Hogan’s Swing Plane, Modified to a Double Plane ( and the flat wrist on top )

Introduction

By now, if you’ve read ANYTHING in the world of golf instruction, you are intimately familiar with Hogan’s plane of glass (imagine a plane of glass resting on your shoulders – that you have to keep your SWING under. If you fail, you BREAK this plane of glass). Hogan describes this brilliant visualization aid in his golf classic The Five Fundamentals of Golf (see here for a list of top 10 instructional golf books). This plane of glass is illustrated in the image below. The idea is to keep your entire swing – especially your downswing  – BELOW this plane. Any deviation and you break the glass. Ok – with that preface, we can discuss the slight modification to this visualization – ala Anuj Varma.

A Modification – TWO PLANES of GLASS

The single plane of glass is great – and does provide a really useful visual for the swing plane. However, there is an even more effective visual than Hogan’s single plane of glass – what I call the DOUBLE plane of glass. The first plane is fine where it is – resting on your shoulders. The second plane needs to be visualized running through your chest – parallel to the first plane.  The idea is to keep the swing (the club) BETWEEN these two planes.

The End Result – A flat wrist at the top of the backswing

The back of the left hand needs to be parallel (facing the SAME way) as the face of the club. This is known as a flat wrist. At the top of the backswing, the wrist needs to be flat – as illustrated in the images below.

Flat Wrist – Sergio Garcia	Flat Wrist – Tiger Woods

So – how do you get to a flat wrist on top?

The answer is in the first part of this post – by keeping your swing between the two imaginary glass planes.  If you can manage to keep the club between those two imaginary planes, you are bound to end up with the flat wrist on top.

Summary

Every pro has a FLAT wrist on the top of the backswing. This simply means that the back of their left hand is PARALLEL to the clubface – both of them pointing in the same direction. To get to this point, it is useful to visualize Hogan’s plane of glass – with a slight modification. Instead of a SINGLE plane of glass, imagine TWO planes of the glass – one resting on the shoulders – and the other one going through your chest – parallel to the shoulder plane. See if this SLOT helps you find the FLAT wrist on top of your backswing.