Necessary Hand Placement at Impact during the Golf Swing Stroke

The most frequent problem that high golf handicap golfers suffer from is with the location of their hands during golf ball contact. Many with that problem swing the club as if the hands must remain behind the ball with the club face taking the lead. This result in a lot of poorly struck balls, plus it substantially takes away much of the golf club velocity, and power that the golfer could have.

Possibly some of this might come from the principle of the baseball swing. If a person had played baseball prior to taking up golf they might think about throwing the head of their golf club out first and trail with the hands. This is the way you swing a baseball bat for maximum power, because if you lead with the hands you drag the bat across the hitting zone. This is actually the method a hitter "goes the other way", as it were, but does not result in the hardest-hit ball.

The legitimate reason why you cannot correlate your baseball swing with the golf swing sequence is a baseball bat is not made the same way as a golf club. It's true, you can get away with more of the baseball swing if the golf ball will be teed up, since in this case you are able to sweep through the hitting zone much like if you hit a baseball. However, most golf clubs are meant to knock a ball from the ground, and so if you utilize the baseball swing you'll wind up working to scoop the ball from the surface, and much more often than not will find yourself miss-hitting it.

So when you're thinking about hitting the ball off of the ground, hit it the way the club was made for you to strike it. What you are attempting to have is what we term a "late hit" on the golf ball. You achieve this first by never attempting to sweep the ball from the turf. Commence with a good start for the back swing. Instead of taking your club from a low angle out from the ball, I think about essentially picking the golf club off of the ball having a quick wrist hinge. As soon as the arms get parallel to the ground in the back swing your wrists ought to be completely hinged.

As a final point, exactly where both hands should be at ball contact is vital for hitting consistently reliable shots. Probably the best mental image of this that I have seen would be to think of the contact area as a finish line. If this finish line lengthens right up, first to the finish line should be your left hand. The second at the finish line should be the right hand, with right-handed golfers of course, and the last to cross the finish line will be the clubface when it hits the golf ball. With this image will perhaps get you thinking of getting those hands in front during shot impact.