The GOAT Code - Ep 1 - How the Hands & Wrist Create Speed
Welcome to The GOAT Code Podcast! In this first episode we cover the most important topic of all, how the hands and wrists work to create speed in the golf swing.
All right guys, I've finally given in.
I had a ton of requests for me to do some podcast stuff, so this is officially the Goat Code Podcast One, and I'm going to start with the most important topic of all, which is what do these guys do to affect this thing?
Your hands are the most important part of the golf swing.
They're like race tires on a race car.
Tires win races, as good old Harry said in Days of Thunder, and your hands are what control the golf club.
And for so many years, the hands have kind of been poo-pooed out of the golf swing, and it's not that you want to actively use them incorrectly, of course, but you have to learn what they do need to do in order to understand really what you're trying to do in the golf swing, period.
Because without understanding what your hands do and your wrists and how they work together, and your arms are included in that as well, you're never going to really understand how to play golf.
You're never going to understand why high -level players are able to do what we do versus why you struggle to do things, to hit the ball even reasonably distant, reasonably far.
And so I want to explain that really in a really simple way to help you understand what your arms and hands are really doing.
So in the goat code, I talk about this GDP or goat delivery position.
That video is on the website, so search GDP if you're not familiar with that.
But long story short, your trail elbow pit and palm and wrist face out away from you just before impact.
You're getting into the delivery position, and this lead arm is externally rotated or internally rotated, so the elbow is pointing out away from you, and the back of the hand is opposing the palm of this one.
So it looks like this right before impact.
When you put the golf club in there, the golf club at this point, the toe is going to be slightly towed in, and so there's very little for me to do to square the club face.
But the trick is understanding what this goat delivery position really is.
And I call it the goat delivery position because when I started the goat code, I was studying all the greats of Ben Hogan, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Jones, et cetera.
And so one thing that was consistent is that they all got into this position right before the strike.
And most amateurs are more like this, where this arm is starting to internally rotate, where the elbow pit's pointing more down the target line.
That forces this one to externally rotate.
And so now as you do this, instead of having all of this leverage and this package set up here, you're starting to look like this.
And this is where the old flip and scoop and chicken wing and all of that stuff comes from.
The goat delivery position is the most important thing that you have to learn how to get into.
Now this is happening insanely fast.
So it's not like you're going to get into some static position.
It's not like that, but getting into this will help you start to understand what you need to do throughout the rest of your swing to have this position, because this position is the most powerful position for you to be in because this arm is cocked and loaded.
And another thing I haven't talked a lot about in the goat delivery position, but this trail shoulder needs to be retracted.
As soon as it starts to protract, it starts moving forward, the release is beginning.
And the whole trick to the golf swing is this, get this package, this goat delivery position to release as fast and late as humanly possible.
And when you understand that that is the purpose of the golf swing, then everything else starts to make a ton of sense.
Nothing else matters outside of this.
And this is why you see golfers like Bobby Jones took the club way inside, got across the line, super long, but then right down here, boom, Lee Trevino, boom, tiger, Jack, all of them get into the same goat delivery position.
That's why it's so important because what it really does is it maintains all of the fascia to be loaded into the last possible second.
And that's how I visualize my swing.
That's why a guy, my size, people always ask me how tall I am.
I'm five, nine.
I have people literally arguing with me on Instagram.
I literally had a guy, a long drive coach.
So you're taller than five, nine.
Why?
Why do you argue with that?
Like, I don't know how tall I am.
I'm almost 50 years old.
I know how tall I am, but there's just this constant disillusionment with the game because they don't, most golfers don't understand like how somebody my size, and I'm not the only one, Rory's my size, can hit the ball so far.
And it's because we take this and maintain it and keep it loaded and keep that fascia tense and stretch till it snaps at the last second.
And that is the key.
And once you understand how all of this has to snap, then the game becomes fun because you have a near limitless source of power.
And you can be an old guy like me and a short guy like me.
And I'm not a big, strong, muscular guy, but I swing at 125 miles an hour on average with the driver.
And it's because I snap everything right at the last second and it's properly timed.
So what I mean by that is once you're in this GDP position, again, you can't like just fabricate this.
Everything else has to work to understand this.
But if you don't understand what this is and that you need to achieve this before the strike, then there's no point in pressing go or passing go and collecting $200.
You have to understand that everything is setting this up.
And so once you're here, what I want to do is get this clubbed from this side of my arm to that side of my arm as fast as humanly possible.
And so what I need is for everything to release at the same time.
