You have clubhead throwaway.
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The secret of golf, the holy grail of every golfer, trying to figure out what it is that the PGA Tour pros do that you don’t, the elusive key to more distance and accuracy, does it exist?
The secret of golf exists!
Homer Kelley spent 28 years researching his golf swing mechanics bible, The Golfing Machine. He named it and proclaimed it, ‘the secret’. Ben Hogan figured out that it was in the hands. Some golfers try it—and get worse. Many teachers teach the exact opposite, fearing too much of it. What is it?
Clubhead lag is the secret of golf.
Clubhead lag is simply defined as the condition of the hands leading the clubhead through impact. More exactly, it is the sensation of a lagging clubhead sweet spot and a stressed shaft on the area of the hands that the shaft stress puts pressure on.
Clubhead lag is a feel.
If you don’t have clubface control, you can’t use it properly. If you slice, trying to do it and getting it half-right can make the ball go farther to the right. In our first two articles (AutoSuccess August and September ‘03) we discussed the proper grip and how to eliminate the slice through clubface control.
If you read and applied this information, you may find yourself with a new problem, the hook. To curb this right-to-left ball flight you need some lag, which is clubhead control. Most golfers that learn to lag the clubhead, learn to lag it by trying not to hook it. They learn it almost entirely subconsciously, which is why most world-class players that have written books, don’t mention clubhead lag much, if at all. They have it and don’t even know it.
Clubhead lag can be learned.
The place to start programming clubhead lag is in the waggle. Far more than a haphazard wiggling of the club to loosen tension—pre-swing, the waggle can be a powerful tool that lets you rehearse the difference between ‘address hands’ and ‘impact hands’.
In the waggle, the right wrist bends straight back, flattening the left wrist. Let’s call that condition ‘Impact hands’ (pic 1).
With impact hands and with the body pointed straight away, the clubhead is nowhere near the ball. The easiest way to bring these impact hands into impact is by pivoting your torso forward of its address attitude (pic 2).
It’s easier to maintain clubhead lag if your torso (pivot) keeps pivoting through the swing.
Add the straightening of the right arm (without straightening the right wrist) and you can see how force can be applied to the ball with out clubhead throwaway (pic 3).
Clubhead throwaway is the opposite of clubhead lag.
This through-the-ball procedure will guarantee that you sustain lag through impact. But besides getting the hands into their impact attitude, how did you create the lag and its pressure to start with?
Clubhead lag is created in the change of direction.
At the top of the swing, or end of a less than full swing, the momentum of the clubhead is going away from the ball, so is the pivoting torso. When the downstroke begins, lag pressure is loaded onto either the left arm by the chest, the right hand by the right arm, the last three fingers of the left hand by the left wrist, the right forefinger by the resistance to change by the clubhead, or all of the above. The easiest to monitor and feel is the right forefinger.
This clubhead lag ‘pressure point’ which Homer Kelley defined and all the great players have employed is in the hook of the right forefinger. Many golfers do not employ a ‘trigger’ finger (AutoSuccess Sept.’03), but the advantages of doing so are many. Just as a carpenter would have his thumb on top of the hammer handle to help him guide the hammer head, the golfer can use his trigger finger to guide the clubhead through impact and beyond. Obviously the carpenter’s thumb does little to add to the main sources of power in hammering, namely the wrist and the arm, and so is the case with the golfer. The golfer uses his unwinding torso and straightening right arm for much of his power, but he feels it in the right forefinger because, like the carpenter’s thumb, it is directly behind the ‘hit’ and the hammer/clubhead.
Clubhead lag is felt primarily in the ‘triggered’ right forefinger.
When this change-of-direction occurs and the pressure is loaded on the trigger finger, the inertia of the clubhead will also cause the clubshaft to bend. Done correctly the start down can also add to the cocking in the left wrist (pic 4).
This slightly bent or ‘stressed’ shaft and additional wrist cock gives the golfer potential power that can be utilized if maintained long enough in the downswing.
To sustain the lag, the pressure that created the lag must also be maintained.
If not the clubhead’s momentum will cause it to ‘run away’ from the right forefinger and create clubhead throwaway.
Imagine pushing a shopping-cart downhill. On its own the shopping cart would roll slowly down the hill. But if you started to run, the cart would go faster, and you will have created lag pressure on your hands where you are ‘pushing’ the cart. Obviously you aren’t pushing the cart with your hands, you are doing it with your legs, but you feel it in your hands. Now, let’s say if you stopped running as fast as you started to, and really slowed down, the cart would keep going and you would lose the lag pressure. Same as the golfer that starts the downswing very fast but can’t maintain that speed, lost pressure.
To sustain lag pressure you must maintain the speed of your change of direction.
So, the ideal application is steady speed. This sustains the lag pressure, keeps the shaft loaded, and stores the wrist cock deep into the downswing where the potential power can be best utilized (pic 5).
The wrist will uncock and the shaft will unload all by themselves, without you losing any pressure on your trigger finger. The clubhead stays behind the hands all the way to the follow-through (pic 6)
sustaining the all-important lag and compression of the ball by the clubhead.
Great ball-strikers sustain the lag well past the ball.
Ideally, lag pressure is constant to the end of the swing as a goal and a feel. In reality, it might be lost just after the follow through as the club swings past the hands in most swings. But you should try to never lose it.
Most slicers have lost lag well before impact and their hands are far behind the clubhead when contact is made. But many teachers and most slicers think just the opposite. High-speed video says otherwise. People who can curve it left are often ‘leakage hookers’, which means the only reason the ball is curving left is that throwaway has incorrectly closed the clubface too early.
If you have fixed your grip and your slice and are hitting it too far to the left, you newly developed lag will keep the clubface open long enough to straighten out your ball-flight.
You should now be a very effective striker of the ball, with both clubface and clubhead control.
