Improving your putting inside 10 feet is low-hanging fruit for almost every golfer. You can easily shave 2-3 strokes off your score by becoming more efficient in this range, and I believe it’s where most of your practice efforts should be spent when you’re on the practice green.

The reason why shorter putts are important to practice is two fold:

1. You actually have a chance to make them (read this article to find out why).
2. These putts carry huge psychological significance on the golf course. They are usually the ones to save par or bogey, and making or missing them can affect your mindset on the following tee shot (and even the rest of the round).

If you watch professional golfers practice putting they spend a ton of time trying to perfect their strokes from this range, and often they are using two golf tees like this.

This was one of Tiger’s favorite drills (weird, but it feels appropriate to talk about him in the past tense now), and for good reason. The quality of your stroke is very important on shorter putts. If you can consistently square your putter at impact you are going to make more putts from these distances.

I’ve recently been working with a training aid that helps tremendously with your stroke, and it’s called TIBA Putt.

It’s been seen being used on the greens by a lot of PGA and LPGA players, most notably Lydia Ko.

Bonus Content:Be sure to check out my complete guide to putting.

My Closed Club Face

A couple of months ago I went for a putter-fitting session. It revealed a few things about my stroke that I didn’t know about.

The main thing that I came away with was that I was closing the clubface at impact, and even more afterwards. I knew I had to work on straightening out my stroke a bit, and the easiest way to do that is to get real feedback while you are practicing.

So I purchased the TIBA Putt, and I’ve been very happy with the results so far.

It doesn’t get much simpler

I love simplicity, especially in golf. I think that’s the beauty of this product.

It takes an extremely effective drill and makes it even better. The two-tee drill helps figure out if you are squaring the clubface at impact, but TIBA Putt takes it a step further and makes sure your stroke is correct before and afterwards.

I set it up on my Birdie Ball mat, which required a little extra effort (I used some tape) since I couldn’t use the tees to secure it into the ground like you would on a putting green.

The feedback is pretty immediate; if your stroke is off-line at any point you will make contact with the plastic.

As expected, I was making contact with the left side. Like any other great training aid, when you get this feedback, you start to make adjustments and feel the results.

What’s interesting about this design is that it accommodates different putting strokes.

If you want to take it a step further, you can pair the TIBA with another great putting aid that I like, The Pill (you can check out my review here).

For $20 you can lower your scores

The TIBA costs $20, which isn’t a lot of money in the game-improvement world.

I’ll make you a promise right now. If you commit to practicing 5-8 foot putts a few times a week, you are going to lower your scores. You will be more confident standing over crucial par putts on the golf course.

How do I know this? Well because I committed to doing that in 2015, and it worked tremendously. There’s a reason why the best golfers in the world spend a lot of time practicing putts from this length, and they should be part of your practice routine too.

I think this product can help make that practice even more effective.

You can purchase the TIBA Putt on Amazon here.