Tips for moving your wrists

Here are some tips to help you position your wrists.

Go (in your mind) to the top of your swing and then get the feeling of starting the down swing by the two different methods by which you started the carry back. That is, the first time feel that you start the down swing with hand and wrist movement only, the second time feel that you start it from the knees.

Now if you were observant of feel in your first experiment (the carry back), this second one will give you quite a vivid idea of what the beginning of the down movement should feel like. Of course it is the movement starting from the knees that is correct; it enables you to come down without using the hands actively. You will feel your hands, arms, and wrists coming down broken back—the wrists beginning to drop down towards the ball. This is what we mean by "dropping the wrists from the top" and "passive hand Work." So at each of the points we have examined there are
two feels-the activity from the knees and the passivity

of hands and wrists. The most notable difference is that at point 1 the wrists are straight while at point 2 they are broken. How they break on the up swing is our next study.

This introduces the question of tension, how tightly we hold our club and consequently our wrists—for if we grip the club with a stranglehold, are  wrists will become inflexible. We want them and indeed our whole body flexible; so our grip should be light and sensitive.

As we take the club head back, from the knees, though the wrists have not taken part in the carry back, they will have been tightened—to hold the club shaft in a straight line with the left arm. How much should we tighten here? Just as little as will serve to carry away the club head where it should go; any more and you lose flexibility.

Those of us who have been in the Navy know what it means to "take up the slack"—"take the strain"—"haul away." They are three degrees of tension. Well, in golf we must always take up the slack, but we are never at haul tension until close behind the ball. Mostly we just use just enough tension to take the strain—to feel taut without feeling tight.

Now, having taken up the strain put on our wrists by the carry back from the pivot, we find that as the club head begins to gather speed and momentum on the way back and up, the strain on the wrists lessens (so our tension on them can lessen) and towards the top of the swing they again become perfectly free from all strain. The tension we noticed on the way back was forced on us by the weight of the club—and the earlier we can get rid of this on the way up the better for our swing. And the tension will certainly decrease as experience teaches us how very little of it is needed, as we become familiar with the feel of a good swing. A good slow waggle will take a surprising amount of tension off our uptake.

Next, when do the wrists break, when should they break? This is an important point, and I did not make up my mind about it until I had made a close study of it in the swings of Lady Amory (Miss Wethered), Harry Vardon, Bobby Jones, and Henry Cotton. My conclusion is that the wrists should break as late as possible.
In order to break the wrists as late as possible on the back swing, we must carry our hands back quite a long way—indeed as far as 'possible, before we break. "It feels like an eternity!” a pupil once remarked to me. Well it does if you have always done the opposite: that is broken your wrists as the initial movement of the carry back. Now you feel your wrists will never break as you go up—and as a matter of fact that is a true feeling, because they actually only break when you are beginning to feel you are on the way down.

Now let me describe an important little local movement hidden in this part of the swing—the reverse. The reverse is the part of the swing in which the club head is thrown over and pulled down. It requires a special name because it has a special feel, a feel curiously detached from that of the rest of the swing. We have our main feel of control and power down in our nether regions, but at the moment of reverse we are conscious of something happening up above, which is not in accordance with what we are doing down below.