Cheers, Celio

He mentioned once to me that his trail arm and trailing hand are weaker than his leading arm and hand, although the trailing hand is more dextrous (he did not mention whether he writes with his left hand or not, or whether he throws a baseball with his left hand, or bowls with his left hand.) For players swing from their natural side (ie. right-handers swing right-handed clubs,) their trailing arm, and trailing hand are stronger by far than their leading arm, and hand.

Ben Hogan played from the opposite side (ie. a left-hander playing with right-handed clubs) so that his trailing side would probably be weaker than his leading side. Hogan went into a great deal of discussion of using exercise to build up the arms like twisting towels, release exercises, and tossing medicine balls. The common assumption is that Hogan was relatively light (specially during his early years) and that he suffered a great injury in a car crash, so that he needed a lot of special exercises, and rehab to build up strength with huge amounts of practice time. However, another interpretation can be assumed that Hogan needed all of these, because he was playing from the opposite side, so that he needed special exercises to build up his weaker trailing side.

Players playing from the normal side have much stronger trailing arms and hands, so that they have to tone down their trailing side to keep from overpowering the swing, rather than they having a need to radically strengthen their trailing side.

There may be first a need to measure the relative strengths of the leading and trailing arm and hand. Like first, can the trailing arm and hand pitch a baseball overhanded strongly. A strength comparison of throwing a ball underhanded from either side. Bowling strength from the two sides, and such.

In bowling and pitching, the lower body leads with a lot of forward movement, but the low body becomes relatively still as the upper body releases the ball. The golf swing is similar with the lower body leading at the beginning of the downswing with the upper body firing during the later release phase. Overturning the lower body can cause unintentional directional changes.

Many top golfers said to consciously use the trailing hand to varying degrees in the hitting zone: Amour, Sarazen, Hogan, Snead, Boros, and Nelson. On the other hand, Nicklaus says no conscious use of the hands, and Watson says to keep trailing hand passive. Nicklaus says no conscious use of his hands in the release, although he has really big forearms, so that he can probably get great power with the arms and hand without consciously using them. Nicklaus used a driver that was cut shorter in the early years, so that a shorter club gives less time for any conscious use of the arms and hands. He says to move the clubhead with the swing. In a very grooved swing, no conscious applications are needed. In the case of Nelson, he wrote that he preprogrammed “throwing” the clubhead toward the target, so that there was not any actual conscious use of the hands during the actual swing, as the conscious preprogramming was done before the swing. Sarazen claimed that after hitting zillions of nails when he first started work as a carpenter’s helper (ie. functioned as a nail gun before it was invented) he developed an extremely strong wrist action to hit the golf ball.

However, playing from the opposite side may leave the trailing hand (and arm) the weaker side. Ben Hogan was a left hander who played with right handed clubs, because as a youth he could not afford left handed clubs. His first book “Power Golf” talked about hitting as hard as possible with the trailing hand in the hitting zone. His second book goes into length about strengthening the release, and about tossing medicine balls. His strength building is rather unusual as modern concepts do not advocate using the trailing hand as hard as possible, and little about release exercises and tossing medicine balls. It may be that since his trailing side is the weaker side, he needed special exercises to build up the trailing side.

The trailing arm and hand power and speed can be compared to the throwing of a bowling ball. The leading arm and hand power can be compared to lifting up a luggage up from the front to the side with the last three fingers of the leading hand holding the handle with the leading side of the body providing the lifting power and turning power.

In bowling the lower body comes to a still at release to keep the body from going over the foul line. A baseball pitcher too comes to a fairly still position of the lower body during the release of the baseball. This promotes accuracy and consistency.

Stillness does not necessarily mean the lost of power according to physics. In billiards, when the cue ball hits an object ball squarely on, the cue ball comes to a complete stop to impart all of its energy to the object ball (minus some energy lost from creating impact sound, and energy lost from heat generated from impact.) If the two balls are of the same weight, the impacting ball coming to a complete stop means the maximum transfer of energy to the target ball. In golf, this is not possible as the club and the body is much heavier than the golf ball, so that it is not possible to completely stopping the body and the club to transfer all of the body and club energy into the gold ball.