Two Simple Drills To Stop Your Hands Over Rotating In The Golf Swing (Video) - Lesson by PGA Pro Pete Styles
Two Simple Drills To Stop Your Hands Over Rotating In The Golf Swing (Video) - Lesson by PGA Pro Pete Styles

So now we are going to look at creating two little drills that should help with the understanding of how much hand action, how much release you should have, and how to avoid the over rotation and the over release.

The first drill is pretty simple, the pitching wedge goes around about a 100 yards, normally 120 yards. I am only going to pick a target that’s 60 yards away, so it's about half of my standard distance. I am then going to pitch balls towards it. Now, just by nature of picking something that’s only half distance, your brain and your body simply understands I don’t need to try that hard with my hands to hit this and I can actually hit this with almost dead wrists, so back and through with almost dead wrists, shift pitching the ball forward. There's no need to flick the hands over, so it's going to be back to hip level and through to hip level with the hands, feeling like the hands really aren’t going to be overly involved in this shot, and if I can do this, I'm just going to hold the club off in the follow-through, pitch the ball here, turn it to that position, so you can see that and I have had literally no release of the hands through the ball that’s not come over this way. Learning that exercise is a great way of just establishing and understanding what hand action is, what it feels like and how you can stop doing it too much. The next exercise is a little follows on from that a little bit more in-depth. This one's just changing your ball flight from what might have felt like an overdraw or a hook previously to actually hitting a little bit of a fade, so we have changed to a six sign this time, picking a spot out here on the driving range and then picking another spot that’s about ten yards left of your intended target. So, you might have a couple of flags that you could aim for, a couple of trees you could aim for on the range, one down the center, which is actually your intended target to finish. The one that is your intended target line it's going to be about 10 yards left, and I want to set my body up facing to the actual target line that’s going to, the ball's going to finish on, so where do I want the ball to finish, but then I'm going to make a swing that feels left and a club face that feels open. So I am going to try and actually cut across my intended target line and just feel like I hit little cuts. With the understanding the ball will generally start where the club face is aiming and then it will move, from left to right in the sky, if the swing path is more left than the club face, so you might have felt previously as if your club face was always to the left of the swing path and this is just exactly the opposite try and get the feeling like the face is to the right of the intended swing path. So as I set up, I am going to pick my ultimate target line, I'm going to swing very much left of that. I'm going to hold the face off and try and hit little cuts. I don’t know if you can see the ball moving left to right, it’s moving about 10 or 15 yards left to right, but again look at my follow-through position. So I've hit down on this, I've held this one open. I have no release of the club face, kept the face pointing to the right of the intended swing path and really made the ball move quite dramatically from left to right. If my problem in the past had been too much hand action going this way, the shot I’ve just hit there would feel ultimately quite satisfying because it’s the exact correction from my previous fault. Practice those two exercises, and see if you can reduce the reliance of hand action. 2016-05-02

So now we are going to look at creating two little drills that should help with the understanding of how much hand action, how much release you should have, and how to avoid the over rotation and the over release.

The first drill is pretty simple, the pitching wedge goes around about a 100 yards, normally 120 yards. I am only going to pick a target that’s 60 yards away, so it's about half of my standard distance. I am then going to pitch balls towards it. Now, just by nature of picking something that’s only half distance, your brain and your body simply understands I don’t need to try that hard with my hands to hit this and I can actually hit this with almost dead wrists, so back and through with almost dead wrists, shift pitching the ball forward.

There's no need to flick the hands over, so it's going to be back to hip level and through to hip level with the hands, feeling like the hands really aren’t going to be overly involved in this shot, and if I can do this, I'm just going to hold the club off in the follow-through, pitch the ball here, turn it to that position, so you can see that and I have had literally no release of the hands through the ball that’s not come over this way. Learning that exercise is a great way of just establishing and understanding what hand action is, what it feels like and how you can stop doing it too much.

The next exercise is a little follows on from that a little bit more in-depth. This one's just changing your ball flight from what might have felt like an overdraw or a hook previously to actually hitting a little bit of a fade, so we have changed to a six sign this time, picking a spot out here on the driving range and then picking another spot that’s about ten yards left of your intended target. So, you might have a couple of flags that you could aim for, a couple of trees you could aim for on the range, one down the center, which is actually your intended target to finish.

The one that is your intended target line it's going to be about 10 yards left, and I want to set my body up facing to the actual target line that’s going to, the ball's going to finish on, so where do I want the ball to finish, but then I'm going to make a swing that feels left and a club face that feels open. So I am going to try and actually cut across my intended target line and just feel like I hit little cuts.

With the understanding the ball will generally start where the club face is aiming and then it will move, from left to right in the sky, if the swing path is more left than the club face, so you might have felt previously as if your club face was always to the left of the swing path and this is just exactly the opposite try and get the feeling like the face is to the right of the intended swing path. So as I set up, I am going to pick my ultimate target line, I'm going to swing very much left of that. I'm going to hold the face off and try and hit little cuts. I don’t know if you can see the ball moving left to right, it’s moving about 10 or 15 yards left to right, but again look at my follow-through position.

So I've hit down on this, I've held this one open. I have no release of the club face, kept the face pointing to the right of the intended swing path and really made the ball move quite dramatically from left to right. If my problem in the past had been too much hand action going this way, the shot I’ve just hit there would feel ultimately quite satisfying because it’s the exact correction from my previous fault. Practice those two exercises, and see if you can reduce the reliance of hand action.