Wrist flexion in the lead hand would likely be poison to a golfer who swings with a strong lead-hand grip. Those golfers already swing with a bias of a shut, delofted clubface, so bowing would likely lead to a lot of smothered, pulled hooks.
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t recommend it for some golfers, but you have to know who you are as a golfer,” Zander says. “If you have a strong right-hand grip (for righties), it could help you square the clubface. But anytime you add one variable to a golf swing, you have to understand how all the other variables in your swing interract with it.”
Jack Nicklaus talked about the move during the Memorial Tournament last year and agrees with Zander’s take that while it is effective, it’s not for everyone. Hand and arm strength are factors, Nicklaus said. Taking Jack’s warning a step further, Dan Hellman, one of Golf Digest’s Best Fitness Trainers in America, says the move can result in pain and injuries to various parts of the arm. Hellman, who trains golfers in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., says the most common might be tendinitis in the elbow, but fractures to wrist bones like the hook of hamate and tendon ruptures are among other cause-and-effect issues.
In fact, Spieth had to have surgery for a ruptured tendon in his left wrist suffered at the 2024 British Open. Was it because he bows his left wrist as he takes the club back? Or perhaps because of his idiosyncratic follow-through where he lets his lead elbow jut toward the target, which prevents the lead wrist from fully releasing its flexed position? Maybe. Maybe not.
One thing is for sure, Hellman says, the human body was not designed to “repeat a position of strain over and over again.” Bowing your lead wrist, sometimes referred to as the “motorcyle move” as it simulates the action required to rotate the throttle and get the bike moving, is definitely a position of strain.
“My own experience bears this out,” says Hellman, a Golf Digest Certified Fitness Trainer. “I personally was doing the ‘motorcycle drill’ in my own golf swing and loving the effect. However, I did it to an extreme and ended up paying the price. I developed a severe case of lateral epicondylitis—tennis elbow—that unmistakable pain on the outside of the joint, as well as wrist pain in my left arm. I had to put myself through a rehabilitation program, change the top of my backswing, and it was about eight weeks before I was convinced that my arm was healed.
