Why You Need This:

 

What's Covered: Finding your capabilities of lag.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:18

Video Transcription:

Clay Ballard: All right guys, so in my most videos, I’m talking about drills that you can take out to the golf course, drills that you can do to improve your golf swing.

Now some of you may be struggling to do those correctly, and in this video, it’s going to be a lot different. It’s going to be a longer video.

We’re going to talk about ideas, and we’re going to talk about just how the body moves in general. I’m going to break it down by the joints.

Doesn’t mean you have to be thinking about this stuff when you go out and play. Doesn’t mean you have to be working on all these drills, but just learning how the body moves.

It’s going to help to speed up that progress for those of you who are struggling with one specific thing. Let’s go through this, try these motions out.

Don’t get obsessed with them. It’s just kind of helping you to learn how the body moves, and I think it’s going to speed up your progress. Let’s go ahead and get started.

Hey guys, welcome back. I’ve got a physical screen for you. Nothing fancy here, I’m going to talk in some real laymen’s terms. Don’t feel like this is going to go over your head.

You don’t have to know any medical terminology. We will talk with some of those terms, but we don’t really need to know what they mean. I’m going to walk you through it.

So can I get lag in the golf swing? There’s things that have to happen with the wrist, the arms, rotation, all that kind of stuff. I’m going to break it down piece by piece.

What I want you to do to start out, is we’re going to bend our arms and hold them by the side of our body. I’m going to go ahead, put my arms down to my side. I’m going to bend from my elbows until I have a 90° angle, just like this.

My elbows are to the side of my body. I don’t want to have my elbows out like this, that’s going to mess up the test. Then I’m going to go ahead and make a fist and have my thumbs out.

From there, how far can I rotate my wrist outward? So I’m looking here, if I was to open up my hand, I’m looking at kind of the palm of my hand.

Now we should be able to get about 80°, or just shy of parallel with the ground. If you’re limited there, that’s what’s called supination or turning out.

That would be turning a doorknob to the right with your right arm. Turning a doorknob to the left with your left arm. If you’re limited there, that could affect your lag, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

Now another way to make sure you don’t cheat this test, is I don’t want to have my arms out. That’s going to be important for this next one.

Again, I’m keeping a fist. The fist is not like really tight, but it is together. If I start to cheat and my hands start to kind of go out like this, and they start looking all funny, I’m trying to cheat and get more than I can get.

Don’t cheat the test, just learn a little bit about your body here, and then we can make some adaptions if we’re not very good at a certain motion.

Now we’re going to do pronation, or which would be rotating in. That’s turning a doorknob to the left with your right hand, turning a doorknob to the right with your left hand.

My thumbs are coming in toward my body. Pro means towards the center, so that’s pronation. Again, I should see this wrist almost flat with the ground.

So pretty good range of motion with mine, not the most flexible ever, but if we were to start to extend our arms out and now we try to get pronation, watch this.

Oh, my thumbs are down to the ground now, so how did I get so much more flexible in a couple seconds? Well, I didn’t. What I’m using is my upper arm there.

My humerus is rotating, my elbow is starting to rotate around. If I lock them into my sides, now I’m just testing my forearms, so your radius and your ulna rolling over top of each other.

If you grab your wrist, you can feel those two bones rolling over top of each other. If you’re limited here, don’t freak out, doesn’t mean that you can’t get lag.

Doesn’t mean you can’t have power in the golf swing. Just means that we may need to do some things a little bit different depending on our limitation.

Now the next one’s going to be what’s called wrist extension. You can imagine if I’m riding a motorcycle, I’m going to crank back on the gas. That’s my wrist extension.

I can do this one with my arms out. I can do it with my arms by my side, it really doesn’t make much difference.

What I’m looking for here is I want to get at least 60°, that angle, between my forearm and my wrist. I want to make sure that one side isn’t way better or way worse than the other. I don’t want my right side ot be like this, and my left side to be like that.

