Lead Arm Vijay Release Drill
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Have you wondered about the golf grip and if the tour pros know something you don't? How are they able to hit the ball so far with so little effort and get into a perfect impact position every time and you struggle to stop flipping it?
This video is the EXACT video you've been dreaming of then! There is a secret that the pros know and you don't! Check it out!
- Two drills to boost your club head speed
- Learn why your grips are tapered
- Learn how to release the club properly
Increase Your Clubhead Speed
If you're tired of having to play from the lady's tees and you want to move back to where the big boys play, you must understand the critical components to increase your clubhead speed. One of the most important factors in increasing your club head speed is learning how to release the golf club properly and fully. And that's one area that Vijay Singh does very well.
You've no doubt seen super slo-mo's of Vijay's golf swing showing how his trailing hand (his right hand) comes almost completely off the golf club just after impact. But did you know he's not the only tour pro that does this? Freddy Couples and Phil Mickelson also do the same move with their drivers, but why?
The reason is that they are fully releasing the golf club. Think about it. What does the word release mean in the first place? To release the golf club means to literally "let go". That's exactly what they're doing, they're letting the club release by letting go, which allows the clubhead to speed up independent of your body. In the golf swing, this is free speed.
How Tension Slows the Club Head Down in the Golf Swing
For most golfers, they do the exact opposite. Rather than reducing the tension in their right hands, they actually tense up even more through impact. This is the WORST thing you can do to increase your swing speed in golf. When you hold on tighter with the right hand through impact, you're actually slowing the golf club down and expending more energy. There's a reason that most tour pros look like they're swinging the golf club effortlessly and most amateur's look like they're wrestling an alligator.
Your goal, as you'll learn in this golf instruction video, is to fully release the golf club by essentially letting go with your trailing hand. You'll all of a sudden feel a big boost of clubhead speed and you did nothing to try and make the club move faster! That's right, you'll get that old RotarySwing saying of hitting the ball further while putting in less effort!
So, if you're serious about increasing your clubhead speed, pay close attention to this golf instruction video and see what you've been missing!
Master the Vijay Release Drill and watch your clubhead speed soar!
Have you ever wondered why the end of your grip is tapered in the way that it is? It seems kind of strange given that your pinky on your left hand, so obviously the smallest finger on your hand ... And that's the fattest part of the grip. Why do you think they designed it that way? And it's also interesting because there's some grips out there that are actually reverse tapered so that this part of the grip is actually the smallest part of the grip. And, it actually gets fatter as you go down the grip where your right hand would be. So, who's right and who's wrong, and why do they do this in the first place?
Well, it's a great question, and, incredibly enough, it's an incredibly important part of your golf swing when you understand it. So, if you don't understand why this is tapered the way that it is, and you don't feel like this tapered part is actually helping your golf swing, you're going to start to understand why you probably can't get into those tour-quality impact positions and why you can't pick up the club at speeds you think you should have, even though you're swinging at it as hard as you can.
So, let's take a look at this. The first thing I want you to understand is one simple piece of math that we're gonna work with. For every half inch in club length that you go up, so let's say from your 7 iron to your 6 iron, your 6 iron's probably about a half inch longer than your 7 iron, you're going to, on average, pick up about two miles an hour of club head speed, just for the sake that the club is a half inch longer. Simple enough, right? So, for every club in the bag that we go up, for every half inch, we can use that as some very simple, rough estimates as to how much club head speed you're gonna pick up.
That's why the whole concept of a single length set of irons just simply can't work. By the time you get to your longer irons, you can't pick up enough club head speed to make up for the difference. So, that's why your clubs all have to be a little bit longer than the other. That and the combination of the loft is what allows you to hit the ball further with a longer club.
So, we need that extra half inch per club to help us hit the ball a long ways, but if you're not using the club correctly ... And I'm going to show you why in a second ... You're going to not take advantage of that extra half inch, and you gonna not be able to hit the ball as far as some skinny like myself who hits the ball a long ways without a lot of effort. That's because I'm using the club the way it was designed to be used. So, let's take a look at this.
