The Two Things Your Hands Must Do in the Golf Swing
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The golf swing can be the hardest thing in the world or the simplest - it's your choice. While I know you think you're choosing the simplest one, you may actually be unintentionally making golf much harder than it needs to be. That's because you don't understand how to use your hands like the greats did in their golf swings. Once you understand the 2 things you must do with your hands, the golf swing will not only seem simple, it WILL be simple!
Have you ever wished that you were the golfer at your club who made the golf swing look easy? The one who can play a set of blades and rip a three iron off a tight lie like a walk in the park? The small group of golfers who truly make it look effortless is a pretty elite club.
And you probably have wondered if there's some sort of secret, special handshake or something to get in the club.
Well there is no handshake but there is a secret.
Do you want to know the secret to joining the club? It's all in understanding the two things you must do with your hands in the golf swing.
And in true, paradoxical fashion, these two things are the opposite of what you think, and incredibly simple.
It's kind of the irony of golf or the rub of the green if you will.
The trick is that, like most things in golf, you have to do the exact opposite of exactly what you think you should.
So what must your hands do in the golf swing to be able to step back and start playing the back tees? They must square the face and add speed.
That's it.
That's the job of your hands in the swing.
It's a common misnomer that you should turn your hips as fast as you can in the golf swing.
And that's the secret to effortless speed and power and control in the golf swing.
But the reality is that's not true no matter how many times you hear it on TV.
Here are the facts.
The LPGA players move their hips much faster than the men, while averaging 20 miles an hour slower club head speed.
So clearly it doesn't matter how fast you turn your hips.
If I go to the top of my swing and turn my hips as fast as I can.
This club didn't really go anywhere.
It didn't give me any speed.
Back in 2007, almost 20 years ago, I did a study on this at the TaylorMade Performance Labs.
To see how much speed I would lose if I tried to not move my hips at all.
While you may not have seen this video because it is quite old, I'll put a link to it down below.
But here's a clip from it.
And here's the gist of what you need to take away.
Is that when I moved my hips as fast as I could there were a couple things that I noted.
One I did have a little bit more club head speed.
I remember the numbers somewhere being around three percent more club head speed versus not moving my hips at what I felt at all in the downswing.
So, three percent, it's definitely a loss, but it wasn't necessarily a devastating loss because the side benefit of that was.
I was able to hit the ball more consistently by feeling that my hips were stationary going down.
So I didn't feel like my hips were firing really hard, and I was able to control my hitting area and my impact positions.
Much better.
At the cost of a couple miles an hour club head speed.
By trying to not move my hips at all versus trying to move them as fast as I could, I only lost three percent of my club head speed.
That's by trying to not move my hips at all.
And perhaps the most important fact from this video is that I hit the ball more solid, more consistently.
The more I tried to calm down my hips, rather than trying to turn them as fast as I can.
As you hear, the TV pundits talk all the time.
And, best of all, by not trying to twist my hips and my spine as fast as I could, any back pain that I had immediately went away.
Now I know you're screaming, Wait a second.
I hear on TV all the time they say, turn your hips as fast as you can.
Well let's take a look at some tour pros and tell me what you see.
All right, today we're going to look at something a little bit different, we're going to take some different tour players rather than just Tiger and the Goats.
But some long hitters who exemplify the opposite of what you commonly hear on TV.
So we've got Kenny Perry back in I think 2010 back here.
For those of you that don't remember Kenny Perry was a long hitter back then.
Very, very long for somebody who didn't look like they had a very conventional golf swing, nor did they use a lot of hip power.
In fact when you look at Kenny hitting the driver here watch his right foot.
He's got his heels on the ground.
This is the old Sam Snead heel to heel move.
This is all arms and hands really just hands more than anything.
You can see his right arm staying pretty bent all the way through the hitting area and his feet staying on the ground.
And if you take a look at Lydia Ko on the right.
Now mind you Lydia Ko is five foot tall.
She's tiny but she also she swings very slow for you know a professional golfer.
But for the LPGA she's pretty much right on right in the middle.
I think she's at you know 97 miles an hour average.
Kenny would have been 20 miles an hour faster than that pretty easily.
But notice how she's up on her toe and get that helps you rotate the hips quicker.
Tiger obviously does this and did this a lot when he was younger.
But it's not a requirement for good golf.
And as I talked about in that older video of me when I did the hip speed versus hand speed.
Shutting my hips down here like Kenny has.
Keeping my feet on the ground.
Feeling like I'm not turning my hips.
