Dear bgolfing,
Excellent point!
"High hands" is a technique described by Dave Stockton Jr. and others in which the golfer cants the axis of the hand more "down" than it naturally hangs at address in gravity. This makes the lifeline aim a little lower than the axis of the forearm, so a more upright putter is the result.
The muscles that "cant the axis of the hand down" are those of the forearm. If you look at the forearm on the left with the thumb on top (as it is on the putter handle), the muscle that "pulls" the lower half of the hand downward is in the bottom of the forearm, and this action in turn stretches the top muscle in the forearm. So there is extra contractive tension in the lower half of the forearm and also extra stretch tension in the upper half. This extra tension tends to "freeze out" use of the forearm muscles, the same way certain pre-set posture make muscle actions less likely.
But this is a dicey game to play with muscles. It is more fundamental to address what causes the USE of muscles to begin with, rather than come along later with a bandaid for the problem.
What causes the use of muscles is "habits without awareness of the preferred pattern at a cognitive level." It is sort of "what do you think you are doing when you make a stroke," but a lot more subtle and difficult to pin down. It is more: "what body parts are recruited at a subconscious level for the (habitual) movement of the stroke". If you simply repeat your usual stroke and attempt to pay attention to what is moving, you and almost all other golfers are HIGHLY LIKELY to "feel" or "sense" the forearms and hands moving. This is not good.
The reason you would sense the arms and hands is because you have a habit without a plan. The plan should be to move the shoulder(s), and leave the arms and hands out of it altogether. When this "plan" is installed in your head at a cognitive level, and you at least "pay attention" and make this your "intention" when you make a stroke (even if the pattern is not yet a habit), you will "feel" and "sense" something entirely different -- to wit, the shoulder(s) moving, with much much less awareness of the arms and hands moving.
The reason for this is due to the way the somatosensory cortex allows us to sense our body parts, and how this somatosensory cortex is in turn the basis for what muscles get recruited when we move. To cut to the chase, if you don't learn to think "move the shoulders not the arms and hands", you will instead MOVE the arms and hands due to habits that don't serve well in putting, and this "default" action "recruits" those muscles that move the hands and arms (to wit: the pecs and upper arm muscles and the forearm muscles). This doesn't really have to be "grooved" to the extent many folks from the 1970s used to claim (e.g., Pelz and his 20,000 repetitions), but the golfer needs to have some KNOW-HOW about the body: "the part that moves is the part you consciously intend to move, and if you don't consciously intend to move a specific part in preference to something else, you will move according to unaware habit using whatever body parts are made habitual."
In order to move the shoulder and not the arms and hands, the golfer needs to "feel" the lead shoulder right before he pulls the trigger and intend to move this down and back and then "feel" it retrace its path forward and up. Doing this is usually sufficient without more to "shut out" the forearm muscles. There is a little more to it than that, though. The idea is that the shoulder shoves and then drags the arm and hand along with it in a nice coordinated way. I tell students that the lead shoulder is the locomotive and the putter head is the caboose and the hands and arms are "sleeping passengers" in one of the middle cars. This helps. Sometimes, while learning this shoulder move as a habit, it also helps to focus on the lead forearm at the top of the backstroke, and to specifically intend to NOT allow the top mucles to become active in the downstroke.
All of this is part of my campaign to educate golfers to get inside the body instead of staying stuck on "what the putter does." The putter, so far as I can tell, is not a living thing but an inert object.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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