The Silver Scot on Using Your Hands

Tommy Armour is a legend of the game and a great teacher, one whom the great teacher Harvey Penick named as an influence on his own teaching. Armour's book How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time was THE golf manual before Hogan's Five Lessons became popular.

I've been posting quite a bit about using your hands lately, so I thought I'd add some of Armour's thoughts from his book. These are some various thoughts from his tenth chapter, called (appropriately enough) The Art of Hitting with the Hands. Where Armour mentions the right hand, you lefties can substitute the left hand. He's just talking about using your TRAILING hand.

Whether you or anybody else calls the pay-off a hit or a swing, I don't care. That's only a matter of terminology. The action is that of whipping the clubhead through the ball with the hands. Not slapping it, waving it, flinging it, stiff-arming it, but whipping it with a tigerish lash.

The great hitters in golf are those who move their hands faster than those whose distance and precision are inferior. That also is the case in sports other than golf. A fighter accomplishes knockouts by having his fists move with devastating speed. Ruth's home-run record was set during seasons when the liveliness of the ball varied, but because The Babe's hands moved faster than those of any other batter, he was supreme as a long hitter. When Jimmy Thomson was consistently the longest driver in golf, motion pictures showed his hands moving at amazing speed.

To let you in on one of the great secrets of good golf, which really isn't a secret at all, one golfer gets more distance because he uses his hands for power, while the other fellow is trying to get distance by using his body.

The long hitter gets his body in position so his hands can work most effectively.

What misleads people into thinking that swinging and hitting are different is principally a matter of the player's temperament. Macdonald Smith and Byron Nelson have been generally identified as swingers because of the graceful appearance of their actions. Hagen and Sarazen were labelled hitters because their common characteristic was to wield their clubs with what appeared to be violent and impetuous slashing.

But, all four of them - and every other great player - had the clubhead coming in with all the speed they could command while retaining steady balance of their bodies.

Hitting the ball a long way isn't a matter of size or weight of the player. It depends on effective use of the hands, rather than on trying to throw the weight of the body into the shot or even, within reasonable limits, lengthening the backswing in the belief that a longer backswing will enable one to accelerate clubhead speed more and get the clubhead moving at maximum speed at contact with the ball.

The more you can get your hands ahead of the clubface in the downswing, the more power you can apply with the right hand.

The late uncocking of the wrists, or the delayed hit, as you may hear the effect called, instinctively causes a decided acceleration of right hand action at the most effective period.

If you'll pause to consider, you will realize that if your hands are behind the ball at impact, you can only scoop the ball up. But if your hands are in front, you've got to smash the ball with lightning speed.

That's a cross-section of what he says, but it gets his main points across. Here are two specific things to note:

• Even lengthening your backswing has limited effect if you don't use your hands. That means flexibility isn't as important as you may have been led to believe.
• If you get your hands ahead of the ball at impact but don't use your hands to get the clubhead to hit the ball at the same time, you won't hit the ball very far.

He says more in the chapter, obviously - I can't print the whole chapter for copyright reasons - but this should be enough to let you know how important using your hands is to getting distance.

How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time is an underused instruction book these days. If more people read it and applied it, we'd be a world of better golfers.

Martin Chuck on "Hand-Controlled Pivots" (Video)

I'll have to come back to this video at a later date, but I've been looking for something like this. Revolution Golf instructor Martin Chuck explains how to let your hands control your pivot to create clubhead speed.



Chuck says this will help older golfers, but note also that he references how Bobby Jones used this technique, so it's not just for older folks!

Most modern players are taught to use their pivot to control their hands (because they tend to overuse their hands), but this is the exact opposite of that technique (although most pros do use a combination of both). I've written about using the momentum of your hands and arms to help pull you through to your finish; Chuck uses the word inertia, which is the same thing.

It's basic physics: An object in motion tends to remain in motion. By using your hands to get the club moving, the club can help you keep moving all the way through your swing. You start the motion by bending your trailing elbow on the backswing, then you straighten it on the downswing just after you strike the ball. This straightening is what creates the momentum to pull you through to your finish.

As I said earlier, I'll come back to this video in a few days. But for now, be aware that this is the same sort of thing you learn when you use the L-to-L drill that I mention every so often. (Here's a link to one of the posts that includes video showing how it's done.) Combine the info from Chuck's video with the L-to-L drill, and you should find it pretty easy to make a hand-controlled pivot.

I know I say this a lot, but the golf swing isn't all that hard. It's just that we spend too much time focusing on trying to do things that would happen on their own if we just focused on the important things. This is one of those important things that will help simplify the game for you.