Now, technically, of course, it's all releasing at different times, but the feeling and that's what really matters.
And that's where a lot of stuff I was doing with the goat code shifted from being mechanical, technical thinking, because that shit's kind of worthless, to be honest, to a large degree, Unless you're an instructor.
And you really need to understand how these things work, because you need to understand how to fix them.
Or you need to understand what's causing problems.
As a golfer, as an athlete, you don't need to know all of that stuff.
What you need to know is what does it feel like?
Because that's the only thing that you can take with you.
It's the only portable thing.
You can't take a mirror with you on the course.
You can't take your coach with you on the course, but you can take your feelings.
And of course, we know that feel and real are often pretty contradictory, right?
But once you understand the correct feelings and you learn how to use those feelings and train them to be repetitive, repetitive, then you can start to rely on your feelings.
And so that's really what you're trying to understand is what does it feel like to release the club like a pro?
What does it feel like to release the club at 125 miles an hour with the driver?
Well, first of all, when I do it, it feels pretty effortless.
I feel like most of my power comes from my core and I include my glutes in the core, but wherever you want to find it.
So if you define them separately, that's fine.
My core and my right hip, my right hip is snapping.
And literally that's the feeling is I want my right hip to be loading in the backswing.
And then there's a little bit of a, what to me feels like a pause at the top.
There's not really a pause, but it feels like that.
You can see the club never stops moving.
And I'm just waiting on that last bit of stretching, that loading as I coil around that trail leg to once it starts to shift back the other way to right at the right last second, snap it.
And when I snap that hip, I snap my wrists.
A lot of times when I'm talking about the supination stuff, people start just doing that by itself.
If you don't move your body correctly, this is completely pointless.
This is useless.
So you have to understand that you're waiting and snapping and that is what it should feel like.
You're loading, loading, loading, loading, loading.
And then you're, as you're transitioning, you're loading just a little bit more because that's where you get that dynamic stretch where my hands are staying up here.
If I start to let that right hip start to snap on the way down and fire my arms at the same time, I don't get any dynamic stretching in this fashion.
So without that, I'm going to have to muscle it.
I'm going to have to put a lot of power, muscular power into my swing.
I don't feel like I'm putting hardly any effort into my golf swing.
Again, that's probably going to be infuriating to more of you out there who are struggling at that 90 mile and 95 mile an hour driver swing speed.
How can somebody like me swing 30 miles an hour faster than you and then tell you that it feels effortless?
It's because I use my fascia.
That was the biggest game changer for me is understanding how to load this fascia and more importantly, how to let it unload, how to let it snap super fast.
And that's what gives you effortless power.
That's what the fascia is really for.
I don't really use my muscles per se.
Of course my muscles are involved, but what I would describe to you, what my swing feels like and what my wrists feel like is that they snap.
They snap back like a rubber band because as this fascia loads, and when I say I'm not really using my muscles, and of course the fascia is integrated to all the muscle cells, all the cells in the body.
But what really is happening is I'm using my connective tissue more than anything.
My tendons.
I want my tendons to be stiff.
So people always ask me, like, could you stretch a lot?
Like I never stretch.
Like literally, I just don't stretch because I don't believe that passive static stretching is going to help your golf swing really at all.
And it's, if you think about it, I mean, how many of you have stretched out there, right?
Like stretch for hours and hours and hours for you.
If you don't stretch for years, you're not going to really see much progress.
Most people won't.
The reality is you don't really want loose ligaments and loose tendons.
You want them to be stiff.
You want them to be springy.
You want them to be tight.
You want them to be loaded and then snap back.
And that's what my swing feels like.
That's what the golf swing should feel like is that you're not trying to get these muscles to be able to fire.
You want to stretch these tendons, these ligaments, stretch the muscles, and then let them snap back for you using the fascia as fast as you can.
That's why I did this big, long webinar on the site on loading the fascia because it's such an incredible part, the most important part of swinging effortlessly.
And that's always been my jam.
I've always prided myself on trying to swing the most effortless way humanly possible.
Whatever that way is, I don't care.
I just want to figure out what the most effortless way to do it.
And using the fascia is how that works.
So now let me tie this back into the supination of how I've talked about, you know, again, there's three basic wrist movements.
You can ulnar deviate, you can pronate, and you can supinate.
And of course, I want you to supinate.
I've talked a lot about this.
As you're supinating, if you just did this by itself and people are like, oh, I do this and I feel like the face is open.
It's because you're not using your body at all.
You're just using your hands.