That would be kind of a difference, I would know I had an issue with my left wrist. Or, if I’m limited in both sides, it would look something like that.

As long as you can get 60°, you’re going to be in pretty good shape for the golf swing. Again, I’m keeping that first. If I have to feel like I let my fingers come up, and I’m cheating a little bit. So keep that fist together, doesn’t have to be tight, but they have to be together.

Now the next one’s going to be what’s called wrist flexion or if I took that motorcycle grip, giving it gas there, I’m letting off the gas. If I hold my arms out, I’m going to with my wrist down.

You’d like to be about 60°, I’m a little bit limited on this one, probably just shy of that, maybe 45-50°. That’s OK, it’s really not that big of a deal if you’re not perfect. But 60° would be great.

Now here, we’re starting to get more specific with lag, that one really helps with lag. If I take my hands to my sides again, this is neutral, so my arm is nice and relaxed from my forearm down to the middle of my wrist.

If I was to have this come up vertically, that’s what’s called radial deviation, or your thumb’s moving up toward the sky.

Now what I want to look for here, if I don’t have very good radial deviation, especially in my right wrist, my wrist is going to want to start to cock in like that.

If you’re looking down this way, instead of it staying nice and flat, it’s going to start to bend back like this. I’ve got to keep that dead flat as I’m bending my wrist up.

Now the key is, you don’t need that much. You probably only need 20°. People think oh, I need to be able to get 60-70°. Nobody can get that. 20° is plenty.

I’m looking at both wrists, they’re nice and flat. I’m getting a good range of motion there. So it’s not very much. You’re not going to feel like it’s a lot. Then I’m also going to go down, same thing.

Wrist nice and flat, keeping a fist. I don’t want to do all this funky stuff with my hands and the thumbs are going down. I’m only going to get about 20° to 30° there is good.

How do these motions play into the golf swing? Let’s go over one more and then we’ll have the full gamut of it.

Now I want you to take your right elbow, put it level with the ground. Imagine there’s a shelf shoulder height, my elbow’s sitting on it, it’s at a 90° angle.

I don’t want my arm to be out here, I don’t want it to be back here like that, some of may start to cheat and come back here.

My elbow’s coming straight out of my shoulder. I’m going to externally rotate my arm. See, I’m not going very far.

If it’s straight up and down with the ground, I’m going to push it back there. That would be neutral, anything past that would be good. That happens in the left arm. Same thing happens in the right arm.

Let’s go ahead and rotate it backwards, I’m very limited here again with my left arm, excuse me, we did right arm first, we’ll do left arm now.

Again, I’m making sure that that elbow stays directly in front of my body. Then with this left arm what I want you to do, is I want you to rotate downward.

We want to be able to get to about 60° to 70°, somewhere around in there. If you can go a little farther, that’s great. If you’re a little shy of that, that’s going to be fine. So how does this make a difference in lag?

Those are all physical tests, and start to think about which ones I did good at, and which ones I was limited at. Then I’m going to go over how those make lag in the golf swing.

The first one we’ll go over is radial and ulnar deviation. So in the golf swing, I have radial deviation as I’m creating lag.

You’ll see my left wrist, it’s hinging upward. My thumb is moving up to create that angle of lag. So in my golf swing, I’m setting my wrist up like that, that’s the angle of lag.

Ulnar deviation is when I release that lag. So as I got a maximum amount of lag, now I’m going to go to my straight line release, now my wrists are going down this way as far as they can go.

So I’ve created a lot of lag with that wrist hinge up, and the power comes from releasing it by going wrist hinged down.

If you’re limited in either of those, just make a note of that. I’m not going to look like Sergio Garcia with this club angled way back if I can only get 10° of radial deviation. It’s just not going to happen.

You can try until you’re blue in the face, it’s not going to matter. You just need to get some speed from a couple other things.

You’ll still be able to get a pretty good amount of lag if we follow these recommendations I’m going to give you.

