Why You Need This: The top pros typically have a perfectly flat left wrist coming through contact.

How do they do that?

I am sure you try and try to keep your hands ahead, compress the golf ball, and keep the wrist locked, but it just doesn't work.

In this video, I go over the counter-intuitive way to keep your wrist flat through the hitting zone.

You actually want to let it bend just after contact.

I know it seems odd, but I will go over just how to make this happen.

The right way.

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured: Novak Djokovic (Tennis)    Tiger Woods    

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:02

Video Transcription:

Now we all have heard how the pros have a perfectly flat wrist coming through contact that helps you to compress the golf ball, it helps you to get your forward shaft lean, and helps you to really start hitting some solid iron shots.

But let’s find out if this is you. Let me ask if you have a couple of these symptoms to see if you may be flipping the golf ball.

Obviously if you videotape your swing, and you see yourself with your club shaft straight up and down, your left wrist is breaking down.

Maybe the club first starts to split your forearms right over top of the golf ball, you’re going to be in the flipping category. We’re going to talk about how to flatten out that lead wrist.

But if you haven’t videotaped yourself, do you find yourself having to tee the ball up on the perfect piece of grass?

If the ball is sitting down, maybe it’s a tightly mown fairway, maybe it’s not setting up just right, you find yourself kind of moving the ball around, back and forth until you just get it one millimeter higher than the normal lie that it had, to try to give yourself any margin for error that you can?

Odds are if you’re doing that, you’re probably flipping with your lead wrist, flipping your hands a little too early in the swing.

Also, if you find yourself hitting what feels like a good shot. You look down, it’s on the center of the face but it’s just not as solid as you hear some other players hitting the ball, then you may be flipping then also.

If this sounds like you, I have a perfect remedy for this. We’re going to talk about one really big misconception of holding the wrist flat that could be hurting you and causing you to flip.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

One of the biggest things you could do wrong to make sure that you start to flip a little bit, and get tight, and lose lag, is trying to keep this left wrist dead tight and flat the entire swing.

Some people will buy special gloves that have a little thing that locks your wrist in. Those don’t work, we’ve tried them, they didn’t really help.

Some people will try to stick a ruler on the back here. It’s good for feedback, it can at least give you an awareness of when you’re flipping the wrist which can be a little bit helpful.

But again, it kind of impedes how you’re doing things and you end up flipping there. All kinds of crazy tricks to try to get you to stop flipping.

What if I told you that you’re actually supposed to flip? The more we can flip this wrist, the flatter it’s going to be at contact.

Now I’m going to get to that here in a second, I know that sounds counterintuitive, but let me walk you through first what happens when we try to keep this wrist tight.

If I try to lock my wrist in, keep it tight, wear the special glove, do all that kinds of stuff. What’s going to end up happening is I go to the top of the swing, when my wrists are tight, I’m going to tend to cast a little bit.

When I start to cast a little bit from the top, now all of a sudden, my club is outracing my hands, and no matter what I do, I end up kind of flipping through contact and my left wrist breaks down.

So the tighter I keep my wrist from the top of the swing and in the backswing, what’s going to happen is I’m going to be more and more likely to flip.

Let’s go ahead and try one out. I’m going to try to really lock in my left wrist, keep it flat, and let’s see what happens.

I could definitely feel myself flip there. Didn’t feel very solid even though I hit the center of the face, it was kind of clunky because I added a little bit of loft to that.

The reason is again, it’s not what’s happening down here, it’s that when you get tight with your wrist you start to cast early, and that club starts to outrace the hands.

So no matter what you try to do at contact, once the momentum of that club starts going it is way too late, there is not much you can do about it.

The proper way to do this is to actually let the wrist go. Now this is what I call kind of a wrist snap. If you take your left wrist and you bend it back towards your body, or your palm of your hands toward your body, that’s what’s called wrist flexion.

If I do it the other way, that’s called wrist extension. In the golf swing the wrist is doing this. It’s actually going, it’s letting loose. It’s the timing of that that makes all the difference in the world.

