Widen the Lead Wrist
Sorry, you need to be a member to access this video.
You Are Just Seconds Away - Become a member here!
Already a member? Log in now
Ready to learn just how simple Tiger and Jack's golf swings were? Start here!
Before we can talk about widening the angle, we got to know what the angle is.
In this video, we're going to focus solely on the lead arm.
So if you're playing golf with right-handed clubs, that's going to be your left arm.
The angle that we're referring to with the lead arm is really just the angle between the shaft and the forearm.
This is typically what's defined as lag.
That term has been tossed around for a very, very long time by a bunch of different people, including myself.
And the reality is that we know now with 3D motion capture that most tour pros not only have less angle than a lot of amateurs, but they're trying to widen it or get rid of it as early in the downswing as humanly possible.
When we talk about the right arm in the next video or the trail arm, we're going to see that even more so.
So the key is understanding how to produce power if you don't have this angle.
Because it's long been thought that the longer you hold this angle, the quicker it's going to snap at the bottom.
And that is true.
The trick is that's not necessarily what the greatest players of all time actually did in their swing.
And as you saw in the intro video, many great players, including the greatest of all time, Jack Nicklaus, said he didn't feel he could throw the club hard enough or early enough at the top of the downswing as long as he was moving to his lead side.
And that is the trick.
And it's way, way easier than you think.
In fact, swinging this way, as I've spent all of this time trying to learn and understand it and internalize it and feel it for myself, it's truly the easiest way to swing the golf club I can possibly imagine.
And what's really amazing, as you saw in the intro video, it's instinctive.
This is a natural thing to do.
We just have to get the right feel for it.
And that's what I want to share with you right now.
So with the lead arm, take your club, go to the top, and you can start from setup if you want.
And you'll note that at setup, there's a certain amount of lag, quote unquote, built into your swing.
That would be getting rid of all of it if the angle of the shaft and the forearm were the same.
But we start with a little bit.
And then as we go back, this angle increases or decreases, depending on how you want to define it.
For our purposes, we're going to talk about widening that angle.
And that's what we're talking about at the top of the swing.
Again, commonly thought of in the golf swing, we think of pulling the arms down or turning the body or doing something to maintain this angle because most golfers throw it from the top, which is exactly what I'm going to get you to do.
I'm just going to get you to do it the right way.
So what is the whole trick to this?
It's really simple.
And we're going to do this one arm at a time to keep it really, really basic because once you put them together, this stuff's going to all click.
So go to the top of your swing with the angle that you have in your wrist.
And all I want you to feel, note how the club feels a little heavy because it's kind of falling back, gravity's pulling it down.
And what I want you to do is start tipping it up to the balance point where it feels pretty light.
And you can hold it very lightly.
You just barely hold it with your fingers because it's balanced now.
Now, from here, start to widen that angle a little bit more, just like this.
All I'm doing is this with my wrist.
That's it.
Go to the top, widen this angle.
Now, once you start to tip it to this point and it starts to fall the other way, let it fall.
All you need to do is widen this angle and start to feel how as you start to toss it out, and it starts to have its own momentum.
That you no longer need to feel that you've got to rip it down with your arms or rip it down with your shoulders.
It's got its own inertia.
So you're going to literally start to go from here, start to widen it, and let it And as you're doing that, I'm going to talk about exactly what to feel in just a moment.
But the key is simply starting to get a feel for when this club begins to fall and have its own momentum.
When it's sitting here, it doesn't want to go anywhere.
So we have to change directions in the backswing, and we do that by starting to widen this angle in the wrist, give it its own momentum, and then as you're coming down, you should feel that your hand becomes light.
And this is the key.
This is what you have to develop a sensitivity to and awareness of, is that if you're used to holding this club really tight with your fingers and pulling this thing down with your hands, you'll never, ever feel that great throwing motion that Nicholas is talking about, that Tiger Woods did in his swing, that the Greats did in their swing.
