Should you hinge your wrists? Keep them soft? Rotate them to square the clubface? Release them through impact? For a golfer who is learning the game or beginning to improve, advice about the wrists can quickly become contradictory. Yet consciously trying to control every wrist movement is rarely the best way to learn. Modern knowledge of the golf swing allows us to revisit an idea that Manuel de la Torre was advocating decades ago: the wrists play an essential role in speed and clubface control, but that does not mean you should constantly try to manipulate them. For golfers in the early stages of their development, understanding that distinction can remove a great deal of unnecessary complexity.
Watch enough golf instruction online and it does not take long for the confusion to begin. “Hinge your wrists more.” “Keep the lead wrist flat.” “Don’t break your wrists.” “Relax your hands.” “Hold the angles.” “Release the trail hand.” “Take your hands out of the swing.” Every one of those instructions can make sense in a particular context, for a particular golfer trying to correct a particular fault. Put them all together and give them to someone who is still learning to strike the ball consistently, however, and they can create more problems than they solve.
So perhaps it is worth starting again with a much simpler question: what should your wrists actually do during the golf swing?
The short answer might be this: they need to be able to move. But you probably do not need to tell them exactly how to move at every stage of the swing.
The idea itself is not new. When we first wrote about wrist action several years ago, we drew heavily on the teaching of Manuel de la Torre. The highly respected American instructor regarded much of wrist action as a consequence of swinging the club rather than something golfers should consciously manufacture. The tools available to analyse the golf swing have developed enormously since then, but de la Torre’s fundamental idea is perhaps more useful today than ever — provided we add some important nuance.
Your wrists are not supposed to remain motionless
Let’s clear up one important misunderstanding immediately. Telling a golfer not to become excessively “handsy” does not mean that the wrists should remain rigid throughout the swing.
The human wrist has several different ways of moving. It can flex and extend, while it can also move through radial and ulnar deviation — in simple terms, movements towards the thumb side and little-finger side of the wrist. These movements are not entirely independent either. Biomechanical research has shown that flexion-extension and radial-ulnar deviation interact, with wrist position in one plane affecting the available movement in another.
[INSERT INFOGRAPHIC: THE FOUR NATURAL WRIST MOVEMENTS HERE]
During a golf swing, these movements contribute to the organisation of the club, the orientation of the clubface and the production and transfer of speed. Trying to completely “lock” the wrists would therefore make little more sense than attempting to swing without allowing the elbows to bend.
The real problem for a golfer in the early stages of improvement is something different: confusing natural wrist movement with consciously manipulating the clubface.
One common amateur tendency is to start the backswing by deliberately rolling the wrists, almost as though the hands have to take immediate control of the clubhead. The wrists will inevitably change position during the backswing, but that does not mean there is a magical hand rotation that automatically places the club in the correct position.
For a beginner, the distinction is fundamental: allowing a joint to move is not the same thing as trying to consciously control that joint during a movement lasting only a couple of seconds.
Manuel de la Torre was asking this question decades ago
Manuel de la Torre is not simply a historical name being used to lend authority to an old theory. In 1986, he became the first recipient of the PGA of America’s PGA Teacher of the Year Award. His teaching career spanned decades, much of it at Milwaukee Country Club, and his philosophy was largely built around making the golf swing easier to understand rather than more complicated.
That philosophy is particularly interesting today because it ran against a temptation that has arguably become even stronger in the age of YouTube, Instagram and social media: breaking the swing into so many individual components that the golfer eventually attempts to consciously command every part of the body.
De la Torre’s approach was built around the movement of the club. In his teaching, wrist action was largely a response to the swinging motion rather than an independent action that had to be deliberately created at precisely the right moment.
Modern biomechanics can describe what actually happens at the joints far more precisely than instructors could several decades ago. But as a teaching concept for a golfer who is still building a repeatable strike, de la Torre’s philosophy retains considerable value.
Why?
Because a beginner does not need to understand six different wrist positions before learning to present the clubface consistently to the ball.
First, he or she needs to develop a simple relationship with the golf club.
Before worrying about your wrists, look at how you hold the club
This is probably one of the most important practical points in the entire discussion.
Golf instruction has traditionally spent a great deal of time discussing which fingers should apply pressure and how lightly the club should be held. Today, pressure sensors allow coaches and researchers to actually measure how golfers apply force to the grip throughout the swing.
And some of the results are surprisingly counter-intuitive.
Golf instructor and researcher Liam Mucklow has presented grip-pressure measurements showing that, in the golfers tested, the better players were holding the club at address with pressure equivalent to approximately 45 per cent of their maximum grip strength, compared with roughly 25 per cent among higher-handicap golfers. Even more interestingly, the higher-handicap golfers tended to begin relatively lightly and then increase their grip pressure as the swing developed. Better players displayed a different pattern, beginning with more pressure and then reducing pressure — particularly in the trail hand — during the downswing.
Those numbers require some caution. They certainly do not mean every golfer should now attempt to hold the club at “exactly 45 per cent”. Golfers do not have pressure gauges built into their fingers, and one player’s subjective 5 out of 10 could easily feel like another player’s 7.
