Lead Hand Low
By Tom F. Stickney, Director of Operations
One of the hardest things to do in putting is keep your hands passive during the stroke especially on shorter putts. For some reason most players find it hard to use the shoulders and arms to power the stroke and tend to allow the wrists and hands to dominate. Whenever your hands are overactive during the stroke you will lose control of the loft of the putter, the starting direction of the golf ball, your impact point on the putter face, thus you will never be as consistent on the greens as you could be normally.
Whenever players use their hands too much during the stroke I have a simple solution for them and that is to try and grip the club with their lead hand lower than their trail hand. This “cross handed” grip allows the lead wrist to stay more stable and keeps the rear wrist more bent during the stroke and when this occurs you will find that you have a more consistent roll off the face of the putter. Now this does not mean that you must change your grip as you can always attempt to quiet down the hands with your regular grip, but I find that this tends to take more practice than just getting used to the lead hand low grip position.
Let’s take a look at this grip and how it operates so you can become a much better putter instantly. …
Looking at this address photo you can see that the lead hand is lower than the trail hand and as stated this tends to make the stroke more solid through impact. In my opinion this is the simplest and lowest hanging fruit that you can fix when working on your putting stroke.
The lead hand controls the line, and the trail hand controls the loft of the putter so if you maintain these address alignments into impact and beyond you will find that you will have a more consistent starting direction as well as better speed control. And we know that if you can control the speed then will have an easier time reading the greens to know what line you should choose as well.
Let’s examine impact and beyond … in this photo you will notice that the hands are in the same position that they started in at address post-impact. Whenever this occurs the loft of the putter will remain constant and this will help you to maintain that same speed from putt to putt. Secondly, notice that my watch dial has not rotated towards or away from the target to any great degree – it seems to be pointing down the line of my intended putt. This helps the ball to leave the blade almost 90 degrees to where it’s pointed at impact and this as we know controls the ball’s intended starting direction.
So, if you want instant putting help as it pertains to a better control of your starting direction as well as the speed of your putts then lead hand low is a grip you must experiment with for sure!
Do you have questions or comments? Email me at [email protected].
