Why You Need This: When is the right time for the "Wrist Set in the Golf Swing?"

If you are like most people you have heard that you need to set the wrists early.

In reality, that is one of the worst things you can do.

It results in a loss of lag, power, and consistency.

In this video I will go over how to properly set the wrists and increase your distance immediately.

Let's get started .....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:56

Video Transcription:

I feel like most players, you’ve probably been told you need to set your wrist early. A lot of pros will say that I want to set this wrist early, keep this angle between my wrist all the way throughout the backswing. Start my downswing, and then hit a shot doing that.

If you’ve tried that out, you’ve probably found you don’t get quite as much distance as you’d like, and you’ve probably noticed some of the best players in the world have these really wide takeaways.

The club is getting wide away from their body, they’re setting their wrist later, creating lag late in the swing, and then releasing the club.

So why is that? Why is setting the wrist probably not the ideal thing to do, setting the wrist later in the swing a little bit better for your lag and your speed? We’re going to go over that and bust a couple myths in this video.

All right, so setting the wrist early. Now what we’re going to have to do if we set the wrist early, is not really move much of our body early in the takeaway. That’s the first big piece there.

If you start to move your body early, it’s very difficult to have enough time to set your wrist. So the body stays fairly still, the wrist set, you’ll hear a lot of coaches talk about how to get almost this 90° angle very early in the backswing, and set that wrist there, then keep this angle throughout the swing.

Now the reason, there’s a couple reason that I think this is going to kill your distance, or really hurt your distance. The first one what’s called the stretch-shortening cycle.

So whenever I flex my wrist up which would be radial deviation like this, I’m stretching the bottom of my forearm. That’s really important.

You have to stretch your muscles first to then be able to fire them with a maximum amount of effort. If I stretch my forearms early and then I hold that angle, what’s happening is my arms aren’t as powerful when they’re stretched and I hold that angle.

Imagine you’re grabbing a rebound in basketball. If I stretch my leg muscles and I bend down like I’m going to jump up, or if I’m doing a vertical jump, testing my vertical jump how high I can go, I’m going to bend down and then immediately fire up into the sky. I’m not going to hold this down here and wait.

Same thing in the golf swing. If I set this angle and then hold it throughout the swing, I’m going to lose some ability of my muscles to fire as fast as possible.

Let me go ahead and put this to the test. Let me go ahead and hit one with this early wrist set, and let’s see how much club head speed I get, and let’s see how far this golf ball goes.

There we go, right down the pipe. I could not have hit it much more solid. So this would be an awesome test, because I should have gotten a decent amount of distance from this.

If I check out my FlightScope X3, we’ll see as I said, I could not have hit that one any straighter. Keep in mind when I’m saying that this isn’t the best way to set the wrist, I think you can hit the ball straight doing this.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I think speed is where you’re going to really struggle. Having an extra five, or six, or seven more miles an hour of speed, 20 yards of distance is a huge advantage.

I’d rather be 20 yards longer and a little bit more wild, and all the statistics out there show the longer players tend to be better players even if they are a little bit more wild.

There I had 109 miles an hour club head speed. I hit the downslope there, this is actually pretty crazy, I carried it 250, and then rolled out 301 yards.

So I’m going to have to hit it pretty hard for this late wrist set to beat that. Let’s put it to the test, we can try it out here on FlightScope, it’s going to tell us exactly what to do, or exactly if we’ve beat this or not.

I’ve set kind of a high bar for myself right now. So 109 and 301 total distance, only 250 carry though, is probably the one that sticks out to me the most there.

Let’s do the late wrist set now. There’s a couple advantages in this late wrist set. When you do the late wrist set, you’re going to feel like your wrist is angled down like this, that’s called ulnar deviation in the takeaway.

Now that does a couple good things for you. Number one, remember in the early wrist set one, I set my wrist right away, how my body doesn’t move very much in the swing.

My hips don’t rotate and my shoulders don’t rotate. Now that’s really going to cost you some swing speed, and the reason is, if my hips and shoulders don’t start to rotate early, I run out of speed really fast. The entire swing is less than a second for most players.

If I don’t get those hips and shoulders turning early in the backswing, I’m going to run out of time to get those hips and shoulders to turn as I continue back.

What I’d like for you to feel is let those knees and hips pivot as you start your swing. Let those shoulders start to rotate, and feel like your wrist is angled down in the swing as you do that.

So as I do this, now I’m going to have a much wider swing, and as I start my downswing, then I’m going to really set my wrist and get the maximum angle of lag. As soon as I’ve stretched this out, then I’m going to go ahead and release and let it go.

So let’s go ahead and put this to the test, and I’ll talk about one more point that I think is very important when we’re casting the golf club.