Your hands are hardly involved in the swing.
They're waiting, waiting, waiting, and then snapping.
So when I'm supinating my wrist, I'm not just doing this.
This is a very subtle thing that's reacting to my core and my hips starting to shift back over and start getting ready to snap at the bottom.
And then as that happens, my wrist has to just do this, but it's a relatively, I almost want to use the word passive movement, because what I'm trying to do in my swing is keep my wrists really supple until right at the bottom.
And then I want them to snap.
And so I'm not trying to actively muscularly force this club into supination.
That's not going to work at all.
That's going to throw everything out of sync.
You've got to use your glutes.
There's a lot of muscles involved in that, but that glute complex and your core to start to bring your body back into rotation.
Because in order to get into GDP, if you don't get this trail hip driven forward, your arms will start to release.
And as soon as your arms start to release, you start to pronate or excuse me, protract with the shoulder, pronate with the arms.
The release has begun and you want the release to happen, but you need to think about it like an explosion.
Imagine if I had, say for example, I had a big bucket of gunpowder and I poured all that gunpowder in a long, thin, shallow stream along the ground and I lit it on fire.
What would happen?
Well, it's just going to burn in the line.
It's going to burn kind of slowly.
It's not going to have some big explosion.
It's just going to fizzle out.
Now let's say I take that same gunpowder and I pack it into an M100 or old little fireworks explosives or a stick of dynamite.
And I take all of that spread out gunpowder and I compress it and compact it and make it as tight as I can.
What's going to happen when I light that fuse?
Something very, very different.
That is to me, how I think of the golf swing is that I'm not lighting the fuse way up here and just slowly letting my arm extend, slowly letting my wrist supinate, slowly letting my body turn.
I'm not doing that at all.
I'm trying to conserve all of this stuff until right at the last second and then the bomb explodes.
It's like a nuclear explosion.
It's wait, wait, wait, wait, go.
That's what it needs to feel like.
And so when you're trying to supinate, you can't just muscularly force the club down.
There's no power in your form and there is, but there's not that much.
You're not going to be able to get the speeds that I generate through just trying to do this really fast, unless you understand how to move your body with it.
And so that's really what I want to talk about in this first episode of the GoAt.
Code is understanding what the golf swing should feel like and what your wrist should do.
They work with the body and you want to get the feeling of this is what your hands should do.
That you, they're rotating, they're supinating, this one's supinating, this one's pronating.
And then I'm just waiting on my body to snap that trail leg.
And then as I do that, my wrist snap through the ball.
There's no effort involved than that.
It's all about loading the fascial system.
So I hope that help gives you the right picture in your mind.
I really like to think of the golf swing is wait, wait, wait, go.
It should be slow and then super fast, like an explosion, like a nuclear explosion.
They're just, it's, you've got to compress.
I don't know if you know how a nuclear bomb works, but we've got to compress this plutonium or uranium, whatever we're using into critical mass through this circular dynamite explosion that compresses it till it's reached critical mass.
And then it explodes.
That to me is what the golf swing is.
It feels like that.
It feels like a nuclear bomb going off when you do it correctly.
And that's what the goat code is all about.
It's about efficiency.
It's about how the greats swing the club.
It's about how tiger swings the club.
And it's about how you can swing the club to start understanding everybody.
Everybody should be able to swing well over a hundred miles an hour.
I truly believe that I can do that with anybody that doesn't have some massive physical limitations.
If you're just the average Joe out there and you feel like you should be hitting the ball further, you should, you should.
It's not rocket science.
Well, maybe it is kind of rocket science.
If I use a nuclear bomb explosion, but the idea is, is just getting the right visual in your mind is that understanding you're not just supinating with force from your arms.
That's not really how it works.
It's your body has to drive this power package to get it down here so that it's loaded.
All of this, I think of my right shoulders being cocked and loaded.
It's back.
My right shoulder is back.
It's down.
It's connected.
So when I drive hard off this trail leg, it's still loaded.
And then once this trail leg runs out of range of motion and I've turned as far as I can, my arms snap off of there and it happens so fast.
It feels like nothing.
So I hope this was helpful.
If you did like it, please post down in the comments below.
If there's some other things you'd like to hear me discuss or whatever about future episodes, I'd love to hear your thoughts on things that you would love to learn more about.
Otherwise just check out the site rotaryswing.
com and check out that fascia webinar.
You'll learn a lot about understanding why you shouldn't be muscling your golf swing.
You should be using your fascia to do the work for you.
Mark
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Doug
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