If I can come down halfway in my downswing, I’m going to have this wrist a little bit bowed, or at least perfectly flat.

Then as I come through, that wrist is going to release up, it’s actually going to fold back up. We’ll get to the details of that here in a second.

This isn’t just for golf, though. This is a universal principle, any time you’re swinging a stick at a ball, this same thing’s going to be happening.

If we take a look at tennis in the back hand, you look at the pro players. As they start forward this would be their lead hand if they’re hitting a backhand.

As they start forward, the wrist is going to bow this way, you see it gets a big bow in it when we’re looking at this slow motion of the wrist of Novak Djokovic.

Then as he releases that through contact, you’re going to see how that wrist is nice and flat. It’s going from bowed to flat.

Now in golf we don’t go quite this extreme but I use tennis as an example because it is a little bit more extreme. You can see how that wrist bows and then snaps forward to go flat.

In golf the same thing is happening. If we take a look at Tiger Woods, we’ll see how his wrist is flat coming down. It doesn’t have to get that much bow as we talked about there in tennis.

But as he releases on through and his hands come up past his shoulders, look at that left hand. You’ll see that thing is almost bent 90°.

He’s really letting that wrist release. If he was trying to hold on that entire time, he would have casted, flipped through impact, and then it would be way too late.

Since he doesn’t mind if those wrists release, he’s going to let that release in front of the golf ball, the wrist is flat coming through contact.

Now I have a great drill, a series of drills I’m going to lead you through now. We all see how this is happening, let’s go ahead and engrain this in your own swing.

The first drill I want you to do is to get used to letting the wrist bow and then flip as you release past contact.

Now that’s a real key here. We don’t want that wrist to flip prior to contact. We still want to let it go, but it’s happening after contact.

So there’s contact, and then I’m letting that hinge up after I make the swing, after I come through contact.

Think about feeling that wrist come on up, as you’re about chest high in the follow through just like we saw with Tiger Woods.

So the first piece to this is going to be letting that wrist feel like it bows. If we’re going to do that, I need to feel like I turn the club handle like I’m turning it, twisting it around itself, the handle there.

You’ll notice how that bows my lead writs. If I come about halfway back, I bow my lead wrist, I’m going to feel like the logo of my glove is down towards this ball.

Then as I come through, I’m going to go ahead and let it be flat as I’m coming on through here. If I go a little farther, I’m going to go ahead and let that hinge up.

So just some little mini swings, some mini practice swings feel like I let that wrist bow, big angle in the wrist there, right hand on top, logo down, and then as I come on through, I’m going to let that fold up as I’m coming here above my chest.

So we’re kind of going from bowed, letting it release to flat, and then going ahead and folding up.

If we’re looking at the right hand here, the same thing. The palm of my hand is bent back, is facing the ground.

As it comes through it goes flat, and then as I come on up I let it release on around. So do a few of those to get really comfortable with this.

Now you may not be quite convinced how this is going to add power to your swing, but think of it this way.

If I was to take the back of my hand, like I was going to backhand something, and I was going to have it locked in stiff and not let it really release.

If I was to push into something doing that, I really can’t get a lot of power doing that. Now I could hit something, I could probably smack it pretty hard, but it wouldn’t be the full amount of power.

Now imagine I’m going to let my wrist bow, and I’m really going to let my hand, my wrist, flick as I’m doing that.

As I do that same thing, we can hear the difference there rather than just pushing into it, getting a pop into it like that.

I’m letting that wrist speed add to it. Same thing in the golf swing, I’m adding not only momentum of my arms, but I’m adding that wrist speed to let the club accelerate.

That way you don’t have to be big and strong, you can take advantage of the physics of this, and get more speed not being the biggest, strongest guy.

So do a few of those swings, and then I want you to go a little farther back and actually hit a golf ball. So a little farther back, let the wrist bow, and then I’m going to let it release as I’m coming up here.

Really check to make sure that wrist is cupping up as you’re doing that. So I’m flipping the wrist, but not until after contact.

There we go, nice and solid. I took what felt like a three-quarter swing there, and I got that ball all the way to the green with my 8 iron.

