The Correct Wrist Set Simplifies The Golf Swing So Much

Your arms and hands are literally the only connection to the golf club. If you don't get this part right in the swing, you're never going to have the consistent, reliable golf swing that you want. If you're a golfer who struggles with rolling the club face open, maybe you're super scoopy or flippy at impact, perhaps you've got a super wide swing with no speed or power, even if you're losing the club at the top of your swing, this video is for you. Okay, Mr. Giles is back with us here today. Giles, appreciate you being here. Thank you for having me back, Eric. Thank you. If you haven't seen Giles' videos, awesome channel, we'll link that down below. Wrist hinge. So question number one and part number one is why do we have to hinge our wrist in the golf club in the swing? Well, like you said, it's the only connection we have to the golf club. If we get this wrong, we're never going to be able to control the golf club. So first things first, assuming we've got a decent grip, if we can control our wrist hinge, we're going to be able to control the club face. The club face sends it. If you want to send the ball in the correct direction, you've got to learn to control this. But the club face also has a huge influence on the rest of your swing. So the plane that we take this club on, if we take it too far out, too far in, we've got to make sure we can set the club up onto a beautiful plane. We can control the face because from there, it's going to promote a downswing that's a lot more on plane. We're going to be able to create lag. We're also going to generate more shaft lean, more compression, a ball then ground contact, more rotation on the way through. The list is honestly endless when it comes to this. So if you want to learn to strike a golf ball somewhat consistently, it starts with the wrist. There are obviously other things, but it starts with how we move our wrists. You know, Giles, the other thing I like as a simple version in terms of hinging the wrist, obviously we hinge the wrist up vertically. You know, that's the piece that makes the club go up. And what goes up, we know must come down. We've got an iron with a ball on the ground that we need to get off the ground. And so part of the reason we need to hinge the club outside of all the benefits we just mentioned is just to get the club to work up and down enough to hit the ball. And obviously the hinging is a speed producer, right? The hinging up and down creates a lever that's a speed producer. So hit the ball, take a divot, hit it high enough and far enough with enough spin. The bad version, let's say, would be like no hinge whatsoever. We'll just call that bad for the moment, one of the bads. So if I had no hinging on either side of the swing, it's hard to hit the ball far enough and creating height. Here'd be my no hinge swing. So I didn't hinge the club on either side of the swing. And even if I try and go as fast as I can with like my body motions, it's still hard to produce a ball where I get good compression and hit the ball far enough. Here's no hinging at all. So that's a eight iron that I probably hit, I don't know, 100, 110, 20 yards. If I create the same sort of energy or swing speed, but I create the vertical hinging on both sides, that ball probably traveled with a smooth swing, maybe 150. So speed production, be able to compress the ball, the hinging is super important. Of course. And it's like you say, it's crucial for strike, it's crucial for speed, it's crucial for club face control. I'm not sure if that proves it. Now there's different ways to learn how to hinge, obviously. I really liked the way Giles explains this. Whether you're left side dominant or right side dominant, you can feel it with either hand, but understanding what each hand is responsible for makes this a lot easier. And later on in the video, we'll give you a simple way to put this into your normal swing. Let's talk some details first. In terms of the left hand, Giles, what do we want to feel and how do we do it? I think the easiest way to view reset is it's a push pull mechanism. So there are two things going on here and they're opposing, and this is what allows us to set the club up. So the lead hand, my left hand in this situation, if I was just to grip it and take the bottom three fingers off and just have my index finger and heel pad on and just hook just one of my fingers on my right hand on, if I go and push that heel pad down my toe line, you can see how it starts to set that club up. And actually you can see that from the downline view how it's gotten that club base in a really nice tilted position, which therefore is going to allow you to come back with some shafting. So the left hand, really for me, if I was to place my club on the ground, place my right hand behind my back and have it down here, I feel like I'm pushing my left hand down. Now, Eric, if you take a look at my left arm, you can see I've got beautiful width right there, but what's happening with my shoulder? Yeah, down. You can see, yeah, it gets that down motion. Now you look at Stack & Till, you look at a lot of the coaching systems out there, the tour pros, you won't see those golfers go this way. If you take the club back and you see this