Are you right or left hand dominant? Are you swinging from the right or the left? Hand dominance in the golf swing is extremely important yet it has almost zero space in the golf instruction world. It can be a massive advantage if you make the effort to understand it. In fact, it probably affects the lion share of your swing without you consciously thinking about it.

I’m not into generic golf advice. That doesn’t work. What works is harnessing your personal strengths and improving your weaknesses. Using your hand dominance as an asset in your golf swing is maybe the biggest cheat code in golf. I’ll use a righty perspective for almost all parts of this article. For your reference I’m a right/trail hand dominant righty player that can barely brush my teeth with my left/lead hand.

For reader context: this article is a part of the FMM Swing Page (my system for teaching the great’s core movements). I recommend that you start here instead.

First Piece of the Puzzle – Swing Position Dominance

In the backswing the trail hand is dominant in strength and ability. I’m not talking about hand dominance here but swing dominance = which hand has more access to its potential in a certain position. You can even try it out yourself right now. Take a club and make a backswing with your trail or lead hand. Which one was easier and created the most body movement? The trail hand.

In the downswing it’s the same story. You are stronger in your trail hand in this part of the swing. All the way to the ball even. But after the ball it’s another story. Then the lead hand kicks in instead. Make the same test now and grab a club. Make a through swing to the finish with firstly the trail and secondly the lead hand. You will feel your entire body moving using the lead hand whilst the trail hand becomes less potent.

So, you likely thought the same as me here – somewhere here lies a huge potential for development.

Matching the Swing Position with your Hand Dominance

Most trail handed dominant players (like myself) basically perform their entire action with a bias towards this hand. This matches up with pretty awesome backswings and a good deal of power creation towards the ball. AND it matches up with pretty lousy rotation in the through swing.

This kind of opens the door to the question – which part of the golf swing is most important? I’ll open it for a second and then close it quickly again.

Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Tom Watson, Phil Mickelson, Johnny Miller and Jose Maria Olazabal are pretty decent at golf right? They are all lead hand dominant players and all of them have through swings out of this world. If I would be forced to answer the above question I would say the through swing (if you’ve got the other parts in order) is the most important part of golf. Why? Because it stimulates consistency through acceleration.

So, if you are a trail hand dominant player your golf career is over? Tiger Woods, Seve Ballesteros, Sir Nick Faldo, Rory McIlroy, John Daly and Fred Couples begs to differ (Actually Tiger might be ambidextrous but let’s let that one slide for now…).

So, the point I’m trying to make here is that you need to understand how you can draw advantage of your hand dominance. In fact, most swing faults exists because this advantage isn’t played.

Not Using Hand Dominance Advantage -> Gateway to Issues

If you use your trail hand in the downswing properly you have a chance to mitigate the issues of having a short downswing arc with its inherent steep striking conditions (read more about power and the swing arc here). If you don’t make use of your trail hand you’ll likely fall into some issues.

I mentioned my non fandom of generic golf advice. Here comes one of them: “The golf down and through swing is a drag with the left and a hit with the right hand”. Can you see how this completely misaligns with the natural swing dominance positions. This would be an ok advice to a lead hand dominant player (but still not my favorite) but it’s detrimental to a trail handed player.

A better trail handed player advice would be to “make a huge downswing arc and then swing through with the lead hand”. This would utilize the swing positional dominance and match it towards your person. Actually this is a very simplified version of what I teach.

The over the top issue, the narrow swing arc issue and the early extenders all have their origins in not using their hand dominance to their advantage.

I’ll reiterate my point and then stop sounding like a broken record:

Let your dominant hand play out its strength card in the part of the swing where it’s open to doing it.

A word of warning here: Trail hand dominant players can, with overuse of the dominance in the wrong swing part, contribute to injuries. Woods, Ballesteros, and Couples have all struggled with back problems, which I believe stem from excessive reliance on their dominant trail hand during the through swing.

Utilizing both Hand’s Dominance Potential?

If you actually train your individual hands (preferrably through one handed drills) you will unlock the skill set of using both advantages in your swing. Tiger Woods feels everything in his right hand but I’ve understood that he was forced to train both hands very much during his upbringing and during mr Harmon’s tutoring.

My training sessions (when I grind swing technique) is 50% one handed shots. This makes it impossible to “cheat” and ultimately trains reactive body movement due to how the body is stimulated by correctly applied hand dominance. Training like this also makes it possible to feel my “real playing golf swing” with my trail hand and not having to “deal with my weak left hand” outside of training.

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