Welcome to Play Smart, a game improvement column and podcast from editor Luke Kerr-Dineen to help you play smarter, better golf.
The wonderful, and maddening, truth about swinging a golf club is that there’s no best way to do it. Every Tour player’s golf swing is slightly different. It all depends on your body’s unique strengths and weaknesses. What may be one player’s biggest golf swing asset may cause you to hit worse shots.
One of these moves that has become particularly in vogue in recent years is employing a flexed — or bowed — wrist at the top of your backswing and downswing. Viktor Hovland, Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm and Collin Morikawa all have notably bowed wrists at the top of their swing, and it’s helped each of them become fantastic ball strikers.
Most golfers have some element of flex in their lead wrist, and indeed, you probably do too. But as GOLF Top 100 Teacher Dana Dahlquist writes here, the secret to making this move work for you is to pair lots of rotation with your body on the downswing.
“Your lead wrist is your swing’s steering wheel, but your body remains the engine. The engine can never stall, because stalling may produce a hook,” Dahlquist writes.
And that’s why, in the opinion of Play Smart co-host and certified TPI coach Reed Howard, golfers should be wary about trying to intentionally chase more of it — especially if they lack the mobility to rotate, or struggle generating enough clubhead speed. Those two things could lead to “terrible” shots.
“You will not have enough speed to get the ball off the ground. You won’t be able to hit a long iron well, you won’t be able to hit your driver well, because you may not have the rotational speed to make this kind of golf swing work,” he says.
It’s not that this move is good or bad, it’s just dependent on what you are actually physically capable of doing The key, Howard goes onto say in the podcast, which you can listen to in full above, is to find a good coach who can help match the best swing to you with your body. You’ll save yourself some headaches along the way.
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