You have to learn to feel this, and you have to be sensitive to it.
And to do that, all you need to feel is relax your hand for right now, and just start to feel how, once it starts to pick up momentum, your hand becomes light.
It's almost like it becomes weightless for just a moment, because you're no longer trying to pull it down.
You're letting the club move under its own inertia.
As you're doing this, once you get a feel for the club and hand falling together, instead of your hand pulling the club down or forcing it down, then as you start to come down, start to bow this wrist slightly.
Now, for those of you that don't know, this would be a cupped wrist.
This would be a bowed wrist.
We just need a tiny, tiny amount of bowing.
And for those of you who've probably struggled to get their left wrist or lead wrist flat at impact, this is how you do it.
It won't happen if you're trying to yank the club down.
It's very easy for you to lose the club and not have the right feel for it.
But once you start to come down and you feel the club becoming weightless, you start to bow this wrist just slightly, and that's what helps you deal off the face like you see in all the great players.
Now, as you're doing this, once you get to this bowing point, you want to release that.
You don't want to hold it bowed like this forever, because that's going to cut off speed.
What you want is the opposite.
You actually want, once this bowing, and you strike the ground, in this case, we're not hitting the ball yet, you want it to release and start to cup.
And in your follow-through, here's your checkpoint.
You want to see that your lead wrist is fully cupped, like your logo of your glove is pointing down towards the ground, and the club face is at roughly a 30-degree angle, give or take.
If it's like this, you're holding onto the club too tight.
And if it's like this, you're in the right spot.
That means you let it release.
So let's start to put this together for a second.
Go to the top, get it under control with the last three fingers, start to widen the angle, and let it release.
Let's do that again.
Widen the angle with the wrist, nothing from the arms, nothing from the shoulders, nothing from the body.
Just begin to widen that angle, and let the club brush the grass.
And that's what you want to feel.
You want to feel it's almost like you're striking a match across a box.
You're not trying to hit down or pull down.
You're trying to let the club release.
That's the whole point of the swing, and that's what Jack Nicklaus was talking about.
When he throws it from the top, he's starting to gain speed early in the downswing, not trying to get it late.
Now, it may look like that, but that's not what you feel.
And that's the difference between intent in doing something and what you actually see on video.
I can tell you that I'm going to throw my arm as if I was throwing a ball as hard as I can, but what you're going to see, while I'm only focused on moving my hand, my whole body's moving in response to that.
That's what I believe Tiger and all these other great players are feeling in their golf swings, is that the club, they're throwing the club from the top, widening this angle to get the club back out in front of them, and that's really the key.
If you remember way back in 2000, Tiger Woods and Butch Harmon were talking about the golf swing on the Golf Channel and these changes that he was making with Butch, and one of the things he said he was working on was trying to get the club more out in front of him, and you hear this with tour pros all the time.
You look at Justin Rose, and he says, I've got to feel I've got to do this with my swing to get the club back out in front of me, and Tiger's saying the same thing.
I've got to feel that I've got to get the club back out in front of me.
What they're really talking about is the club head, and what's the easiest way to get that club head back out in front of you?
It's to widen that angle and to throw the club from the top.
Let's listen to Tiger talk about this real quick.
Keep the club head in front of my hands a little longer, going back, higher right arm, and from there, round off the left arm, make it a little flatter at the top, left wrist, left arm up a little higher, then from there, get the club down in front of me.
From here, there, I can arc it off with a little bit of a bow in my left hand to a nice short follow-through.
And then when you go to the top of your swing, probably the biggest change that Tiger's made is he's really tried to get his hands in front of himself coming down.
In other words, arms in front of the body, where the club used to lay down somehow when you're old swimming, you used to get stuck.
Yes.
They go, ole.
That's the lay the shaft down 16th tee player championship.
As you begin to get a feel for this, I want you to start paying attention to how the club is interacting with whatever you're on.