motion, you're going to take that club inside every single time. It's going to be super hard to control. And so as you're doing that left hand down motion, Giles, I think one of the important pieces, like it's not just down at the ball, it's like down and back, yeah? If I go just down at the ball, then I'm just setting that club up. Right. And also this is where the left shoulder comes in. We don't want to see the left shoulder just go straight down because otherwise we're going to get stuck on the left side. We're going to be losing loads of height. So everything blends really nicely together. I'm pushing down across my toe line, just like so, as if I'm pushing that palm down that club. And if you see that there, that promotes chest rotation. It promotes getting the club in a great position, the left shoulder a great position, the left arm great position, place my right arm on. It's also created that natural fold and natural arm right there. Okay, Giles, how about the right wrist and the pull action? So like I said, it's a push pull motion. So if you imagine we're pushing with the left hand, well, the right hand's got to do the opposite, right? So we need to pull this right wrist back. Now, the feeling I love is taking the knuckles and just bringing them back to the forearm. If I have my hand up in front of me here, I'm holding a tray. And you would have heard that analogy, you know, at the top of your backswing, you want to feel like you're holding a tray above your trail arm. Well, essentially it is just setting that right wrist back on itself. Now you can see when I do that, it actually forces the club to go into an excessively closed position right there to where the face is pointing really, really far down to the ground. So this is then when we blend the two motions together, we get sort of this 45 degree wrist set that gets that club a little bit face down to the ground, matching your spine angle. And then from there, if I add my chest rotation, it comes to a perfect position right there. So it's push, pull. I'm pushing down the toe line. I'm pulling back with the right wrist. If you blend those two motions together, you're going to have beautiful width, club face control. The club's going to sit up and plane. It's going to go up with speed. The list is endless. So we talked about the how, now the when part. Yeah, Giles. So for those of you that like the details, couple easy checkpoints here. As we're pushing down with the left, pulling back with the right, you'll see players like Nelly Korda, Adam Scott, many other great players. How much hinge should I have? By what point? By the time the hands, the butt of the club, get just outside the trail thigh and the hands are even with the middle of the trail leg, that's about when the shaft should be parallel to the ground. That would define how much you have by what time. Obviously, Giles, if I went back and the club didn't get parallel to the ground until my hands were like hip high, that would be relative to a neutral model, right? This would be theoretically not enough soon enough. If I got to parallel to the ground before my hands even moved back, that would be theoretically too much too soon. And look, you don't have to be perfectly here. We're just using this as like a guide, as a guide. Now, if I get from here, the next checkpoint I would look for, and we'll use Nelly and Adam Scott and many others, you want to get roughly 90 degrees-ish with the shaft in the arm, about 100, right? A little bit wider than 90 to the 90. It's like a pretty good spot, especially with an iron, right? With a driver, you might be a little bit wider, but with an iron, you'll see both those players about here. This is the point in the swing where you create that 90 degree-ish angle. From the down the line, the shaft angle, the butt of the club would point like roughly at the ball line, the ball target line from here. And this would be where my lead wrist would be like flat-ish, right? So my right wrist is bent back, maybe that 45 degree sort of angle we're feeling, flat-ish with the left wrist. So as you're pushing down with the left, pulling back with the right, in motion, as my body's moving, right? Those are some checkpoints where I can ensure that I'm doing the right amount at the right time. How I like to initially learn this, I want you to try this with me. Take the club with your left hand only, and we're gonna do three reps where we just feel the left hand doing the pushing down and away. So just the left hand only to create some of that hinging, right? To feel that. And when I'm doing the exaggeration here, notice I'm gonna actually hinge the club a little bit more than those checkpoints because I'm trying to exaggerate a bit. I'm trying to feel some early hinging. Couple of rehearsals with just the left hand. I like to then do a couple with just the right hand. Now I'm feeling the pulling back, right? The right wrist knuckles getting to the form like Giles mentioned. A couple of feels to feel that. I've had a lot of success teaching students feel it a little bit with just the left, feel a little bit with just the right, see which one you cue in on better. And then let's feel that together, right? To get that sensation of the left wrist pushing down, the right wrist back. And if you need