4-Week Putting Improvement Plan

Who this is for

You hit greens in regulation more often than you used to, but your putts-per-round hasn't followed — three-putts still show up, and putts from inside 10 feet miss more than they should. This plan assumes you can already make a reasonably repeatable stroke; it's not a putting-fundamentals-from-scratch plan, it's a focused month on the two things that move a scorecard the most: starting the ball on your line, and controlling how far it goes.

Three sessions a week, 15–20 minutes each, on a putting green. No new equipment beyond what the two drills already call for — a putter, some tees or alignment sticks, and balls.

The 4-week plan at a glance

Week	Focus	Sessions/week	Primary drill
1–2	Start-line control	3	Gate Drill
3–4	Distance control (start line maintained)	3	Distance Control Ladder

Weeks 1–2: Start-line control

Every session this fortnight opens with the Gate Drill — full instructions are on that page, so this plan won't re-explain it. Run it for 15 minutes per session, narrowing the gate as it starts feeling easy, per the drill's own progression guidance.

Spend the last 5 minutes of each session on 15–20 putts from a single mid-range distance (6–8 feet), no gate, just checking that the start-line control from the drill is showing up in a normal putting stroke without the visual aid.

By the end of week 2, you should be doing the Gate Drill at a noticeably narrower gate than where you started — that's the marker this stage is working, not a specific make percentage.

Weeks 3–4: Distance control (start line maintained)

Start each session with 5 minutes of the Gate Drill at whatever width you finished week 2 with — this is maintenance, not the main focus anymore, just enough to confirm start-line control hasn't slipped.

Then run the Distance Control Ladder for the remaining 10–15 minutes — again, full instructions on that page. This is the drill that was missing in weeks 1–2, and it's deliberately introduced only once start line is already solid: distance control is much harder to isolate and improve when you're also fighting an inconsistent start line.

How to measure progress

Two numbers, checked at the end of each week rather than every session:

• Weeks 1–2: the narrowest gate width you can putt through with a real success rate (not perfect, but clearly more makes than misses).
• Weeks 3–4: your ladder drill score (out of 12) from the distance control drill, tracked weekly.

If the ladder score is flat across weeks 3 and 4, that's more often a sign the gate width from weeks 1–2 needs revisiting than a sign the distance drill itself isn't working — a shaky start line will cap your distance-control results even when you're doing the right drill.

Adjust the plan if...

You're missing sessions and falling behind the 4-week window. Stick with 3 sessions a week rather than compressing the plan into fewer, longer sessions — repetition spread over time matters more here than total volume in one sitting. A 6-week version of this plan at the right pace beats a rushed 4-week version.

Start-line control isn't improving after 2 weeks of consistent Gate Drill work. Before extending weeks 1–2, check your setup — ball position and alignment at address are a common cause of start-line misses, sometimes more so than stroke path itself, and no amount of gate drill reps fixes a setup issue on their own.

You only have time for 2 sessions a week. Keep the structure the same but expect the plan to take closer to 6 weeks than 4 — the split between start-line and distance-control weeks matters more than hitting an exact calendar deadline.

Tools that can help

Neither drill in this plan requires an app or training aid — but a comparison of the best putting apps and training aids is coming to the tools hub, for once you want to compare options.

FAQ

Can I do this plan alongside full-swing practice, or should putting be the only focus for the month? You can run this alongside full-swing sessions — it's only 15–20 minutes, 3 times a week. Just do the putting work first if you're combining it with a range session; putting drills that require precision are easier to do well before fatigue sets in.

What if I'm already good at start-line control and want to skip straight to distance control? If the self-check in the practice structure guide confirms it, you can start with the Distance Control Ladder from week 1 and use the freed-up time to run more reps of it. It's easy to overestimate this without actually checking, though — the Gate Drill takes 15 minutes to confirm one way or the other, which is cheap insurance against wasting the rest of the plan on the wrong thing.

Do I need a specific putting aid or app to follow this plan? No — both drills use tees or alignment sticks you likely already have. If you're curious whether a putting app or training aid would speed this up, that's a separate question from whether this plan works without one; it does.

Want the next plan as soon as it's published? The newsletter covers exactly that.