If you're on turf, if you're on grass, if you're on a mat, it's very important to start paying attention to how the club works through that surface.
What you want is just a brushing of that grass.
I like to, again, think of it as striking a match.
If you're starting to find that you're digging the club in, your arm and hand are way, way, way too tight, and you're trying to sustain this pull too long.
Really what you're trying to do, again, is just pitch the shaft.
Tip it this way.
It's going to start to fall, and then rather than fighting that fall, let it fall.
We're going to add more speed to this later when we get to the second video, but for right now, all you need to feel is how effortless this can be, and that's the whole point of this.
If I miss the ground completely, so there's a couple of different ways that you're going to miss.
One is going to be digging into the ground, as I mentioned, just pulling really hard.
That's not what you're trying to feel.
You're trying to feel this club get its own momentum.
The other one is if I try and flip my hands really quick and I lose a sense of that club head, then I might miss the ground completely, or if I keep pulling my arm.
Again, what you're going to feel is that the club actually bottoms out right at underneath the ball.
Now, of course, we know we want to strike it.
We want to hit the ball first and then get the divot a little bit more in front, but your vision, your feel for this is that you're letting the club do its own thing under its own weight, and you're just simply guiding it, and as you get comfortable with this, you'll see, notice how the club's really ripping through the turf, but I can't even begin to tell you how soft I am throughout my whole body to let it do that.
My hand is very soft.
I would say it's a three out of ten in terms of ten being squeezing as tight as I can and zero being not holding at all.
It's a three.
What I feel throughout the whole swing, and that's what gets that nice little strike at the bottom, is letting myself guide it, and the more that I start feeling this, what I want to start to feel is that the faster I start to pitch the club or throw the club from the top, the faster my hand is allowed to move with it, and that's the key.
We generally think of the golf swing as muscling this puppy, and we go to the top, and we're like, oh, turn your hips as fast as you can, or turn your shoulders, or fire your arms, or whatever it is.
The reality is, if you want to get the club back out in front of you, like the greats talk about, this has to take a nap.
This can't move that fast, because you'll never get your arms back out in front of you.
You'll never get the club back out in front of you.
You'll get stuck like you heard in Tiger talking in that clip there.
But if I'm not trying to power this with my arms, and instead I'm starting to feel this club have its own momentum, its own inertia, and the more that it has, the more that my hand becomes what I describe as weightless.
Then I can feel that my hand can move much faster without any tension.
I'm not trying, all I'm trying to do is just speed up this throw, and it's important to understand this is not with your thumb.
You're not going to the top and pushing against the shaft with your thumb.
First of all, the right hand, the trail hand, is where most of the throw occurs.
The left hand is relatively dumb in the golf swing.
It's doing some heavy lifting.
It's getting a flat left wrist to de-loft the face, but you're not really using it for power.
It's not in a very powerful position.
This is way more powerful, which again, we'll talk about in the second video.
But with this one, it's the last three fingers that you're really focusing on, and you're just trying to get a little pitch of the shaft to go that way.
And the faster you start to do this, the faster the club begins to move.
I'm not moving hard.
I'm not moving aggressive.
I'm not trying to turn my hips.
I'm not driving off the ground.
I'm not pushing off the ground.
I'm not turning my shoulders.
I'm not even turning my core.
I'm responding to the club having its own velocity and letting it do its thing.
And now this will start to help you understand why your golf swing feels like so much work, because you're not pitching the shaft and getting it to move.
You're not throwing it from the top.
You're probably trying to make it go that way whether it's your right arm, your left arm, your legs, your hips, whatever it is.
But you can see I'm starting to look like a pretty effortless golf swing.
And this is all completely relaxed.
It's not doing anything to provide any power really.
I'm just responding to this throwing motion.
And as this club starts to pick up speed, my hand gets lighter so I can just kind of focus on guiding the club and letting it rip through.
