in there, at least in the amateur divisions.
