I’ve made a few small tweaks to my swing in the last 10 days. Actually 2 of the changes were pretty big and 1 pretty small.

The first small thing I did was move the ball forward in my stance a bit on my iron shots and moved my hands forward too. Before I was keeping my hands even with my belt buckle, but the natural slant of the shaft made me have to keep the ball too far back in my stance, which made me have a very steep downswing. Now I’m keeping the ball even with my belt buckle and moving my hands up closer to my left thigh and it seems to be working very well so far.

The two big things I did were switch out my putter for a Taylormade Spider Mini.

New to me Taylormade Spider Mini

I’ve always played with toe hang blade putters, and since my putting has been very bad I thought a drastic change might do me some good. In the two rounds since I switched I’ve been under 40 putts with 31 and 37. It is still not great but it is better than the 42-46 putts I was having for awhile. Most importantly for me, my lag putts are getting much closer, and I’m not leaving those 6-10 footers short. Today’s 37 putters actually isn’t as bad as it sounds because I counted several shots from off the green that I played with putter. Technically those probably shouldn’t count as putts and I’ll have to decide how I want to track those and stick with it going forward.

The second big change I made was how I’m playing my pitch and chip shots. I have always favored playing the ball off my back foot and hitting a little bump and run with a pitching wedge as my go to shot around the green. These shots go OK for me from the fairway or the first cut around the green, but they are very inconsistent out of anything slightly deep. I’ve moved the ball up to my front foot and started hitting shots with my 60 degree wedge. My distance control improved dramatically, and I feel much more confident that I’m going to get the ball where I want it. It’s just like making a soft underhand toss on to the green.

All of these changes have had the net effect of getting my Handicap Index down 13.3 from 17.6 at the start of the year. The journey to single digits continues.