more hinge, a nice feel, even though it's not our exact checkpoint, is about here when the hands are about hip high and the shaft's probably just shy of like 90, it's probably a hundred degrees. So it's a little over-exaggerated, but it's a good way to feel that, right? Initially. A hundred percent. So I did three with the left, three with the right. Now I'm gonna feel that in my normal stock swing. That was nice. Giles, a couple of quick points on the wrist hinge before we show them that drill, how they could flow it into their normal swing. Yeah, of course. So I know a lot of questions will get fired at this. So let's just sort of run through. You will see a golfer like Danny Willett. He will have a lot more wrist set. You will see Xander Shoffle. He'll have a lot less. The key thing is they are just moving their wrists at different amounts that feel better to them. They are still following the push pull mechanism. Some are doing it more than others. Some are doing it earlier than others. That's personalized down to you. So we're showing you how to move the wrist. You can put your thumbprint on it. The next thing is when we are physically pushing with the left hand, I like to imagine it's the heel pad right here. Hence why I said assuming a good grip, if we get that heel pad on top, it's going to be the heel pad that's pushing down on the top part of the grip that creates that setup. Another question I get asked all the time is, Giles, well, how do I get that left wrist flat? Well, a lot of golfers will then try and focus on the actual left wrist and you'll see sort of bowing and it's very, very uncomfortable for a lot of people. Versus if I simply just pull that right wrist back, you can see if I do this on the camera, I've got a little bit of wrist set right there. If I pull that right wrist back, it flattens the wrist off. You don't have to manually manipulate the left wrist. If you simply get that right wrist setting back, it is going to pull that left wrist into a good position. Hence why when we go to the top, we can see that that left wrist is nice and flat right there. And the final question I often get asked is, well, what about the chest rotation? How does that piece will blend in? Well, if I'm working this correctly, especially with the left hand, if I'm pushing that away, my chest is going to turn automatically. Everything's connected right here. It's a sequence, it's a chain reaction. So if we get this club moving on a good plane on the way back, we're feeling that push pull, everything else, the width element, the right arm folding, swinging back on plane, the chest rotation, the hip rotation, it'll all just get pulled along into the correct position. So it takes care of a lot of things. It's sort of one swing thought, one concept to fix five, six, seven different other things. So in terms of practicing this, obviously you can do the left wrist only, right wrist only combo drill that I showed you. But Giles, if someone didn't want the details, they wanted more of like a simple way to flow that into the swing, how would someone do that? Well, I think the first thing is when we are doing this exercise, we're learning the position we're trying to get to. So we're learning how does the right wrist feel? How does left wrist feel? But to get that rhythm, that sort of freedom to the swing, I'll have to do a little swing where I start with the club head past the ball and just get it swinging back with some momentum. When we have the weight of the club there, it's going to help us get that little upward set. As long as we know the little function of how the wrists are working. If you do that here for me, you'll naturally see, you know the position you're trying to get to. You add that flow in, you start to get that rhythm, the club sets up and actually you'll feel like you can get way more speed, like a whip in a sense. If you get that rhythm, you're relaxed, you can really fire the speed into the club head, which is the thing that matters. I also like if you guys are doing this and you notice because you're focusing on your wrists that you tend to get really tight and like it's like a lot of tension there. This is a nice way where I can like loosen up my grip pressure on my arms a little bit, still feel the pushing back, pushing down, pulling right to your point. It's a really nice way to start to feel that just to get a little flow going with that. And if I can hit one Giles, feeling that same, like I'm flowing into that same sort of position as I go back. Yeah, that was correct. Beautiful. All right guys, so getting the wrist hinge in the golf swing, so darn important. Different ways to do it, but that's a nice stock model. Pushing down with the lead hand, pulling back with the right hand. At the end, that little flow drill really feels nice. I would highly encourage you to give that a try as you're doing it. Mr. Giles, if you haven't checked out his channel, we'll link that down below. Great YouTube channel. He does online lessons, golf schools in person. You'll love those. If you guys have any questions, as always, leave us a comment down below. If you enjoyed the video, consider liking, sending to a friend. Thank you for watching. If you liked that and you want to see more on wrist hinge, watch this one next.