HOW SHOULD YOUR BODY MOVE WHEN PUTTING? 

Your putting stroke will all be executed by rocking your shoulders, with a quiet lower body and head. Jonas DeWitte, Head Golf Professional at Aquarina Beach and Country Club shares the Karate Kid putting drill. He calls this the best putting drill he knows for teaching the proper muscles to engage when putting. Place both of your hands on the putter shaft in the position you would use for a karate chop. Your hands will mirror one another but not touch. Now with your eyes over the ball, rock your shoulders back and forth in a smooth motion.  While he acknowledges that there will be variations of putting styles, most of the best players use their shoulders as the engine with smooth acceleration through ball impact. 

Karate Kid Drill

The Karate Kid Drill is great for helping you to make your putting stroke come only from your shoulders.

1. Position both of your hands in a karate chop position.  
2. Bring both hands together on the shaft of the putter but not touching one another
3. Using just the muscles from your chest, squeeze your hands on the putter
4. Rock your shoulders back and forth and this will give you the proper feeling for putting

Shorter Backstroke is Best

Everybody has different putting strokes and different putting routines. That's the beauty of the short game. But a short compact backstroke will be the easiest to control your shoulder movement.  A lot of people will take the putter back way too far and decelerate into the putt.  When you take a stroke back real short and real smooth through it comes for a lot better straighter putt than having all that time to accelerate through to the target zone. 

Position Your Eyes Over the Ball Correctly

Make sure your eyes are over top of the golf ball.  If you're not directly over the golf ball and seeing the line, it won't matter how well you stoke the ball.  So, the way to get directly over that golf ball is to make sure you can drop a ball from between your eyes and the ball fall directly on top of your ball at address.

Putting is Over Half Your Strokes in Golf - Practice, Practice, Practice!

The potential to lower your golf scores by improving your putting is huge. Consider that in a round with 18 holes, you will almost certainly be looking at 40% to 50% of your total strokes taking place on the putting green. By shaving off one stroke per hole on average, you could reduce your overall golf scores by 20% to 30%. A great way to start is learning to get your ball within three feet of the cup (the circle of love) at least one stroke faster. This means learning distance control in your long putts. To learn to control your distance effectively, you should try to reduce your putting to only changing one variable. You should attempt to keep everything else as a constant. Making your putting mechanics the exact same for every distance, but only altering either the amount of backswing or pace of the putter can be a gamechanger for most players. Avoid changing both variables from putt to putt.

And you can combine the Karate Kid Drill with the ladder drill which focuses on developing great putting distance control.

Spend 50% of your practice time on the putting green. Spend 50% or more of that time working on your distance and speed control.