What the measurements do challenge is one of golf’s oldest pieces of beginner advice:
“Hold the club as lightly as possible.”
It isn’t quite that simple.
You need enough pressure to control the club. What you want to avoid is unnecessary tension spreading through the hands, wrists and forearms.
That distinction may sound subtle. In practice, it can be enormously important.
Relaxed does not mean loose
Imagine someone asks you to throw a tennis ball as far as possible. You probably would not crush it between your fingers with maximum force. But neither would you hold it so loosely that it might fall from your hand before you began the throw.
Your hand naturally finds enough pressure to control the object while allowing the wrist to remain free enough to contribute to the throwing action.
Biomechanist Sasho MacKenzie has used a similar idea to help golfers explore grip pressure. Throw an object naturally and notice the relationship between control and freedom in the wrist. Then repeat the movement while deliberately tightening the hand and forearm. Excessive tension can make the movement immediately feel less athletic.
Control without tension.
[INSERT INFOGRAPHIC: GRIP PRESSURE — FINDING THE RIGHT BALANCE HERE]
That is a useful way of thinking about holding a golf club too.
You do not need floppy hands. You do not need a death grip.
You need enough pressure to control the club while retaining enough freedom for the wrists and arms to function naturally.
Holding the grip too much in the palm can restrict wrist movement
Pressure is only part of the equation. Where the club sits in the hands also matters.
David Leadbetter has long highlighted a common amateur tendency to position the grip excessively through the palm of the lead hand rather than more through the fingers. This can restrict the way the wrist moves and can also make controlling the clubface more difficult.
For a beginner, this is particularly useful because it is something you can check before changing anything in the swing itself.
Take an 8-iron and make your normal grip. Look at where the handle actually runs through your lead hand — the left hand for a right-handed golfer. If the grip runs almost entirely through the centre of the palm and you feel that you need to squeeze hard simply to keep the club secure, it may be worth asking a qualified coach to check your grip.
Leadbetter has also pointed to excessive wear in the heel area of a golf glove as one possible clue that the club is sitting too much in the palm.
But once again, do not turn an observation into another absolute rule.
Because this is where modern coaching becomes particularly interesting.
There isn’t one perfect grip and one perfect wrist action
For decades, golf instruction often searched for models. Here is the correct grip. Here is the correct position at the top. Here is the correct lead-wrist position. Here is the correct release.
One of the more useful developments in contemporary coaching is a greater emphasis on compatible combinations.
Mark Blackburn, one of the best-known coaches in American professional golf, frequently discusses these relationships. A weak grip and a strong grip can both work, but they may not be compatible with exactly the same release pattern or clubface behaviour. Rather than imposing one universal solution, the objective is to understand how the grip, wrists, clubface and rest of the swing work together.
For a beginner, the lesson is not to start analysing different professional release patterns.
It is much simpler:
Never copy a tour player’s wrist position in isolation.
A photograph of a lead wrist at the top of the backswing tells you very little without also considering the player’s grip, clubface position, swing direction, body movement and everything that occurred before that photograph was taken.
This is also why instructions such as “keep the back of the lead hand perfectly in line with the forearm” need context. For some golfers, that may be a useful feel or checkpoint. It is not a universal law of the golf swing.
Why do beginners want to use their hands so much?
Golf creates an unusual psychological problem.
The ball is sitting there. The club is in our hands. And our hands are the only part of the body actually connected to the club.
It is therefore entirely understandable that the brain concludes that, if we want to send the ball somewhere, the hands should command the clubhead. The harder we want to hit the ball — or the more desperately we want to straighten a shot curving to the right — the stronger that temptation becomes.
For a beginner who slices, this can become particularly obvious. After three balls curve to the right, the golfer realises that the clubface somehow needs to close. On the fourth attempt, he tries to square it with the hands.
Sometimes it works. The ball flies straight and, for a brief moment, it feels as though golf has finally been solved.
On the next swing, the hands arrive a fraction earlier and the ball disappears left.
The golfer delays the hands. Then accelerates them. Then changes the grip. Then tries to “hold the face off”.
Twenty balls later, there may be no clear idea left of what the swing is supposed to feel like.
The underlying issue with a slice is a clubface that is open relative to the club’s path. But that does not mean the beginner should attempt to time a violent closing action with the wrists in the final few inches before impact.
The useful question is why the face is arriving open.
The grip may contribute. The backswing may contribute. The movement of the body, the club’s path or several factors working together may contribute.
This is one of those situations where twenty minutes with a good teaching professional can be far more productive than twenty contradictory videos.
Your ball tells you more than a photograph of your wrist
For a golfer in the early stages of development, we would therefore suggest a very simple hierarchy.
Before filming your lead wrist at the top of the backswing, look at your golf shots.
Hit ten balls with an 8-iron. How many are reasonably well struck? Where do they start? Which way do they curve? Do your poor shots tend to produce the same pattern, or are you alternating between shots to the right, shots to the left, thin strikes and heavy strikes?
Ball flight alone cannot diagnose every swing fault. But it prevents one extremely common mistake: trying to correct an aesthetically imperfect position before identifying the problem you are actually trying to solve.
