Passive Hands

I've been playing OK lately but not striking the ball quite as solidly as I would like (so what's new?). Anyway, I went to the driving range to check a few things out. Having looked in the wrong places first, I then stepped back and thought about what was really active and variable in my swing. I then realised that I have a pretty active hand action which certainly gives a feeling of pent up power but actually controlled / manipulated the club too much.

Basically, I took a pitching wedge and made some full swings with very passive hands - essentially taking them out of any manipulation of the club to get it in the right position. Suddenly, I was swinging better and striking the ball far more solidly. By removing the focus on the hands, I transfered responsibility to the shoulder turn and swing of the arms - a much better feeling. With that, the hands hinged and released automatically in response to the swing.

May be worth a try if you're not hitting the ball quite right. Now, I just have to see if it holds up in the heat of battle out on the course.....

It will hold up ... but you will have a battle with the hands when you want to hit the ball harder. Be careful to remember that as you SWING harder that the hands will lag more, so you need to help them catch up a bit more, or else you will have a lot of pushes.

That's a good point about the extra lag.

Another thing I've noticed is that without the focus on the hands controlling the club, my grip pressure is lighter with less tension in the arms. As a result, I'm feeling more connected to the overall swing in the sense that I can actually feel the swing part as opposed to the hitting part which I think the active hand action encouraged.

My feeling right now is that I can generate the same clubhead speed with an easier, smoother swing. That's got to be good! I'll report back on how I get on.....

Sounds all good! A help in the grip will be to keep the pressures the exact same throughout...it's easy to increase it in the move down and that has the effect of added tension in the wrists. Also, if there are any pressure points, they should be in the leading hand's pad against the pinky and ring finger (affectivly holding the club against the pad), then in the trailing hand, the first index finger and top pad of the thumb. All these pressures are still "light" but when compared to the others they will be the dominant ones that should be "felt" the most.

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So, to report back, took the passive hand approach out onto the course. As Greg pointed out, the greater hand lag on the fuller shots was apparent. On the first three holes, the tendency was for the club face to remain slightly open through impact, making the ball tail off towards the end of its flight. Therefore went back to a more active release of the hands through impact.

What the whole passive hand approach has got me to realise, though, is that I had been overemphasising the hands in order to manipulating the club. Using the hands certainly puts the idea of hitting into your mind, as opposed to swinging.

Reducing the hand use means my focus on the swing is now elsewhere. For example, I am making sure I get a full chest turn (using the chest to turn the shoulders), thereby achieving a much better top of backswing position more naturally. (I think I had been using the hands to position the club at the top as opposed to swinging it there with the body and arms.)

These are all pretty small things, but they add up. Probably, it's those little 1% plus changes that make a big difference cumulatively - certainly to the overall cohesion of the swing which, I believe, generates power and distance.

The battle with the hands is one of the most constant problems a golfer faces, it will always be there, even Tiger Woods has problems in that department, especially where generating power is concerned as Greg said..

I prefer to concentrate on the turn/swing plane most of the time but twice a week or so I work on the hands i.e grip, pressure, returning the hands square and returning the hands to the ball well before the club head gets there.

I think people often make the mistake of not going over old ground when practising and it tends to lead to problems leaking into your game which develop unchecked. Golf is one of those games where you are always battling against errors. I don't think I've ever played a round when something hasn't gone wrong be it hands, swing plane, the turn or whatever. The idea is to know what to look for and identify the problem straight away. That way you might just rescue the round.

oldweasel, I prefer active hands.

Passive hands is a confusing term. The hands can be used in so many ways, which way are they used passively in this case? The term is often used to include the arms as well. Let's look at it from different angles, as it were.

One thing passive hands is used for is to prevent casting. It's easy to understand why casting is unwanted but it's also just as easy to confuse with maintaining proper angle of the arms and club. In order to maintain that angle from the top to impact, one must activate the hands to hold the club in position until it releases from this position naturally and subsequently strikes the ball. The feeling one gets when maintaining this position in such a fashion is quite similar to the feeling one gets when casting. Because of this similarity in feel, few actually try to maintain this position. We could maintain this position by manipulating tempo and rhythm but it is so tricky to do it that way, I think only an expert would achieve any kind of success with that method.

Look at maintaining a flat left wrist and square clubface at the top versus bringing the club up to parallel at the top. The former requires active hands, the latter can be done with passive hands. But anything can happen with passive hands, because they are passive and susceptible to the throes of the body.