Xander Schauffele on Hitting It Long

Xander Schauffele did an article for Golf Digest on some of his tips for getting big distance when you're a smaller person. You can follow the link to learn some of his tips and feels, but I want to point out one specific thing he says which is different from what you may have heard most instructors say.



Xander uses a neutral grip, which goes against the advice most instructors give -- that is, that a strong grip makes for a more powerful strike. But Xander's definition of a neutral grip is very interesting. Here's what he says:

One thing that will help you unleash that power at the right moment is your grip. Mine is neutral. For a stock shot, I see only one knuckle on my glove hand when I look down. This grip allows me to hit draws or fades when I want to. It also lets me release the clubhead into the ball like I’m hammering that nail. If your grip is too strong, you can’t fully release the clubhead, typically resulting in a loss of speed. And a grip that’s too weak makes it tough to square the clubface at impact, so you lose control.

You get that? He can only see ONE knuckle, not two or three. Take a good look at that photo above from the article. Xander also notes that he wants to club shaft almost vertical at address for a drive, not leaning forward. That's important because it works with the one-knuckle grip to get the hands in the proper position at impact. Make sure you read what he says about the one-knuckle grip, shaft lean and ball position at address so you don't turn your grip too weak.

He says these things will help you to get better hand action so you hit the ball farther. He certainly ought to know!

There are several interesting ideas in Xander's article, but this one about the grip really stood out to me. It's pretty clear that Xander is trying to move freely, not "hold" anything in an attempt to create some special position. That mindset change in and of itself might help you get more distance than you do now.

Bob Toski on Feeling Your Hands

The Mouse was a formidable opponent though he was never very big. He won 11 or so major tournaments (five on the PGA Tour) but he's probably best known for his instruction. This quote is from his book How to Feel a Real Golf Swing.



Modern instructors are finally beginning to teach that you need to use your hands in your swing. However, teaching "feel" is never easy, and teaching it from a book is even harder. Yet Toski does an admirable job in this section from a chapter called -- appropriately enough -- Feeling Your Hands.

"Some players might as well stick their hands in their pockets," said the great golf instructor Seymour Dunn, "for all the use they make of them." Think back to the swing in the park [Toski was talking about a child's playground swing in an earlier chapter]. Let's say it's not a swing now, but a tennis ball hanging from a rope attached to the swing crossbar. You find it at rest and you want to start it swinging. How do you begin? Do you butt it with your body or nudge it with your shoulder? Do you push the rope with your arm? Or do you set it gently swinging with an easy push of your hand so that the ball climbs and falls back before you send it on its way again? And if you use your hand, do you clench it tightly or hold it just firmly enough to start it on the natural path limited by the length of the rope? Do you stiffen your wrist or let it flex? Which will keep the ball moving without bowing or jerking the rope? In a similar way, do you "flick" your wrist slightly at the bottom of the club's arc to add speed and send it forward faster? Or do you twist your body and lunge forward to quicken the club's pace?

The freedom and motion that we spoke of in Chapter 1 emanate from the hands. The hands start the clubhead moving, keep it on its natural path and sustain its centrifugal motion. It would take very little movement on your part to get that tennis ball moving at its maximum speed, and most of the movement would come from your hands. And so with your golf swing.

The hands, Dunn said, are the leaders of the swing. And that surprises most golfers. You see them on the practice range struggling to lift the club with their arms or pull it with their shoulders or help it along with their legs and trunk. They twist and turn and slap and hit, clutching the club in a grip so tight their hands lose all of their natural power. "Most poor golfers," Ernest Jones said, "merely use their hands to hold the club. They don't understand that it is through the hands and fingers alone that they can influence the behavior of the club." [p20-21]

Think about how you throw a ball or swing a racket or bat. You don't freeze your wrists; you allow them to move. But neither do you leave them "floppy" like a wet noodle, bending all over the place; rather, you tend to finish with your hands and forearms in a fairly straight line. (And just a note: If your lead wrist is bent backward after you hit the ball, you aren't letting your shoulders turn fully into your finish. The natural "pull" of the club as your wrists uncock on the downswing is to point the clubshaft straight out from you, so your shaft and arms form a nice Y-shape when seen from the front. If you don't get that, you're interfering with the natural motion somehow.)

In fact, I think that's why so many teachers and players -- John Daly comes to mind -- practice a one-armed swing with only their lead hand on the club. As the club swings into its finish, your lead arm and club tend to remain in a straight line as they swing upward. Again, to get that same kind of wrist action naturally with a two-hand grip, you have to let your shoulders turn fully into your finish.

Practicing the feel of your swing is a nice thing to work on during the winter since you don't have to hit balls. And Toski's description of the process may help you wrap your mind around that elusive thing we call "feel."