How to practice putting at home

Set your stations up once at home and every practice session turns into a scored round — the same five stations, the same format, a number at the end you can hold this week's putting against last week's.

No course, no card of players, no waiting for daylight. A driveway will do.

What the game asks for

A basket. Anything you can stand up and leave standing — a portable practice basket is what most people end up with at home, and it's the part of the setup you'll use every single day.

Room to throw. You want 30 to 40 feet of usable lane, plus a few steps behind the longest station. Thirty covers Lite and Normal, whose ladder tops out at 30 feet; forty gets you to Pro's back station. A driveway, a backyard, a long garage, the field at the end of the street.

A stack of putters. We'd recommend five. That's a whole station in Lite — throw the stack, log it, move on. Normal and Pro are ten putts a station, so you'll throw two stacks at each one. Carry fewer than five and the session turns into a walk.

Lay the stations out once

Open Measure, point your camera at the basket, and it walks you through placing all five stations at the right distance. No tape, no pacing it out.

The ladder depends on the mode:

• LITE and NORMAL — 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 feet
• PRO — 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 feet

Then mark them. Chalk, a tent peg, a dab of paint, a rock you agree not to move. A 360 score is only worth something because it's the same test every time, and that starts with station three being twenty feet this week and twenty feet next week.

Pick the mode that fits the time

Every mode is the same five stations. What changes is how many putts you throw at each one and how many times you go round.

• LITE — five putts a station, one round. 25 putts, scored out of 150.
• NORMAL — ten putts a station, two rounds. 100 putts, out of 360.
• PRO — the same shape as Normal with the ladder pushed out to 20–40 feet.

Ten spare minutes is a Lite round. A proper session is Normal — and the second round is the interesting half, because it tells you what your putting does once your arm is tired. That's the half that shows up on the back nine.

Let the scoring do the coaching

Every station pays a bonus for the first putt of the run and for the last one, and a bigger one again for sweeping all of them. Those bonuses grow as the stations get longer, and the fifth station counts double — so rounds are won and lost at the far end.

Practice into that. Don't rush the opening putt to get going, and don't mail in the last one after the station is already decided. Those are the two the app pays for, and they're the two that decide real rounds.

Then keep showing up

Same layout, same mode, logged every time. The streak keeps you honest about turning up, and the trend line in Stats will tell you the truth about whether the routine is working.