Wrist Hinge In The Golf Swing Explained

If you lack power and struggle to get the ball in the air, there is a chance your wrists aren’t behaving. But what is wrist hinge in the golf swing and why is it important? 

When you hear TV commentators talk about “cracking the whip” or releasing the club through the ball, they are referring to something that just isn’t possible without first getting the club into position on the way back. Setting your wrists in the backswing is key to loading power.

Watch the video below to hear more about the importance of wrist hinge from PGA pro Katie Dawkins...

To make it simple, imagine you’re skimming a stone; you’ve got a flat mill pond in front of you, a smooth pebble in hand and you want to skip it across the water like you used to as a kid. 

Now imagine trying to achieve that without using your wrist. Where are you going to generate power from? Unless you want the pebble to fall at the first hurdle, you need to set your wrist to be able to release it with enough fizz.

Related: Best golf irons

Similarly, if you don’t hinge your wrists in the golf swing you could be throwing away loads of clubhead speed and delivering your irons with less of a descending angle of attack than is ideal.

E-Learning Tutorial - Shoot Lower Scores!

Are you interested in making lasting improvements to your golf game? Shoot Lower Scores is an online course from Golf Monthly designed to help you find power in your swing and hole more putts as well as how to avoid falling foul of the more challenging rules of golf. Whether you want to brush up your knowledge or learn something new; this tutorial is perfect.

View Deal

If this sounds like something you struggle with, you’ll probably have noticed that heaving the ball down the fairway feels a lot like hard work.

In the backswing, the body and arms should take the club away smoothly as one unit, while the wrists start to set. Once your lead arm is parallel to the ground, the club should be pointing towards the sky, roughly forming a right angle.

From here, you need only turn as much as your mobility allows to wind up to the top. For some, this results in a Jon Rahm-esque compact motion, and for others with oodles of flexibility, the club will get close to, or even beyond, parallel to the ground. 

Whatever the case, the fact that the wrists have done their job early on means they are way more likely to unhinge at the right time on the downswing. This should create a nice amount of lag and stored up power that can now be released through impact.

Alternatively, if the wrists haven’t hinged, there is less angle to unload and therefore generating power becomes a mission. Some players - like Bryson DeChambeau for example - still manage it, but for the club golfer it’s a big ask. 

It’s much easier to encourage the wrists to hinge early to benefit from the power that angle can give us later on.

We’ve all played against a golfer in their later years who still gets it out there from what appears, to the naked eye, like a half-swing. That is what an efficient use of one's wrists looks like and is something that can also take a load of pressure off a tired back.