And as long as I got these release checkpoints, my logo pointing down, my left wrist fully released and that club face pointing more towards the ground, not back behind me, then I release the club fully and properly with that lead hand.
Now, as I begin to do this with a little bit more pace and a little bit more tempo and timing, it's not going to look like I'm casting the club.
But I'm going to tell you that's exactly what I'm going to feel.
So take a look.
I'm going to go to the top.
Now, it probably didn't look like I look like a 25 handicapper doing this, right?
But it's exactly what it felt like.
I felt like I went to the top.
I stopped with all this stuff and I just started to widen this angle.
And as I did that, my hand became lighter.
Once this club gets cast out into its own orbit, the hand is now free to move extremely fast without me trying to put any muscular effort into it at all.
Haven't you always wondered why certain golfers make it look so easy?
They produce so much speed or they can make a really short swing like Jon Rahm and produce so much speed so fast.
This isn't trickery.
This isn't voodoo.
This isn't mysticism.
It's simple mechanics.
And when you start creating speed early in the swing, you've got all this time to begin to accelerate the club.
And so you don't have to be in a rush.
Whereas if you're down here and you've got this much angle, you've got to get rid of that thing really, really quickly.
And it's much more difficult to time.
So you start building compensations into that.
When you look at Tiger swinging back in the day, he would make these little short wedge swings and then just have all of this crazy speed and have tons of distance with a short swing.
To do that, you've got to have speed early in the downswing.
Now the whole trick to you garnering this move and internalizing it and being able to feel it is becoming aware of it and sensitive to it.
The reason that you're trying to learn the golf swing through mechanics or 3D motion or just video, all of those things by themselves are helpful and useful, but they won't get you to the promised land.
As I showed in the intro video, Tiger Woods has been swimming since he's five years old.
And you can see at the top of his swing, the first thing he's doing is trying to widen that angle, get the club back out in front of him, which again is the opposite of holding lag.
He's trying to cast the club.
So at first, this may seem wildly counterintuitive.
I know even for me to think this way was counterintuitive for me.
But as I began to feel it, that's when all of the magic started to happen because then all of a sudden my body could relax.
And many of you know, my body's a complete wreck.
I've done more damage to it than you can imagine.
And I have countless lingering injuries.
So for me to be able to swing truly effortlessly for the rest of my life is extremely important to me.
I want to have distance as long as I can, but I don't want to work hard for it because it hurts.
It physically hurts my body.
So what I want you to really start to become aware of is being relaxed with your body and producing speed with your hands, Which, again, is the opposite of how I've thought about the swing in a lot of ways for many years, and how, I'm certain it's the opposite of how most of you think about the swing.
But once you start to get the feel of this, you're going to start to feel that just this little widening, casting the club out into its own orbit allows everything to move way faster.
It allows my hips, I'm not trying to move my hips.
I'm not trying to push off the ground.
I'm not trying to turn anything.
I'm just moving the club and my body as it stays relaxed, it naturally begins to move like a golf swing.
And that's why golfers like Vijay seeing Tiger Woods, all these guys who make it look truly effortless, this is how they're doing it.
So now let's understand how to put the trail hand back in there so that we can start doing this with some real speed.
And feel how all of this starts to tie together.
Jordan
Chuck
Patrick
Chuck
Loren
Chuck
Mark
Mark
Chuck
Mark
Chuck
Steven
Chuck
Steven
Chuck
Loren
Chuck
Bernard
Chuck
Tassos
Chuck
David Stephensen
Chuck
Ron
Ron
Chuck
Asle
Chuck
Asle
Chuck
Asle
Chuck
Asle
Chuck
David
Chuck
Diane
Chuck
M. (Certified RST Instructor)
Chuck
Francis
Chuck
Francis
Brian
Jeff
Chuck
M. (Certified RST Instructor)
Chuck
M. (Certified RST Instructor)
Paul
Chuck
Scott
Chuck
Ken
Chuck
Ken
David
Chuck
Francisco
Chuck