All right, let’s do the late wrist set here. There we go, hit that one pretty good. I could definitely tell my swing speed was up. I saw that the ball carried a little farther.

Let’s see what the total distance was. All right, so the first one 109 club head speed, that one went 116.5, so I picked up about 7 miles an hour of club head speed.

Now whether you’re swinging 116 or 80 miles an hour, the same principles apply. If I get a bigger body turn, I might go from 80 to 86 or 87. Or if you’re a fast swing player and you get a bigger body turn, you might go from 110 to 116.

These core principles apply no matter what your swing speed is. So I boosted up about 7 miles an hour swing speed, and I think you guys can get the same kind of results there.

My carry distance went from 249 to 286. Carried the ball about 36, 37 yards farther, and my total distance, it didn’t roll out quite as far on that one, I got 315 total. So I picked up about 14 yards of total distance.

By setting the wrist a little bit late in the backswing, now I could really get those wrist – well two things. I could get a bigger turn, that helps me to build more power. Then I also got those wrists to stretch later and then fire with a little bit more effort as I’m coming through there.

Last thing I want to mention here, and I think it’s very important to realize just what’s happening when we’re casting the club.

If I start to cast the club, imagine, let’s imagine a figure skater before we get into this. A figure skater’s going to turn and twirl really, really fast.

They pull their arms in tight and then they spin really, really fast, and if they put their arms out to the side, they slow down and spin a lot slower.

You can do the same thing, next time you go to a bar, get on a bar stool that spins around. Start to pull your arms in, get your buddy to spin you around as fast as you can, probably going to fall off the stool, but you’ll spin pretty fast.

If you put your arms out, you’ll notice that that’s going to slow down your moment of inertia, or increase your moment of inertia and resist your ability to rotate.

So it’s a big fancy way of saying when I stick things out away from my body, I’m going to rotate slower.

Now when you cast in the downswing, when I get this early wrist set, remember I talked about how as soon as those muscles get stretched they immediately want to fire?

Well a lot of times what players do when they set those wrists early, as they start the downswing they start to fire these wrists and that kicks the club out in this casting motion, and now you have all of this mass out away from your body, it slows down your ability to rotate.

If I can set my wrist late, it slows down my ability to rotate in the backswing, it slows down and smooths out my backswing, as I start down then I can get a lot of lag, everything is in here tighter, I can rotate faster and then release the club and get those wrists and forearms to fire coming through the shot.

Let me go ahead and hit one more good shot here, and again, you’ll notice how the backswing on this wider, smoother takeaway creates a bigger shoulder turn, and it looks much more fluid, much smoother as I’m doing this.

Let me get lined up with my FlightScope here, let’s see if I can beat that record there. 315 on the last one, see if I can get up around 320, really hammer one here.

There we go, hit that one good. Don’t know if I’ll be able to do much better than that. Let’s grab the FlightScope and see what it said.

Again, I try to stay nice and wide, really rotate my body on the way back. Ah, a little short. Almost 120, I got 119 club head speed. Highest carry distance all the way up to 294, remember, I started at 249. My total distance was 318.9, so didn’t quite get to the 320 I wanted, but hey, I’ll take it.

Now we don’t want to stop there. We have a lot of great tips on how to set this wrist late, how to really keep that wrist angled down, that’s going to slow you down, really allow you to take advantage of your rotation when you do set the wrist later in the swing and get more power.

That’s great to do this and go out on the range and do these drills right away. You don’t want to stop here.

If we just stop with this video, we really don’t have it ingrained yet. What you want to do is go to the Power Turn section of the Top Speed Golf System, that’s really going to walk you through step by step how to really get that big turn, how to load up your body.

When you get those drills in, when you go to level 1 start working through the level 1 videos, doing those drills, it feels better than not making a good turn.

You just naturally start to make a better turn, because you start to see the ball fly farther for it to fly straighter, and you don’t want to make a short turn anymore. Just becomes completely automatic.

So make sure you do those drills and start working through that level 1, then level 2, then level 3.

Also in there in The Lag section, we do a lot more drills talking about when and how to set those wrists in the downswing to get that angle of lag. Not only that, but when to release that in the Straight-Line Release.

Make sure you work through those videos, too. Again, once you get some lag, and the players that I’ve taught that have gotten a lot more lag, I’ve never seen them go back to casting again.

Once you can start to feel the power of having a lot of lag and letting that release through contact, you start seeing that ball fly a lot farther.

Once you get that down, you build that muscle memory, you’ll never go back to casting. Once you get it once, you have it forever.

Make sure you get those reps in, start building through that level 1, level 2, level 3 of The Lag section, that way you have it for a lifetime and we’re not kind of chasing the latest tips.

So best of luck, I can’t wait to see you in the Power Turn and The Lag.