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when it comes to hinging your wrist

i guess the best way to explain it would be (for right handers)

grip your club and seperate your hands by like 5 inches... go to about half way through your back swing.. now in this position if you pull up/towards your body with your right hand only...and keeping the left hand still..

(which cause your wrist to kinda torque up)

is that the *feeling* you want when you hinge your wrist...?

.. or is that too much

and more kinda like when you swing a baseball bat....?

Actually no. When done properly there is no effort what so ever.

Your hands have to be close together and positioned correctly so they work as one unit. Your wrist should be very relaxed as to allow the club to go where ever momentum and centrifugal force takes it without any effort or force applied by you. Think of your wrist as a ball and socket hinge that just flops around.

dereck is much more on the right track. I think that it is important not to force it. A big reason it is bad to force it is that then it requires a timing move with your hands, wrists, and forearms to bring the club back square. You can practice this a lot and then find that it is off when you go to the course. It is because the small muscles in your hands, wrists, and forearms are much more unpredictable when the adrenaline is flowing. And, any time there is even a hint of pressure the adrenaline will flow. Like, teeing off on #1 with the starter and the next two groups watching you.

This is why the best golf swings are driven by the core muscles, torso, shoulders, legs. These large muscles will also feel the effects of adrenaline, but they are much less likely to fire rapidly and out of sync then the small muscles when they are flooded with adrenaline. This is especially pertinent because, in general, when you practice there is very little to no pressure -- hence no adrenaline. You can practice the timings needed to hit a very wristy shot and even perfect it, but when you take it out to the course it may then fail you once you feel even a little pressure. A secondary issue is that you will have to practice those timings for the rest of your life, since if even one part of a very manipulated swing starts misfiring you are going to have some big league struggles. Whereas if you use your core muscles, the timing of those muscles may be a little off, but the results usually aren't disastrous. For example, you might hit a slight draw instead of your normal fade, or something like that, but if the large muscles are just a little off, you will still be able to hit a lot of good shots.

So, hand & wrist manipulation of the club is in most cases bad*. If you just let inertia fold the club back, your body will find the most comfortable way to bring it back. Do not get tricked into reading a tip in a magazine or webpage that says you have to have so much wrist hinge at such-and-such a position. Firstly, it is always possible to find a different article or webpage that will say something different. Secondly, everybody is built differently, so what is comfortable and natural for one person will not be the same for someone else.

* I just wanted to put an asterisk after this sentence to state the reason I wrote "in most cases" instead of always. There are a select few shots in very precarious situations where wrist and/or hand manipulation is needed. To hit that super-softly landing flop shot. Or Lee Travino's Texas Turn Down shot that stays low and has almost no backspin. But, these shots are needed only in exceptionally rare situations. In almost every other swing, the core muscles need to drive the swing. Even chips and pitches -- using your hands to flip the ball up in those situations will lead to disaster when the adrenaline starts flowing.

Hands together, keep wrists limp, ACCELLERATE ACCELLERATE ACCELLERATE!!!!

If your arms accellerate then the wrists will unhinge and just the right time in the forward swing.

As for the backswing, when your arms reach the halfway point they should not be applying any more force to the swing itself. As a result, the momentum you've developed will have the club continue on it's path while the arms are slowing down slightly. This change will cause the wrists to hinge.

This is IDEAL, but not required or even often done.

It took me over 30 years to figure this one out. I just started using my body turn to hit pitch shots this past weekend and now I see how stupid and stubborn I have been. It will take practice to eliminate the hands from my pitch shots, but I finally feel like I am headed in the right direction.

BTW...a great way to ruin a competitor's round is to mention something about their wrists during the round (like..Your wrists seem to be hinging a little late). I would bet that the player will start thinking about their wrists and their score is down the tubes at that moment in time.

Well said Bignose, "the greek shall inherit the earth" (line from Monty Python's Life of Brian).

Most of that info is straight out of Dave Pelz's Short Game Bible. I just re-wrote it from memory. But, it is all very true -- adrenaline kills timing based on the small muscles. Those large core muscles -- that's the key to playing the same golf under zero pressure and 100% pressure. It's also how the pros make their swings looks so effortless yet have tremendous swing speeds. You get those core muscles working right and the arms follow along and accelerate. The best analogy is to imagine your body to be like a whip... you move the handle just a bit and eventually the end of the whip is moving at the speed of sound (that's the crack).