Not only allowed me to hit the ball more solid more consistently.
But I really didn't lose that much speed.
And of course Kenny figured out a way to do it and add a lot of speed.
Which is really just all done with his hands.
So do you need to rip your hips open? Nope.
Definitely not.
It's not the fastest way to get the most club head speed.
You your speed.
The vast majority of your speed is coming from how you're going to use your hands to generate that speed.
Now let's look at Jack.
Look at the golfer behind him in the background.
Notice how Jack as he goes back.
His head's actually going to go up.
He's covering that guy's face in the background.
And then watch.
Notice how much he stands up in the backswing.
And now watch in the downswing.
He stands up even more.
So for those of you who are trying to get your head really really low.
Thinking you're going to use the ground for power.
Well one of the longest hitters of all time.
Certainly the longest hitter.
One of the longest hitters of his era.
Actually stood up continually.
He stood up a little bit in the backswing.
And then stood up more in the downswing.
But anyway that's not what we're talking about.
Let's focus on his hips.
Take a look at Jack's hips.
You see the heel coming up off the ground.
Then he plants it.
And now watch his hips.
Just focus on how much his hips are turning.
Does it look like he's trying to rip his hips open as fast as he can like an LPGA player? Or does it look like he's kind of bracing and stabilizing, using his hips instead of trying to rotate them for speed? So where's all that speed coming from? Well if we listen to Tiger it's certainly not from his body.
I gotta really put a lot of speed into this.
And so I'm gonna be flying in here through my hands.
So this is not really a I'm not thinking of body speed.
I'm thinking about nothing but hand speed.
And really try and feel like like my hands move past my body.
So I can get some serious speed.
All I do is really put more speed in my hands and my arms.
What about Rory? Now Rory's got a pretty interesting hip movement that's talked about a lot in the golf swing.
Let's look at what's happening.
This is a great angle to see what's really happening with his hips and shoulders.
Obviously you start to see some lateral movement here.
But now is he firing his hips like the LPGA players? Well it doesn't look like.
It looks like his hips are very quiet.
Especially if you compare that to his shoulder rotation.
His shoulders are turning a ton to get those hands moving fast.
But his hips are very very quiet.
Barely doing anything at all.
In fact he's really working hard to brace and slow down the hips.
Keep the hips in check.
So that the hands can fly past the body like Tiger just said.
Now let's listen to Rory talk about what he's feeling in his downswing.
And the way that he thinks about it.
In terms of getting those hands to work.
It's just clear so hard and you create so much lag.
But it's just you just leave it behind, and you can almost feel like a little bit of like, re-widening on the way down.
Okay.
Just a little like a little.
Like you remember how like KJ Choi swung it? Yeah.
Where he sort of went like this and then he sort of re-widened it.
You see golf is not as hard as you've been led to believe.
It really isn't.
The reason golf may feel hard to you is that you're trying to move your body really fast in order to move your hands really fast.
Instead of moving your hands really fast so that your body can then move really fast in response.
I know it seems kind of paradoxical or maybe even a little semantics, but I promise you it's not.
Listen to what Jack Nicklaus thought about his golf swing when he thought about what his hands and club were doing at the top of the swing.
Something that may surprise you, but I firmly believe, is that it's impossible to release the club at the top of the downswing too soon.
As long as you move to your left side.
The movement of the hands is just this.
If I have the face square, all I have to do is decide how much force I want to apply as long as I have the correct feel.
And that's because the correct feel will always give you the right mechanics, but the right mechanics won't necessarily always translate into the right feel.
Translating proper swing mechanics into the right feel is really hard for most golfers, because the swing is just simply happening way too fast.
Way too fast for you to think your way through it.
And that's why swing thoughts may seem really good at one day and on the next day you feel lost.
You couldn't hit water hitting a ball off an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean.
We call that chopping wood where your swing thoughts work only one day.
You don't want to play chop wood when you're playing golf.
You need the right feel, and the right feeling comes from understanding what your hands need to do in the swing.
This is your only contact point with the golf club.
And as you saw earlier with the tour pros, you can see that their hips really aren't trying to rip wide open.
That's really a misunderstanding of what's really happening.
The hands are moving and the body is moving in response to what the hands are telling the body to do.
Tiger has talked about in his own swing that he never thinks about body speed.
He only focuses on hand speed.
Now I'm not saying that your hips, if you turn your hips really fast, that you're not going to hit the ball a long ways.
There's as many ways to hit a golf ball as there are golfers.
You can turn your hips and your body really fast, keep your arms really passive and let the club release through.