In the follow through, if I can’t get a lot of ulnar deviation, my wrists don’t go down very well, I may need to just stay in my posture a little bit more, get my shoulders to come down a little bit more to be able to reach the ball and to get me able to come through contact.

If I have a little bit more angle, I can’t go all the way to there, let’s say I’m here, as I come down, I’m going to stay a little bit more bent so I can reach the ball and come through the shot.

I’m not going to see this type of an action, I’m going to be a little bit more like that. My hands are going to stay inside my club head if I don’t have a lot of ulnar deviation.

So if you’re limited, radial deviation and you’re not going to see a lot of lag, one thing to be cognizant of is I don’t have a big angle there.

When I lay this shaft down though, now all of a sudden it looks a lot sharper. So as I get in the downswing, that looks very sharp.

Sergio Garcia has the most look of lag, he also has the flattest swing on the PGA Tour. If you look at his hands in the transition, as he’s about halfway down, his club looks like this, right?

If I take that angle from face on, now all of a sudden that looks like a bunch of lag. So it’s not up and down as much as it is rotating this way.

What was that test? That was our pronation with our left arm and our pronation with the shoulder up here.

If you don’t have a lot of this hinge action, you can go ahead and let your arm rotate inward and get a little bit more of what Sergio Garcia does, which is to flatten out that shaft.

Now that’s going to be an advantage. So as that shaft flattens out, now I’m creating a pretty big angle that is as my hands start to come back in to the left, that’s going to whip on through there and I can a lot of club head speed.

If I get vertical, like most people get, and I don’t have a lot of wrist angle there, now I’m going to start to chop, fall back out of it. I’m going to tend to kind of scoop the ball like that.

Same thing with the right hand. My right wrist as I’m creating lag, it’s going to be angled up and my wrist is going to be angled back. That was that wrist extension like we talked about.

So we’re doing the motorcycle grip. This is my right hand as I come down and I have the lag. I’m externally rotated.

So here’s the key. If I couldn’t do this one very well like me, and my elbow’s kind of sticking out a little bit like that, I’m going to go as much as I can.

I have to supinate my right wrist even extra. I have to get a lot more of this to flatten out that club shaft. If my elbow’s out, my club’s going to be out.

I don’t have the ability to get my elbow in and my club in, I just can’t do it. My arm won’t go that way. So I have to use more wrist action to have that happen. It’s completely fine.

Everybody has physical limitations, there’s nobody that I’ve ever tested that didn’t have some kind of physical limitations. I don’t have a lot of elbow in, I’m just going to have to use more wrist and forearms.

So my right wrist is angled back, like I’m giving it some gas, and then it’s also my wrist, my forearm, is rotating more to the right that way.

Now, I’m in a pretty good angle. Now this looks pretty good, even though my right elbow isn’t tucked way under like that.

You’re also not going to be able to get your elbow vertical at the top of the swing like this if you can’t rotate it like we’re talking about. So those are the pieces of lag.

Now the last one here with the right wrist, I’ve got this wrist laid back. As I continue to come on through, it’s laid back and then it’s releasing I’m coming through to the Straight Line Release.

I’ve got this motorcycle gas twisting the grip as I come down I’m here, and then as I come through, I’m letting that release.

I’m going from the grip being twisted back to flat like that. A lot of that’s releasing with momentum that I’m turning this grip back up. Hopefully you’ve picked up a few little things there.

You’ve tested yourself. Make a note of which ones am I limited at? If I have limited radial deviation, I can bend and bend and bend, it’s not going to go any farther, just can’t do it.

If I have limited rotation in my shoulder this way, I can try to tuck that elbow in there, I can get it in front of my body as much as I want to, it’s not going to happen.

We can work on stretching and doing things to improve on these, but it’s a lot easier to realize your physical limitations, do a couple of quick adaptions to get where you need to be, and you can be playing better right away.

So best of luck on the lag. Hope you guys learned something from this video. I’ll see you all soon.