And of course, "Blessed are the cheesemakers"

That's exactly how Harvey Penick describes it.

Shade

now i was told to keep your left wrist flat (for righties) not hinging

TenPut, there is a difference between wrist cock and wrist collapse. The bad news is that the term "hinge" is used for both. This thread has been talking about wrist cock, not collapse.

Here is how a proper wrist cock should feel: Take a proper grip and stance. Without moving anything other than your wrists, lift the club straight up as if you were wanting to hit yourself in the nose. This is an okay feeling, now you should intentionally hinge/collapse your wrists to the left and right to learn what feeling you should not be feeling. I'd suggest you practice both of these moves until you are very familiar with how both feel so that you are sure that you are only cocking during your swing and not collapsing.

so basically on you backswing and downswing your wristshould not hinge left or right but up is okay , im still learning proper mechanics, it seems like theres a million things to to think of before you even make contact with the ball. LOL

I just took my first lesson this week after years of bad recreational golfing.
I told the instructor that the main thing I wanted to work on was my driving. We started with him just watching me hit a few balls. It was funny because the first 5 swings I took were long drives straight down the middle. The instructor looked like he was wondering what I was talking about. But sure enough, I hit a few more and started hitting some slices and some hooks.

By the end of the lesson, he had explained exactly what I was doing and it all made perfect sense. Basically, my grip was setup to hit slices, but I was compensating by snapping my wrists and pushing the clubface through the ball. So when my timing was on, I could hit straight drives, although even with a 9 degree driver, the ball flight looked like a 5 wood because I was snapping the club head up and in front of my hands. But when that snap of my wrists came too early, I'd hook and when it was late, I'd slice.

So yeah, too much wrist movement was making my drives (and my irons as well) inconsistent and very dependent on having the perfect timing.

As I stated earlier, the wrist should be perfectly relaxed, and the proper hinge is just a result of proper setup, grip, centrifugal force, inertia, gravity, swing plume, etc. In other words it works like a whip.

With that said the proper wrist hinge can be summed up to the YES and NO analogy. Take you normal stance and grip with the club on the ground. Lift your arms straight to horizontal and the club pointing straight up forming a 90 degree angle between your arms and club. Now bob the club in a fashion like nodding you head YES, or toward and away from your face. This is the proper wrist hinge action. Cup and bow your wrist like rotating your head side-to-side for a NO jester is the wrong wrist action.

Here is a great drill to teach yourself proper arm swing and wrist action. It will take a friend to tee balls up for you.

Take a driver out, get on your knees and hit teed up balls until you hit good long shots with a little draw. At set up the back of your left hand depending on grip will face down the target line. When you reach your full back swing the back of you left wrist will be point straight up to the sky, wrist will be hinged/cocked and the club should be about at a 90 degree angle to your arms. At impact the back of the left wrist will be toward the target line. After impact your arms will rotate and at the end of the follow through the back of your right hand will be pointing straight up, and left facing the ground.

Practice this until you can hit nice long draws. At that point you have the swing down. Stand up, take a normal stance, bend from the hips to produce the proper spine angle with your hands hanging straight down, and start playing golf with what you learned.

For me the only swing thought is line it up, and at the top of the backswing, pull the butt of the club into the back of the ball and let the whip crack.

Interesting how all of you are saying not to cock the left wrist, just let it bend by itself. That's exatly opposite of the tip to make an early wrist cock as you start back, which is what Adam Scott does. And it's opposite of what I've been doing for the last 3 years. When I started to pull the club back and make an early wrist cock, I gained 15 yards with all my irons. And when I started doing the same thing with my driver, I gained 10 MPH of swing speed and a go 25 yards of distance. Not to bad for doing it all wrong. Just my opinion of course.

Oneputt, this is what I did also the other day, I cocked my wrist early during my take away, maybe after a foot or two, I just wanted my shoulders to start the swing, but after that its "cocking time!" hehe....and its a deliberate cock, I think my right hand even "helps" my left hand to be "more cocked", more than left hand alone.

Results were amazing! more distance (faster swing speed), straighter shots, easier shots, more solid contacts, gets the body out of the swing, which was my usual swing problem, body gets too "jerky" or "sways/slides too much" on the downswing resulting in fat shots (the club head goes so fast that the my body couldn't react at all, before it was able to react I had hit the ball already)