Certainly, swinging versus hitting comes to mind. But what are we doing with the club in all instances? We're swinging it to and fro, back and forth, up and down. Even if we're "hitting". I don't like this distinction of swinging and hitting because it presumes that one of them is wrong and the other is right. Not only that, it is also misleading. In my opinion, they are both wrong because they make the distinction of right and wrong. I don't make that distinction, I simply use what works, discard what doesn't. None of which is wrong. And what works for me is active hands. I do control the club with them after all, might as well control them as precisely as I can. In my opinion, passive hands do not lead to precision, quite the contrary. I prefer to think in terms of pulling versus pushing, it's much appropriate. Pulling would be like swinging in this case and pushing would be like hitting. But look at where it gets us, right back to maintaining a flat left wrist (pushing) versus bringing the club up to parallel with passive arms (pulling).

How about width and length of swing arc. I notice that when a good player wants more width, he maintains the clubhead much farther away from the ball than otherwise. It seems to me that he could not do that with passive hands. In fact, if he did use passive hands, he'd bring the club up and flop it up to parallel much sooner and closer to the ball than otherwise. If instead he used active arms to maintain the flat left wrist position to the top, the clubhead would be farther from the ball at this point and the arc would be wider and longer. Bear in mind that a wider and longer swing arc is always associated with power and distance.

Passive hands and squaring the clubface. In my experience, when I used passive hands, I could not produce more power than what the mechanics of my swing dictated. And passive hands were a limiting aspect of those mechanics. As I kept my hands passive, to produce more power I had to accelerate the shoulders, in doing so, I was leaving the clubface open. The result is obvious. This particular mechanism is due to the confusion between passive hands and passive arms. As I learn to swing my body to drive the club, I learn to twist and turn the shoulders to swing the arms to swing the club. I could not accelerate the hands through impact because I did not have the required motors to do so: Passive hands and arms. I changed all that. Now I can accelerate the hands as much as my strength will allow and the clubface will always be square at impact. It's a function of the release mechanism. No matter how fast one swings the club, release will happen with proportionately greater speed as long as the hands and arms are active in this role.

It is important to make the distinction between maintaining a flat left wrist at the top and maintaining this position, casting, forcibly releasing the club with active hands. The three are not the same. In the first instance, all the hands are doing is maintaining a position. In the second instance, the hands are releasing the club early. In the last instance, the hands are forcibly releasing the club early and generate the speed which would otherwise be produced by a natural release.

It is also important to understand our perspective in this matter. We may perceive that we are swinging shorter if we maintain a flat left wrist at the top versus if we bring the club up to parallel. It's only a perception and we can change it easily. From this misunderstanding of our perception, we don't understand how we can swing shorter and still produce more power. But we are not swinging shorter, in fact we're swinging wider and longer because the clubhead happens to be farther away from the ball when we maintain a flat left wrist at the top. Think of the tip "shorten your swing for more power". You're tricking your mind into believing that your swing is shorter when it's actually longer and wider. Such is perception.

OK, there's obviously some confusion as to what I meant by passive hands.

What I meant was keeping the hands relatively quiet in the backswing as opposed to manipulating the club with the hands independent of the arms. As a result, the club's rleationship with the left arm is essentially maintained (without undue rotation, etc). There's no implication that the hands are held rigid or prevented from achieveing a proper hinge at the top of the backswing.

Passive hands, used in this way, actually help prevent casting as the passivity leads to the hands lagging the arms, and, presumably the shoulders. The passive hands delay the release, again not promoting casting.

As Greg pointed out, the risk of keeing the hands overly passive comes when you're cranking up the power - it is possible to lag too much, to the extent that the release is mistimed.

When releasing the hands is that usually done naturally at the bottom of the swing or is it a consicious movement at the bottom of the swing and for a rh which hand does it?

I think it should happen naturally, shouldn't need to be forced.

Thanks, thats what I thought. I'm going to have to go in for a tune up.

I played my 1st round yesterday with more "passive hands" as well. Greg hit it right on the nose. If you increase that grip pressure, especially in the RIGHT hand, you will hit pushes, fades and slices (depending on the club path).

Once I "loosened" up my arms, wrists and hands and just let them go along for the ride, I was hitting great shots.

You have to commit to the shot and just let it happen. Don't force it

Good post Random I have fallen into some old habits and have gotten a little out of sorts with my swing. I'll have to relax and let my hands and arms just go along for the ride.

If you are strong right handed, it can tend to be overactive. It is fairly common problem. I try sometimes practising hitting the ball with just my left arm and hand, training it to be more dominant, bringing a balance to my swing.

Hope that helps.