The moment of feel

The best feeling of hitting a golf ball is when the shaft is felt to be “unloading” prior to the impact. This is especially true when hitting with a driver.

The feeling of shaft-unloading, in simple terms, is pure transformation from shaft bending and unbending. During backswing, shaft starts bending uniformly throughout the swing, at the top of backswing, bending pause and goes the other direction when golfer’s arms start to come down. In a proper swing movement, where hands are leading the shaft, it is felt that there is a flex in shaft following all the way through the downswing until when the shaft is “released” prior to the impact, when the shaft unbends itself and release the energy from bent to straight formation, the energy is “released and hopefully transform onto the ball.

From a spectator’s point of view, during the moment of impact, the shaft should seem like it is chasing or closing to the golfer’s hand position due to this energy-release transformation. In a hand leading swing, from spectator’s point of view, the bending in shaft should happen all the way starting from top of backswing to anywhere prior to ball impact.

However,

If hands are still leading the shaft after impact, this means shaft is not properly released, this could be caused by bad swing, shaft too soft and bad timing, this delayed in time will very easy cause an open clubface and force a pull/push slice. (This is where hands supination is important)

If hands never lead throughout the swing, this fact wipes away all the joy in a golf swing as golfer would not have felt the unloading in shaft. This could be caused by bad swing, shaft too stiff or hands-only swing. This advance in timing will usually lead to close clubface and hooking in ball flights.