The Only Wrist Hinge Drill You’ll Ever Need (Simple Golf Lesson)

Whether you're a beginner golfer, a seasoned golfer, or a touring professional, one key part of the swing that everybody must master is how to work the wrist correctly. By doing so you'll be able to control things like the club face, the plane of your swing, and generate amazing effortless speed. Now the first thing that I want to say is the way we work the wrist is exactly the same for every single club in the bag. So apply what I tell you today across the board. Now one of the key things that I like to just explain is what each hand does. For our lead hand, for me as a right-handed golfer, the left hand, one of the biggest roles that it has is to do what we call radial and ulna. Now do not worry, I'm just going to throw these words out there for some of you who like them. I will simplify and explain what each of those words mean. So radial deviation, you bring your thumb towards you, hinging the club up. Ulna deviation, you throw the club down away from you. Now that motion is a really powerful motion. It gives us hinge, it creates lag, but most importantly it releases it. So essentially the left wrist is there to, or lead wrist is there to hinge the club up and down. Really if I switch to this angle, you can kind of see this replicates what lag looks like and how we release it. The second bit is the trail wrist. Now the trail wrist for me is more about controlling the club and getting it, setting it up on plane really nicely. So if I work the trail wrist, I want to be working it rather than up and down, more back and forward. So this is going to be called extension where we create cup and flexion where we create the bow. Now, if I do that here, you can see extension is going to get that face pointing more down to the ground. So that's going to be great if you're a golfer that struggles with an open clubface, but it also helps me create this beautiful top of the backswing arm structure right here to where we can create lovely lag, control the face, get that shaft lean, yada, yada, yada. Let's now go through actually how we piece this together. So the first thing that I like to do, get rid of the golf ball. Let's grip the club with just the left hand. Let's get used to learning to just hinge that club straight up, just like so. Now from here, you'll start to be able to see how you can get quite a bit of momentum into the club head as you do this, this with the trail hand. So with a good grip, set it back on itself, come back through, set it back, come back through. So now you can see how one creates more of an up and down motion. One creates more of a side to side motion. Now, if I blend those together, I start to get sort of this motion that looks a little bit more like a 45 degree angle. Couple it with then a bit of rotation, club starts to go back on plane. I can load the club up beautifully, get the face into a great position. Arms can come down. I can get that beautiful release and start to fold things up. You can form a golf swing very easily with this motion. Let's talk about the first bit, which is how do we learn how to load this club correctly in the backswing? Take your right hand, hold it in front of you just like so. Now, what I want you to do is imagine first and foremost, you hike your right shoulder up, you pull your right shoulder back, and then you drop that right shoulder down. When you do this, you will feel your scapula drop a little bit. This is where we can engage the scapula. Now, that sensation you've got there, I want you to keep that the whole time, feeling the scapula down. Now, as you do this now, swing to the top, keeping that scapula down and get that palm pointing to the sky. You'll feel like your elbow is underneath the palm, is underneath your wrist, and you'll feel like that scapula is down. Not the scapula forwards, scapula down. So, if you're a golfer who struggles with anything like this or an overswing, you're going to want to do this movement. So, hold the wrist in front of you, shoulder up, back down. Then from there, swing to the top, that classic holding a tray. You'll feel your scapula down, elbow under your wrist, palm pointing to the sky. If I do that now with a golf club, up, back, down. Awesome. Now, swing to the top, palm to the sky, elbow underneath. Look at that top of backswing position. Beautiful width right there. If I place my left arm on, you can see how that's already gone into what we would class as some radial deviation right there. So, you can see how it all blends together. This is an amazing drill. So, here's what you're going to do. You're going to grab the club in front of you. You're going to feel that scapula drop down, just like we've done here. Now, you're going to hinge the club, mainly focusing on the back of the right wrist here, but just hinge the club without moving your hands too much. So, notice here how my shoulder blade fills down, my scapula fills down, my elbows in front of my body, and my wrists are fully hinged right here. The face is toe up to maybe slightly leaning down to the ground. This is preset my arm structure here. Now, if you've watched any of my recentering videos, I love to feel the right shoulder pull behind me over the center line to keep me nice and centered. All you're going to do is from this position, turn to the top, pull that shoulder behind you. There'll be a little bit of arm lift, but now you're in a awesome top of back swing position to where you can come down. If I hit a shot, I have an injury in my right shoulder, meaning that I can't really do this at speed. You will see me get across the line, kind of ignore that. It's just an old injury that I have. If I do start to accidentally rotate my arm, I get a huge impingement in my spine. So, do not worry about that. Kind of take this with a pinch of salt as my demonstration. I'm not the best at demonstrating this, but here, hinge it. Now, from here, you're going to start from this position, turn to the top, hit from there. Here's what it will look like. I'll try and do my best impression of this. Here, to the top, and through. Now, that is a beautiful strike. It might actually hit the flag. That's probably about two foot away, actually. I should do that more often. But you can see there how it's able to really keep me wide. That's such an important piece. Your goal for the collapses, you want to feel that scapula down, the right wrist hinged back on itself, and feel that at the top, that palm pointing to the sky. That is the crucial part of the backswing. Now, for my favorite bit, the downswing. Let me explain the key concept. Okay, so in the backswing, we have a combination of a little bit of radial, so thumb coming up, left thumb coming up, little bit of right wrist extension. That's that faldo preset drill. We get to the top. Now, as we start down, I want you to focus on your lead thumb. This is the key one. What I see so many golfers do is they get to the top, and their first movement is they go straight into what we class as ulna deviation, which is where you throw the thumb away from you. They go straight into that straight away. This is this casting motion that I see so many golfers do. So you can see I've lost all of my radial hinge, which is lag. So what we find with the best players in the world is they accelerate their arms down so that at roughly halfway down, they are at maximum radial deviation. Their thumb is still pointing up to the sky right here. Now, from this position, they're getting their arms back in front of them. Then here's the secret sauce. They throw their left thumb down past the ball. So they feel like they're going to point that thumb down past the ball. Now, a really cool demo that I like is this one. I like to grab an alignment stick, hold it up in front of me just like so, place it in the ground. Now, if I do the Nick Fauto preset drill, so I go hinge it up, hinge it here, and then stand tall, you can see that the club's in front of me. Now, if I said, right, point your thumb away from you as much as you can, but slightly past. So somewhere over here, watch what happens to the club head. The club head goes away. So it goes wide. So this will stop you topping the ball, thinning the ball. It'll stop that horrible chicken wing, but it'll also get your hands past the ball and square the face. Do this with me. So stand up. If you're doing this like this, you'll not be physically letting that thumb go. So it's a great, or going into older deviation. It's a great way with a little bit of forearm rotation to get that club squaring up. So then you can walk into the bottom of this Fauto preset drill. Great. Do that same feeling. You can see, look, I can deliver beautiful shaft lean. And now from there, if I step in and hit a shot with that feeling, I'm now going to be able to recreate that same feeling in my swing. So Fauto preset down, thumb points past the ball. Let me try and recreate that feeling all in one go. And you can see there how I'm able to take a beautiful divot. And that is going to allow me to square that face up more consistently. Now, the faster you let that go, the more speed you're going to generate. So right wrist is the extension piece. That's the backswing with the scapula down in the downswing. We keep that radial until we're ready to release those angles out, which is then where we go into that ulna.