You can have a ton of leverage and release your hands really late.
There's a million different ways that you can hit the golf ball and hit it well.
But there's always one golden rule for me, and that is effortless power.
I want to swing as easy as possible and hit the ball as hard as possible.
And I don't want to work hard to do it because I want to be consistent.
And if I'm swinging at 80%, I'm always going to be more consistent than somebody who's swinging out of their shoes.
At a hundred percent on every shot and barely able to hit the ball 250 yards.
It's all about effortless power.
And that's what rotary swing.
It's been our motto since I started the website back in 2005.
It's always been this pursuit of trying to find the most effortless, consistent way to hit a golf ball.
And now as I approach 50 years old, if I'm going to keep playing these blades, I need a lot of speed and I need to make sure that my body is okay with how I'm swinging the golf club.
Because at this age, it's far more vocal when I'm doing something it doesn't like.
So as you saw from the goat code research I did, The way that I got my swing to both consistently and effortlessly hit great shots and match up to what you saw in Tiger Woods early 2000.
Swing was focusing primarily on what I was doing with my hands in the swing.
The only thing I had to focus on was squaring the face at the top and then adding speed.
That's it.
Then my body followed along and did what it was told by my hands.
Because of this, my body was able to relax more than ever, Which actually allowed it to move faster than before in order to keep up with my now fast moving hands and club head.
And that's really the trick to it all.
If you want to join the effortless Power club and be the guy at the club that everyone stops to watch.
Hit balls in the range, all you have to do is this.
I'm working way less hard than you are, and getting way more payoff by simply using my hands correctly and letting my body move in response to my hands.
So if you want effortless power, you need to do something different than what you're doing right now, obviously, right? And you will like this guy get different results.
So give this a shot if you want to hit the ball solidly and stop tearing up your body in the process.
First, make your life really simple and square the club face at the top.
Flat lead wrist and the leading edge matching up with your form.
If you've done this, you've taken out 90% of all the struggles in the golf swing.
I see all the time golfers cup their lead wrist, open the face, get really long, and then they've got to try and square that thing in a quarter of a second.
Good luck.
You can't focus on both squaring the club face and adding force and knowing what you're doing.
It's too much to ask of your brain and your body in just a quarter of a second.
Once you have a square face, you simply need to begin accelerating the clubs and hands immediately from the top of the swing.
You see, the golf swing is the fastest drag race in the world.
As a soon-to-be elite ball striker, You're going to be accelerating the club from zero to 115 miles an hour in less than a quarter of a second.
Top-fueled dragsters don't accelerate that fast, but like a dragster, you need time and distance to reach peak speed.
That's why you need to accelerate your hands immediately at the top of the downswing.
If you're waiting to accelerate the club when it's only a few feet from the ball, you've given up both time and distance.
And in order to have the club with this much leverage this late in the swing, the club face is going to be open still, unless you've got a very, very strong grip.
A dragster needs a quarter mile and in golf, you need as much runway as you can get as well.
And it should come as no surprise that the fastest moving part of your body in the golf swing is not your hips, but your hands.
And they travel the greatest distance.
And again, they're the only thing in direct contact with that golf club.
So, focusing on how you use them should be your highest priority if you want to hit the ball far while looking like you're not trying hard to do it.
And much of this has to do with the grip.
Ben Hogan not only started his book Five Lessons with the grip, but then devoted 15 pages to it.
Without a proper grip, golf becomes very tricky.
Very tricky indeed.
If you look at most tour pros, they look quite similar.
Their grips look like they're going to hit a good shot before they even start the swing.
When you look at amateur golf's grips, they're all over the place and almost never look like a pro's grip.
While you can learn to hit the ball the poor grip, You're making it 10 times harder on yourself.
Because it is the grip and the pressure points of the grip that allow you to both.
Sense the club face position and effortlessly accelerate the club from the top of the swing.
Once you realize that.
A flat lead wrist also sets the trail hand in a powerful position to be able to accelerate the club from the top with great speed, you've licked 90% of the swing.
Once you have that, the only thing you have to do is understand how to move your body.
And in a proper golf swing, the body really doesn't move that much.
While I see high handicap golfers trying to twist their body and turn as fast as they can in efforts to try and hit a straight shot, I'm actually trying to quiet my body down and keep my hips more stable to provide a stable base for me to hit the ball from.
The opposite of what most golfers are doing.
I'm really trying to feel that my body only moves laterally, which is exactly what you can see in Tiger's early 2000 swing.
