Hi!
I think the left-hand low grip is really a putting style, and one that either gives control for direction and force to the left hand or at least gives directional control to the left hand. Since I teach a "dead hands" pendulum stroke, this is partly good to the extent the left-hand low style takes power control out of the hands. So, for this reason alone, it will help plenty of golfers as a waystation to a higher skill level with truly dead hands. Most golfers rely too heavily on power-control in the dominant hand to solve problems of break or distance or targeting, and they would be better off if they left all this separately to the proper "authorities" -- targeting for targeting and break, tempo and targeting for distance control -- not ham-handed johnny-come-lately efforts to fix up the putt with some mythical "touch finesse." Good mechanics is the start of good accuracy.
The directional control being in the left hand is, to me, superior for most golfers to allowing the right hand to control direction of the stroke. Ultimately, though, you want your consistent setup to control stroke direction as much as possible. The setup, however, seems inadequate to result in the left elbow staying headed down line briefly after impact. This requires something a bit more conscious. And for this, left-hand low helps quite a bit. If I had to pick which hand to worry about at and thru impact, it would clearly be my left hand.
In the stroke movement, from the top of the backstroke to the top of the follow-thru, the front hand can only "pull" or "draw" the putterhead along the ground and the back hand can only "push"
or "shove" it along. If the bottom of the putterhead had a small lead pencil tip on it and the green was a sheet a paper, which hand would you prefer from the top of the backstroke to "draw" a straight line across the paper with your putter's sole-pencil?
If your "feeling" is the back hand, then I would like to suggest that perhaps you are not sufficiently familiar with your lead hand and it's capabilities. In the past, I named my left hand Niclas Schtinck
"(herr professor N. Schtinck") to remind me that the left hand for a right handed golfer is a superb artist at golf but is also a bit crude and even mute. You cannot talk much to it, and can only give it free reign for its job - which is to keep the stroke going straight at the target. The explanation for why this is so may be a bit cloudy, but it probably has to do with two well-established neurological facts:
1) the right side of the brain controls the left hand, and the right side is (for almost all golfers) the side that specializes in targeting; and
2) vision to the left of the ball looking down at address comes in both eyes from the left side of the world and is routed back to the right side of the brain; and thus this visual signalling towards the
hole or target gets a cleaner shot at influencing spatial perception and motor control (which is occurring nearby also in the right hemisphere) than signalling from the right side of the world, which has to get processed in the left hemisphere of the brain before it is "shared" with the right side across the neural "bridge" between the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. The idea is that going the long way around to the important right-side centers sort of wears down the quality of the visual info. So, the visual info from the left side of your body (for a right hander) has a little more clarity and umphf. This all meshes better with left-hand control in the hand-eye coordination of moving toward a target.
So I give mute Niclas all the "trust" I can and keep the jabbering busy-body right-hand (let's name her "Gertie Gottschaulk") out of it in her left-brain control room. Just let Niclas do it straight -- he can do that one thing very well.
The one problem with the left-hand low style, apart from not going far enough in the right direction, is that it lowers the left shoulder. This usually delofts the putterface and requires some biomechanical adjustments to get used to this and still stroke thru the ball the way you want to. I prefer a level shoulders pendulum stroke that doesn't inject this complication. In the thru-stroke, the left elbow needs to continue straight thru impact for a bit and this means the left elbow has to travel down the toeline instead of curling back toward the hip past impact. This alone requires that the left shoulder rise vertically above the left elbow. The left-hand low style promotes this shoulder rising better than the "normal" grip with right hand low to the extent the left arms is what the golfer is moving and aware of.
To sum up -- the left-hand low style is fine as far as it goes and will help a lot of golfers by reducing handsiness and emphasizing the thru-stroke move with shoulder action instead, and by giving the directional lead to the hand better suited for it. By all means, try it out and learn it's advantages.
But ultimately it's only an incomplete transition to a more unified and integrated style.
Hope this helps!
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
The PuttingZone.com
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