... THE SWING CLINIC CONTINUED
shoulder to allow the mallet to strike the ball. Once the player has done this a couple of times they are already beginning to work out how to drop the mallet in passively, and get a good strike, so if you haven’t spotted what’s happening the effect is already disappearing. The third thing is to ask the player to temporarily increase their grip strength in their left hand when swinging two handed. When you do this it will greatly reduce early left shoulder movement, because the left shoulder can only lunge early if the left wrist is fairly loose. This may not make much sense to you, but if you experiment with a mallet yourself, holding it in just your left hand, you’ll find it much more difficult to do a forward lunge with your left shoulder if you’re gripping the mallet shaft really firmly. When the player grips more firmly with the left hand the right wrist flick diminishes. How do you fix this problem? You need a set of exercises which retrain the left shoulder to work in better time with the right shoulder. The best one is getting the player to swing one-handed, left hand only. If they’ve not done this before then they’ll struggle to hit the ball 10 yards, but after coaching them on the correct technique of a passive mallet drop from the transition they should quickly progress to hitting twenty or more yards. Once they’ve got a good passive left shoulder action going then reintroduce the right hand, but ask the player to imagine they’re still playing left-handed only. Alternate one- handed and two-handed strokes, concentrating the whole time on the correct left-sided action. Using a firmer left hand grip can be helpful with this. At this stage the right wrist flick should have disappeared, and you can then ask the player to try playing the stroke with a conscious equal pairing of both shoulders. Eventually, the hope is that the player can use this method to retrain their left shoulder action, and their right wrist should stop hurting! Regarding left hand grip strength, once the problem has disappeared the player can experiment with different grip strengths, as they won’t need such a firm grip once the left shoulder is retrained. The other benefit of this is that with the left shoulder working properly their swing will actually be more powerful. Happy days! Hopefully this article has been of interest to the swing coaches out there. It demonstrates how a painful wrist can arise as a primary stroke issue (the wrist swing), and as a secondary stroke issue (the wrist flick correction for an errant left shoulder). It covers the observations you can make, the tests you can do to diagnose the problem, and the remedial steps which can be taken. No hocus pocus – honestly.
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