That actual shot went 152 yards with just a nice easy three-quarter swing with the 8 iron. A lot of that action is coming from the wrist.

Now another great training aid for this, is a really simple one, it’s called Tactic. All this thing is, it goes over your wrist. Got a little piece of plastic in there that snaps.

If I put this on, what we’re going to see here is that makes an audible sound that doesn’t happen until after the swing.

You can see this little tab is on the back where my logo of my glove is. If I let my wrist bow, it’s got some space between that and my wrist.

As I let my wrist cup, or I flip my wrist, now all of a sudden it’s going to make a little click. You can hear that happening.

This is going to give you audible feedback now to where I can tell when I’m flipping my wrist. If you tend to set up with your hand like this at address with a cup there, you’re going to notice oh, I’ve got to get my hands way forward to get this not to snap.

So as I set up from there, this hasn’t snapped yet, I should be able to go all the way to the top of my backswing, even in my downswing I feel like I’m going to create a little space there like we talked about.

Then I’m going to from there let this go and snap up. Now I hear that snapping right around here somewhere. I shouldn’t be hearing that until I’m about, again, chest high in the follow through.

But the key is, once I get to impact, I want to feel like that’s happening as quickly as I can. I want to get that pop, that snap coming through there.

So let’s go ahead and try one here with the Tactic. You don’t have to have this, this is just a good example of why it’s not a good idea to, it’s OK for feedback in the backswing and the downswing, but it’s not the best idea to say OK, I’ve got to lock this wrist coming all the way through.

If I do that, that’s kind of like me locking my wrist and trying to push through my hand like I talked about. You’re not going to get that snap of speed.

Let’s go ahead and get this set up correctly. Let’s listen for the tick coming through into the finish.

There we go, so me, I don’t know if you can hear that on camera, for me I felt like that snapped right around in here. That was a pretty solid shot. Again, with this or without this, you can still do the same drill.

Now last piece here, I want you to focus in on your right hand. Again, we talked about that right hand covering the golf ball, I want you to feel like as that right hand releases, it goes from bent back to flat. This is what we call the straight-line release.

As I come through contact, I want my right hand facing down and then from there, I want to release my right hand and get the wrist perfectly flat at about a 45° angle in front.

So make a couple little half backswings, wrist bent back, and then I’m going to really release that coming on through.

Get that same sensation for four or five swings, and you’re going to go ahead and really get the full power of your swing on these.

There we go, so nice, full swing on that one. Let’s go ahead and see what the distance said there. You’ll notice with the half swing I was even getting 150, that one’s going to be a little farther, about 160 or so, probably.

Yeah, 160 carry, 163 after it rolled out a bit. So get those wrists to add some speed to that, that’s going to help you to get the most out of your swing where you don’t have to be a big, strong guy. You can still get some great distance.

Now we don’t want to stop there. We just talked about the Straight-Line Release, and that’s the perfect compliment to this video.

In this video, we got your started. We got a good feeling of releasing out in front, but if you really want to ingrain it, we can’t stop here, we have to build on that.

In the Straight-Line Release section, what we’re going to talk about in the Top Speed Golf System, is that we have this great angle of lag, and then we’re going to release that to a flat point where all these angles are released, about 45° in front.

In this video we talked about if you continue on around, you’ll see how your left wrist is actually bent back as we go farther in the swing.

If you want to ingrain that, if you want to feel like you get the full speed of the wrist, you don’t even have to think about it. You get these booming golf shots, you’re always sitting nice and solid, that’s the way to do that.

Start working through level 1 of the Straight-Line Release. Work through each of those drills, get those reps in. That’s going to ingrain that to where you feel like you don’t even have to think about it and it goes out in front, you’re always releasing in front.

Build in level 2, level 3, and then it’s going to be completely natural. What I don’t want you to do is take this video we did today, get a little bit better, and then two weeks later, fall back to what you were doing in the past.

I want to keep this momentum rolling, really get that release out in front so that you can play great golf the rest of your life.

I’ll see you in the Straight-Line Release Section.