If eight shots out of ten are reasonably well struck and produce a playable pattern, the fact that your wrist does not look exactly like Rory McIlroy’s at the top may not be the most urgent problem in your golf game.
If, on the other hand, the clubface consistently arrives open and almost every ball starts or curves to the right, checking the grip and the overall organisation of the movement becomes much more relevant.
Golf is not a competition to produce the prettiest freeze-frame.
The golf ball remains the ultimate judge.
Three simple exercises before looking for a complicated solution
The first exercise comes directly from the philosophy associated with Manuel de la Torre and remains remarkably appropriate for beginners.
Stand upright without a club and put your hands together as though you were holding one, with your thumbs pointing generally upwards. Slowly make a backswing and return motion, allowing the shoulders and arms to move the hands. The objective is not to freeze the wrists. It is simply to experience the fact that you do not need to deliberately roll the hands at the beginning of the motion to create a swing.
Next, take an 8-iron and place a ball on a very low tee. Make only a half-swing and forget about distance. Your only objective is to produce five consecutive strikes with reasonably similar ball flights.
Not five perfect shots. Not five shots travelling 140 yards. Five controlled contacts.
If you can do that, gradually increase the length of the swing.
If you cannot, adding more speed and more deliberate wrist action is unlikely to make the problem simpler.
Finally, try the throwing test. In a safe area, throw a ball towards a net or into an open space. Pay attention to how your hand and wrist feel. Then repeat the movement while deliberately tightening your hand and forearm.
The difference should be obvious.
You have just experienced something that twenty lines of technical explanation struggle to communicate: you can control an object firmly without rigidly contracting the entire chain responsible for moving it.
Don’t try to deliberately “flick” the ball
There is one final trap worth avoiding.
Discussions about wrist action eventually tend to arrive at the concept of the release. Ben Hogan famously described powerful sensations involving the hands during the downswing, and modern biomechanics can explain in considerable detail how energy and angular velocity are transferred through the system.
For an experienced player, discussing exactly when and how these accelerations occur can be fascinating.
For a beginner, we would be much more cautious.
Do not deliberately try to produce a sudden “wrist snap” when your hands reach hip height. And do not artificially attempt to preserve wrist angles throughout the downswing before violently releasing them at the last possible moment.
The golf swing happens far too quickly for a developing golfer to easily orchestrate a sequence of conscious micro-actions of this kind.
More importantly, doing so distracts from the original objective: producing a repeatable strike and sending the ball towards a target.
Speed can develop progressively as the movement becomes better organised.
What revisiting this subject taught us
There is something particularly useful about returning to a technical golf article several years after it was first written.
In the original version, we personally experimented with several pieces of advice concerning which fingers should apply pressure to the grip. One instruction that was supposed to encourage a freer wrist actually produced the opposite sensation: the lead wrist felt more tense.
Looking back, that may have been the most useful result of the experiment.
A swing feel is not a biomechanical law.
When a coach asks a golfer to feel more rotation, use the hands less, apply pressure through particular fingers or keep a wrist firmer, that instruction is usually designed to change that golfer’s movement. Give exactly the same instruction to another golfer and it may create a completely different — sometimes opposite — result.
That distinction matters enormously in the social-media era.
When you watch a video entitled “The wrist secret that will cure your slice”, the information is not necessarily wrong.
What you do not know is whether it addresses your problem.
And that is a very different question.
So what should your wrists actually do?
If you are learning the game or still building the foundations of a consistent swing, we would ultimately suggest remembering fewer things, not more.
Your wrists need to be able to move. Do not try to make them rigid throughout the swing.
The club needs to be held firmly enough to control it, but that does not mean your hands and forearms should be tense. Modern grip-pressure measurements are particularly interesting here: in Liam Mucklow’s observations, better players actually began with more grip pressure at address than the higher-handicap players tested. The important difference was not simply “soft hands”, but how that pressure was organised and changed during the swing.
Check your grip before rebuilding your wrist action. A club positioned excessively in the palm can restrict movement and make clubface control more difficult.
Do not try to flip or roll the hands at the last moment simply to square the face. If your shots repeatedly start or curve in one direction, identify the underlying cause first.
And perhaps most importantly, stop searching for one universal wrist position.
Strong, neutral and weaker grips can all function when they are compatible with the rest of the motion. That is one of the most useful lessons from modern coaching: effective golf swings are built from relationships between the grip, wrists, clubface and movement of the golfer, rather than from a single perfect freeze-frame everyone should reproduce.
Manuel de la Torre may therefore have expressed, using the language and knowledge available in his era, an idea that remains particularly valuable for today’s golfer:
Your wrists are too important to spend the entire swing consciously manipulating them.
Learn to hold the club properly. Give your joints enough freedom to move. Build a simple motion. Pay attention to what the ball is doing. Learn at lower speed before chasing power.
Then, when your ball flight reveals a repeatable problem, use technique to address that specific problem.
For a golfer learning to build a reliable swing, that is likely to be far more useful than trying to consciously control the wrists during the roughly two seconds it takes to swing a golf club.