Once you stop trying to make a huge turn going back and through, hitting a straight golf shot becomes a heck of a lot easier.
Hitting a straight shot in golf becomes really tricky when you typically do this.
Cup that lead wrist at the top, open the club face, and then try and square that while adding speed on the way down.
Good luck.
That's really, really hard to all do that in.
23 seconds that the downswing happens in.
The second way that you can make your golf swing really hard to hit straight shots is making a huge hip turn.
Imagine trying to do anything that requires accuracy and precision while moving in a big, rotational way.
If I wanted to hit this ball very straight, I would ideally want to move straight back and straight through compared to around and around.
Because your target in the golf swing is a ball on the ground that you're trying to hit with a stick in your hands, imagine trying to just simply throw a ball at a ball on the ground while rotating back and forth.
It's gonna be pretty hard.
If I was wanting to hit this ball, I would make my swing as simple, short, compact, And straight back and straight through, in order to be able to more accurately throw the club head at that ball on the ground.
If you want to hit it straight, move straight.
Get your left wrist, your lead wrist flat at top with a square club face to your forearm.
Accelerate the club head and your hands from the top as soon as possible, so you give yourself as much runway as possible and have a proper grip.
That naturally squares and de-lofts the club face at impact when you're in the right impact position.
Move your body in a way that feels more straight back and through, rather than so crazy.
Rotational, and join the elite club of ball strikers who make the golf swing look easy.
And that's exactly what the GOAT code is.
It's my five-part video series that walks you through exactly how I figured out Tiger's early 2000 swing to make my golf swing stupidly simple, efficient, and effortless.
In the first video, I'm going to show you how the lead hand works to both square the face at the top and how it helps to create that effortless feeling of free speed that width gives you in the downswing.
The second video is where we pour gas on that fire with a trail hand.
That is in a powerful and loaded position to accelerate the club from the top and how this gets the club back in front of the body.
The third video shows you exactly how you should grip the club and where to feel the pressure in your fingers.
So you know exactly where to apply force and how to sense the position of the club face throughout the swing, so it's much easier to hit straight shots.
The fourth video shows you how to move your body or almost not move it if you will.
And finally, The fifth video gives you my wide glide, wide drill that ties it all together in a way that will show you just how simple it really is.
And how much you've been working too hard in your swing.
And why those of us who make it look easy, make it look easy.
This is the trick.
The secret, we are literally moving less than you are and not trying as hard as you are.
You can see it when we swing the club.
This is the formula to show you how to learn how to do it.
So if you want to be able to put a set of blades in the bag, step back to the back tees, rip the ball out of the center of the face, and start hitting balls as long as you know you should be able to.
Give my GOAT code a try and see why all my members are experiencing successes like this.
Start experiencing results immediately like Todd who took it to the course, Not just in the living room.
Practice swings or hitting balls in the real world.
On the course and loving it and no sore back after a round.
And like Cade, it's just all about making it simple and even more simple.
Or if you're like Luke, you'll find your swing again.
How many of you feel like you just don't know which way is up anymore? This is about simplifying it.
And like Dean said, you're going to feel like you're less robotic.
You're more fluid.
You're more natural.
And no matter how old you are at 77, no pain, even a back fusion.
I have a spinal fusion.
Early success is amazing because it just makes things simple.
Or if you're like Dave, Find the swing that you had 40 years ago, when you began and before golf instruction made everything so confusing and frustrating.
Find your old swing again.
Get rid of all these aches and pains and all these swing thoughts.
Or if you're like Steve, who's appreciative of just bringing them back from the brink of insanity, because that's really what golf is doing to so many people.
It becomes so confusing, so frustrating, that once you finally feel how simple it really can be, you're going to be pretty appreciative as well.
Just like Nico, who's thrilled and astonished that it can really be this simple.
He calls the Goat code the philosopher's stone because we tend to make things so complicated when, really, it's Occam's razor.
The simplest answer is the right answer, but figuring out the golf swing, it's not that easy.
But David liked the explanation, called it pure gold because we can just finally make it simple again.
And that's really what everybody needs, more than anything else, is just a simple understanding of what the golf swing really is.
So if you're looking for simplicity, go to RotarySwing .
com, sign up, give it a shot.
You're going to know right away if this makes sense to you.
You're going to see that this is how the greats swung the club.
They literally told us this is how they swung the club.
So all we had to do was listen and make things simple again.
And that's exactly what my goat code is all about.
Making golf simple again.
Janne
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Craig
Michael H
Chuck