The one thing I want you to understand, and I've talked about this in other videos, is that the golf swing is predominantly left hand dominant. And so, when you start to think of it that way, you're gonna start to understand how things fall into place the way that they do. The problem is, most golfers are right-handed, and they're right hand dominant, and they try to swing the gold club right-handed, and stuff starts falling apart really fast when you do that.
So, here's what's gonna happen. Tell me if this is you. You come into impact, and you look like this, where you're scooping and flipping it and your right hand is causing your left wrist to break down. As this happens, what you're essentially doing is you're making the pivot point on your club further down the shaft. Whereas, the way that I'm swinging, using my left hand to control the club, I'm taking every inch of the shaft and utilizing it to generate speed 'cause my club is pivoting from up here instead of down here. So, now you can imagine, if I'm trying to force the club to release with my right hand, I've effectively made my iron 4 inches shorter.
You're not going to be able to make up 4 inches of speed no matter how hard you flip it with your right hand. You have to use the taper in the grip and use the last three fingers in your left hand to allow the club to release with a lot of speed, and the club should almost feel like it's trying to slip out of your hands and the taper is what's allowing you to hold onto it. If it wasn't tapered and you swung the club correctly, the club would actually fly out of your hands. It'd be very hard to hold on to. So, that's why your grips are tapered.
So, now, in the next part of this video, I'm gonna show you two golf swing simple drills that are gonna help you learn how to understand and take advantage of this leverage piece of this swing to get a lot more speed with a lot less effort.
Alright, so now that we got the concept of why this grip is tapered this way and why you need to use it the way that it was designed to get a lot of speed without a lot of effort, we give you the two drills that we need to work on. So, the first one is, I want you to take the grip, take the club, and just grip it with your last three fingers. Literally just hold the club with your last three fingers. Take the thumb and forefinger off, and what this is gonna do is it's gonna force you to stop pushing against the shaft with your left thumb, 'cause, again, that's gonna move that pivot point down the shaft, and we want that to be as far up the shaft as we can. So, right at the very end is where the majority of our grip pressure's gonna come from.
So, what I want you to do, last three fingers, and start making little swings, back and through. And, as you're doing this, keep the thumb and forefinger off the shaft, and start seeing how the club wants to, it needs to, turn over and rotate, kind of around the butt of the club. And as you're doing this, one of the things I talk about in the clinics and my lessons all the time, a good way of thinking about it is rolling the knuckles under. So, you're taking your knuckles on your left hand, and as you're flattening out that wrist, you're rolling the knuckles under to exaggerate to where you could see your fingernails. That's gonna be a hook if you're doing it right. But, it's a good exaggeration, especially if you're used to flipping it with your right hand. This is gonna get you into a flat left wrist position, rotating this so I can see my fingernails, and releasing it all the way around on the left-hand side.
So, that's the first drill, and you need to practice this as much as humanly possible. It looks incredibly simple, but what you're gonna find is that you have very little coordination, probably, in your left hand, and especially when you take that thumb off of there. And, you may even have a little bit of a weak left hand, 'cause we don't use it all the time. So just keep working on this drill. Just even hitting little half shots, back and through, this alone is gonna start giving you the feeling of how to get that club to work and release correctly. That's the first drill.
The second drill is, obviously, you gotta put the right hand back on at some point. We need the right hand on there, it does a lot of things for us. But, what I want you to do is put the right hand on there, and we open palm it at first. And what I want you to start doing is letting your hand come off. Now as we're working through and we're releasing the club, my right hand is actually tracing along with the club, but I'm letting it come off. From face on, you can see that my left hand is doing the work, and my right hand is releasing off.
