I remember the first time I learned about a putting metronome.
It was the fall of 2021, and my golf game was still in its nascent days of ascent. I was getting better slowly, but my energy was focused on bigger problems like a wayward drive and a far-too-omnipresent audience with the shanks. Still, my ears perked up when I found myself on the receiving end of a putting lesson from Danielle Kang.
Kang, owner of a fine mallet putter and one of the steadiest strokes I had ever seen, was telling me about her lifelong relationship with a metronome — and with the ways the tool had helped her establish an easy sense of consistency throughout the stroke. The tool, she said then, was not meant to help with the mechanics of the putting stroke, merely the timing of it, helping her to be sure she wasn’t accelerating or decelerating through the stroke, two easy killers of consistency around the greens.
For those who don’t know, a metronome is a device that produces a steady beat — or number of taps — per minute. The device is primarily used by musicians to keep time, but it serves plenty of benefits in the golf world, where players have leaned on its benefits to keep their own sense of tempo.
Fast forward, now, to the summer of 2024, with your trusty editor’s game at a rare moment of strength. After a few more years of fits and starts, my swing had rounded out in full, turning my competitive pursuits in a different direction. Suddenly I could find fairways easily, wear out the center of the greens with my irons, and generally find myself in position to make lots of easy pars. I was at the point with my golf game I’d always dreamt of finding — well, except for one thing: I’d forgotten how to putt.
The issue, as I remember it now, was troubling. During one round, I left somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 10-footers short of the hole. During another, I blasted so many putts long that I briefly wondered if I was suffering from a health episode.
One day I lucked into a round at the Old Course, and my swing left me. I was battling to keep my game upright during a round I desperately wanted to go well. Then, finally, disaster struck on the 13th green — but it had nothing to do with a wayward drive. I five-putted from about 100 feet and realized I’d had enough. It was time to address my putting woes once and for all, and I was going to start with Kang’s old trick: the metronome.
I set out on the practice green back home on Long Island a few weeks later with headphones in both ears and no music playing. Following Kang’s advice, I turned on a metronome app, and I began to practice my putting stroke.
Almost immediately, I noticed a major issue: my tempo changed with every distance. On long putts, I’d take an eternity to pull the putterhead back, then slam it through the ball with a mighty pull. On shorter putts, I’d try a choppy little backstroke that forced either a violent follow-through (which sent the ball well past the hole) or a defensive decel (hello: short misses!).
I stopped looking at the putterhead and focused instead on the noise in my ears. With each putt, I tried to make sure the backstroke stopped on one beat, and follow through finished on the next. Then, as I went to longer putts, I tried to focus on keeping that same back-and-through tempo, just with a longer backstroke.
Within an hour, my distance-control woes were dramatically improved. The threshold for improvement was admittedly threadbare — now I could actually look at a target and hit a putt within the general vicinity — but the effect on my game was considerable. Three-and-four putts had been reduced to relatively consistent 2-putt makes. My scores were improving, and my mindset around putting had evolved into an actual, actionable strategy.
It is not a perfect fix — it does not help bad reads or bad contact, two putting issues that face a lot of mid-handicap players — but it is something that requires very little time and energy to correct.
When it comes to managing life around the greens, that’s good enough for me.