Why You Need This: One of the most important questions I get is "when should you start rolling your wrist in the downswing?"

Now to answer that we need to take a closer look at the primary parts of the release.

Ideally, what you want happening is to have your club coming down on plane...

And release the club so it's square at impact.

In your follow through, your path and club face are both travelling in the same direction.

Now let's break down the release further...

The first part is releasing the angle between the forearm and the shaft.

So no matter if you're trying to hit a fade or a draw...

You'll be releasing the built up lag in your swing to what I call the "Straight-Line Release."

The second part of the release concerns the club face angle...

And how much you roll your wrist in the downswing.

This is where you can fine tune your swing to hit a draw, a fade, and to hit dead straight.

So what do you feel in your release?

Well, start by taking a normal swing and take a close look at the ball flight.

Let's say you hit the ball with a slight fade.

If your goal is to hit it straight...

...then you need to feel like you're going to roll the wrists a bit more during the release.

What if you draw the ball too much?

No problem.

By simply manipulating the roll in your wrist in the downswing,...

You can tone down your draw and hit it straight.

So watch this video now to discover the ins and outs of rolling your wrists in the downswing...

And fine tune your swing for more accuracy!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 5:09

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome to Top Speed Golf. This is one of the most important questions that I hear all the time, is when to release the golf club. It’s very to get the wrong idea for this.

Ideally what we want to have happening, and there’s two parts to the release, I’ll get that in a second.

But ideally what we want to have happening, is as I’m making a swing, is my club comes down it’s going to come down perfectly on plane, and then I’m going to release the club to where it’s square into the back of the path.

So my path and my face are both going down the same direction, that’s going to give me that nice square contact, good distance, and really good compression.

Now the first part of the release is releasing the actual angle between our forearm and the shaft. So no matter which release we do today, we’re going to always be releasing this angle.

So if I’m hitting this direction, now as I’m swinging down, I have some lag and as I come through, I’m going to be releasing that lag until I get to what I call a straight line release.

Where if you take a line from the center of my chest 45° in front my hands and arms are going to be splitting that line, my club is going to be straight down that line, and I’m fully releasing those angles.

So here, if we did that line my club would have a big angle, and I’m releasing that as I go out in front. That’s the first part. No matter what you’re doing, that’s going to need to be nice and consistent, that’s why we pay so much attention to that in the Top Speed Golf System.

Now the second part is going to be the face angle itself. How much do we release or roll the face angle?

This is going to be depending on your individual shot and what you feel. So again today, I talked about earlier, we want to be nice and square. What are you going t feel to actually make that happen?

If I go ahead and I make a swing, I make a really nice, easy swing here. We’ll just see what the ball flight does. That was almost dead straight, it had a little tiny bit of a fade on it.

Let’s imagine for a second that I didn’t like that fade, I didn’t want it turning two or three yards to the right, and I wanted to get a nice draw on there. Well if I wanted to do that, when I actually start releasing, or when I feel the release, is as I get to my maximum lag position, now the club is as open as it’s going to get. From here, if you watch the face, it gradually starts to close and to roll until I’m square and then coming through contact, it keeps rolling on over. So you’ll see past contact it’s about 45° rolled over when I get to that straight line release position.

If that’s what I feel like I’m doing, and I get a little bit of a fade, I need to adjust my feeling to get the draw. So as I get down to my lag position, where my left arm is parallel with the ground, now I’m going to feel like I start to roll more.

Instead of my club face coming in square, I’m going to have the feeling if I’m looking down at the ball, that my club face is going to roll, and it’s going to be closed. Now you can see my face is pointing to the left.

Even though I have that feeling, when I look at my ball flight, that’s probably going to get that ball to draw from right to left.

So let’s go ahead and try one of those out, and I’ll try to see if I can get this one to draw by getting that feeling that rom here, I’m going to release and actually have a closed club face.

There we go, almost dead straight, probably had one yard of draw on it. So nice, straight shot. Again, I felt like I rolled a little bit more, and it squared the club face.

Now what happens if it’s going the other way, and I’m hooking it too much? I’m going to feel like as I get to my maximum lag position, now I’m going to feel that I keep the face a little bit more open, and now the face is pointing out to the right.

So in reality, if I know I hit the ball dead straight, I know it’s square, that I’m tweaking my feeling for that. As you go more and more, let’s say that I’m trying to get rid of that slice and I try to get the face to roll over to the outside, and it’s still not slicing, I’m going to visualize in my head…or still not drawing.

I’m going to visualize in my head that I roll it even more, or that I start even sooner and more aggressively with the roll from my hands.

So you’re always tweaking that to get the type of shot that you want. Ideally, that club is going to be releasing from the full lag position here, and max out its release at the 45° in front, which is the straight line release position.

Don’t worry about trying to do the same thing every time. You want to watch your ball flight, constantly fine tune and adjust. That’s what the best players in the world are doing, so that you can get that proper release.

The release starts from the maximum lag position, and you’re going to tweak that and adjust that to get the perfect ball flight for your game.

So good luck to you guys, work on those drills. What I’d like for you to do is go ahead and set up, and I want you to hit 20 balls where now from the lag position, you’re going to get that club face to close and you’re going to get a draw.

Then I want you to hit 20 balls, same thing, you’re going to keep the face a little bit more open, and you’re going to hit a fade. Then we’re going to end that off with 20 shots, trying to adjust our feel to get that ball to fly dead straight.

If you do those drills you’re going to get a lot more awareness of the face, and you’re going to have a lot more control of your game.

I’ll see you all soon.