Swing the Golf Club With Your Hands

Let me tell you the easiest way to hit the ball straight and hard. Swing the club with your hands. Not your body, not your arms. Your hands.

This was once the way people played golf. Now you’re supposed to swing with your large muscles in order to have a consistent swing. But think for a moment.

When you pound a nail into a board, what do you swing the hammer with? Your hand! When you swing a tennis racket, you swing it with…your hand!

Get this: a few days ago I asked to the manager of our local minor league team how he teaches his players to hit the ball. He said, you’re hitting with your hands, just like driving a nail with a hammer.

It’s the same with a golf club.

Humans have evolved hands that are wired to do complicated and precise activities. Use them! That’s what they’re for! Getting the clubhead back to the ball headed toward the target and with the clubface square to the path, all at many MPH, is a task requiring the utmost precision.

Tasks of utmost precision are what your hands are designed to accomplish.

This is how to do it. Take the club away from the ball with both hands. That means your mind is on the movement of your hands, and no other part of your body. When you swing down into the ball, your mind is on your hands delivering the club precisely to the ball. More to the point, the left hand guides and the right hand delivers, both at the same time.

Really, that’s all you have to do. Swing with your hands and your body will follow.

A few caveats. This does not mean rear back and slug the ball. Far from it. You still use the golf swing you have now, but with your mind on what is really doing the work. You still need to have good pre-swing fundamentals (grip, stance, posture, alignment, ball position, aim). You still need good rhythm and tempo.

Also, you don’t hit at the ball. You swing through the ball, with your hands leading the clubhead into the ball. And you swing with both hands, not just your right.

They say your hands should be passive. Nice thought, but they never are. That’s because they want something to do. And if you aren’t paying attention, they’ll do something wrong. Best to give them something to do that is the right thing.

Let them take over the swing. That’s what human hands are meant to do. Since I started doing this, I hit one straight shot after another. I’ve taken four strokes off a round (no kidding!), all because I’m swinging the club with the part of my body that was designed for this job.

Why not give it a try yourself?

17 thoughts on “Swing the Golf Club With Your Hands”

  1. How does your swing thought differ from Ernest Jones’ “Swing the Clubhead” or Eddie Merrins “Swing the handle”. My thought is to Swing the hands back and Swing the clubhead forward

    1. My feeling is not much different from Ernest Jones’s teaching. Merrins concentrates on the handle, not the hands, even though they’re in the same place. I don’t do that. If you get back to my hammer analogy, I swing a hammer with my hand for maximum accuracy of strike. I do the same when I swing a golf club, swing it with my hands, especially on the forward swing. That helps ensure my hands will (a) lead the clubhead into the ball instead of following it, and (b) swing the club through the ball along the target line.

      1. I am a disabled paraplegic golfer just starting back playing using a single user golf cart device called the ParaGolfer. U can Google it. It straps my bottom half in sternly and stands me up into swing position. I ONLY have my hands and arms to hit the ball with. Very difficult. I hit it very straight but only 70 yards or so. I wish there was someone here in Orlando that could show me a more hands powered swing approach!

  2. When I switched to the handsy swing, I got much better results- can’t wait to show it off at the next pro-am when Gulbis and Wie are around…

  3. I’ve been tinkering around with my swing and started using my hands more in my swing. It totally worked for me, my shots are consistent and have a better launch angle. I stumbled upon this page looking to see if others are using the ‘hands’ method. I won’t tell any of my friends about this until I’ve won a good amount of skins from them. I know this may not work for everyone, but it is worth looking into. You have nothing to loose but strokes.

    1. Tony,
      Please do let your friends know about my blog. By the time they’ve found the Hands posts, you’ll have taken them to the cleaners plenty of times.

      Bob.

  4. Tried this today on the range, before I read your article. I find leading with the lower body makes me come over the top, but hitting with my hands and keeping the hips back led to better strikes and about 10 yards more distance. Give it a go
    GG six handicap age 68

    1. Glad it worked for you, Gregg. We think of our hands when we swing anything — hammer, fly rod, tennis racket, baseball bat, axe — so why not a golf club, too?

  5. Where are your pressure points now? Still toward the bottom fingers or more with the index finger/thumb pinch point?

    1. I assume you’re talking about the four pressure points discussed in The Golfing Machine. The mind is agile and can be trained to do whatever you wish it to. Starting down, I feel PP#2, the last three fingers of the left hand, but coming through the ball I switch my feel to PP#1, the heel of the right hand where it touches the left hand thumb, and expand this to include the entire right hand palm. I find PP#3 risks turning the club over. I never have understood how PP#4 is used.

    1. The same. With these more delicate shots, the idea is to slide the sole of the club underneath the ball. Most people think of getting the leading edge of the clubhead between the back of the ball and the ground. This is a very difficult hand-eye coordination problem. Slide the sole across the grass, with your hands, and you should be all right. One more thing — hitting with your hands does not mean only with your hands. The body has to move properly, too.

  6. I think we are in agreement about the intention, although we may use the same terminology to mean different things. I would say to swing the hands around the body without active bending or twisting of the wrists to cock/uncock the club or square the face. Those actions surely occur, but result from the proper action of the arms and the mechanical implications of holding a weight on the end of a stick.

    1. Brian,
      It would be difficult to demonstrate this conception in a video because it is primarily a matter of what the mind focuses on rather than what the body does.
      Bob.

  7. Finally, some good advice for normal weekend golfers. Hit with the hands, swing easy and be amazed how far the ball will go.

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