THE weather outside is starting to get much colder, and a lot of us may not have played as much golf as usual over the Christmas period.

This is the perfect time to think about practising as we aim towards achieving our goals in 2019 – practising at home for a few minutes every evening can eventually make a world of difference.

One of the easiest things to practise at home is putting.

For me, when I practise putting in the house, I tend to focus on shorter putts. Within six feet of the hole is critical distance for being a good putter. You should have at least a 50 per cent success rate from six foot – every one foot you move closer to the hole, your success rate should increase by 10 per cent.

We want to aim for consistency – Luke Donald holds the record for the most consecutive successful putts from inside three feet, putting into the hole 529 times.

It’s easy to practise this at home – I simply place out two alignment sticks with a target at the end, and play the ball down the middle of the sticks towards the target (Picture 1).

Once you get good at it from a distance of three feet, you can extend the distance to four feet to practise more consistent putting from further away.

A putting mirror is handy to have when practising at home (Picture 2) – this allows us to check our set-up to ensure our eyes are over the ball.

Another physical aid is a putting arc (Picture 3). This can be used along with the alignment sticks to assist our swing (Picture 4). This helps us to achieve a near perfect putting stroke the more we practice with it, meaning the ball has to roll straight. If you do enough of these each night, it adds up to be a huge amount over a month.

Lining up the ball can be helpful for people looking to improve their putting. A simple black line drawn around the ball to help line up shots can help when trying to improve our stroke (Picture 5). If our stroke is correct, the line should roll straight towards the target – if this isn’t the case then we have more than likely struck the ball incorrectly.

I have another ball which has the outside cutaway (Picture 6), meaning that if the shot isn’t hit perfectly, the ball will fall onto its side.