Now, what we want to start transferring this into is keeping that right hand on there longer and longer and longer. And, I call this the Vijay drill. So, what we're gonna do ... You're gonna come into impact ... Now my fingers are on the club a little bit more, and I'm gonna look like Vijay, or Phil Mickelson, or Freddy Couples. These guys all release the club really, really well with their lead hand. And the trailing hand actually comes off, and that's why Vijay looks like this. Hogan didn't understand this, that's why when they asked him about it, he said, "Well, I guess he just doesn't need it there." He had that part right, but Hogan thought you really needed to push through with the right side, and that's why he looked like this at impact.
You look at the modern player who has a tremendous amount of club head speed these days, they release the club very aggressively and let that trailing hand come off. All it's gonna do with the trailing hand is slow it down, 'cause the tighter you hold on with a trailing hand, the more your body has to come through with the release. The club can't move independently of your body to speed up, and it needs to. So, when we let the right hand start coming off like Vijay, now, all of the sudden, the club can speed up really fast. You'll see my body is actually moving quite slow, but I've got a lot of speed. So, that drill is you start getting into this Vijay position where you're letting that hand come off the club, combined with the first drill of starting to learn to use the left hand, the last three fingers in the left hand only, will start to get you into a perfect impact position and get you a tremendous amount of club head speed with very little effort.
Hi, I'm Chuck Quinton, founder of Rotary Swing Golf. In the previous two videos, I talked a lot about the physics of the impact position and release, and how it impacts how you get into a great tour quality impact position. In this video, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the release, and it's importance. One of the things that's critical in the golf swing that we all know about and typically most amateurs want more of and better players want to get rid of, is this concept of lag.
The lag is again, to redefine it, just the angle between the forearms and the shaft, whether you define it within a left arm and right arm, it's not important for our discussion point for know. But this angle is potential energy as I discussed in the first video. But that potential energy is useless if you don't release it. So in other words, if you have this great angle, and you hold it all the way down to impact, and you hit the ball like this, well you haven't released it, and it doesn't give you any more speed. And this is critical, because the release of this lagging or the release of the angle from your wrist, accounts for over 60% of your club head speed. Over two-thirds of your speed comes just from the release of your wrist.
So to have this lag angle, to have this potential energy and then properly release it, is the essence of the golf swing. It is the most important part of the swing. Most amateurs struggle because they release it incorrectly, and start doing it too soon, and as they do that, they get into this position because they're pushing from the right side ... and if you watched the first two videos, you'll understand what that means ... and as they're doing that, the lag angle's getting thrown away, and they're getting into this scoopy chicken wing impact position.
To understand how to release the club, you've got to understand what the word release really means. Think about that for a second. You hear this term on TV all the time, or for golf instructors, or other golfers, "Ah, I didn't release the club." What does that mean, literally, to release something? Well, it means to let go. If you really release something, that's when you let it go, and that's when it's going to accelerate the most. The trick is how you release the club in the golf swing is everything.
So when we talk about that, we're talking about getting rid of this angle, and letting the forearms and club face rotate over ... you can see the club can move very fast without my body doing much of anything. That's giving me a lot of speed, just because I'm properly releasing the club, without having to do much with my body. Now to do that correctly, I want you to think about how you'd swing a hammer. If you were to use a hammer, and we're going to use either hand for now, this angle that you create is what gives you the potential energy to get a lot of speed into that nail, without a lot of effort. You don't heave your body into it, and hack at it with your arm, you get the majority of your speed from the release of your wrist. Think about that ... if you're holding onto a hammer really tight, and your wrist is really tight, you can't get a lot of speed out of it, because your wrist can't move very fast compared to keeping your wrist soft, and letting it release with a lot of speed.
I have a great video that's going to show you a really cool trick that's going to help you pick up at least 20 yards off the tee. If you're not releasing the club properly and don't have lag, this video ... I call it the VJ release drill ... is going to show you not only how to properly rotate and release the club, but it's going to show you how to pick up a tremendous amount of effortless speed, all from doing less in your
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