Learning how to hold the club is one of the first fundamentals golfers learn when taking up the game. Along with positioning the hands on the club correctly there is one key factor often overlooked by beginners and advanced players alike: finding an ideal grip pressure.
How lightly or how tightly you secure the club in your hands while swinging ranks as one of the most important influences on accuracy and power in all of golf. If held too lightly, the club slips in the hands, making it difficult to hit the ball with a squaring clubface. If held too tightly, your wrists and arms become stiff and unable to load and release the club with fluidity and speed.
An intense squeezing of the grip just prior to impact commonly causes "topped" and wayward shots. This 're-gripping,' as it were, often raises the club head up off of the ground, and manipulates the direction of the clubface at impact.
To see this for yourself, take your address position with a very light grip pressure. Now, quickly squeeze the handle as hard as you can and notice how the club head rises up off of the ground and/or turns to either a closed or opened position. To varying degrees, this happens for a majority of players, causing varying degrees of unwanted results. All it takes is a slight vacillation in the grip pressure during the swing to negatively influence the flight (or lack of flight as the case may be) of the ball.
Interestingly enough, the lightest club in the bag, the driver, is the club that usually receives the greatest stranglehold of all from golfers. It often is the case that when a player wishes to drive the ball with pure power and distance as the main objective, the more unwanted grip pressure seeps in. This death grip certainly does not yield distance; it freezes the wrists, reducing club head speed, and therefore, distance.
Finding an ideal grip pressure that promotes accuracy and distance is fairly easy. Set-up to a ball and then let the club head hover ever so slightly above the ground and behind the ball. In other words, copy Jack Nicklaus and do not ground the club while at address. That is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining that same grip pressure throughout the entire swing.
There is no shortcut here. You simply have to take a lot of practice swings with and without a ball present, becoming aware of any inconsistencies in your grip pressure and working it out.
How lightly or how tightly you secure the club in your hands while swinging ranks as one of the most important influences on accuracy and power in all of golf. If held too lightly, the club slips in the hands, making it difficult to hit the ball with a squaring clubface. If held too tightly, your wrists and arms become stiff and unable to load and release the club with fluidity and speed.
An intense squeezing of the grip just prior to impact commonly causes "topped" and wayward shots. This 're-gripping,' as it were, often raises the club head up off of the ground, and manipulates the direction of the clubface at impact.
To see this for yourself, take your address position with a very light grip pressure. Now, quickly squeeze the handle as hard as you can and notice how the club head rises up off of the ground and/or turns to either a closed or opened position. To varying degrees, this happens for a majority of players, causing varying degrees of unwanted results. All it takes is a slight vacillation in the grip pressure during the swing to negatively influence the flight (or lack of flight as the case may be) of the ball.
Interestingly enough, the lightest club in the bag, the driver, is the club that usually receives the greatest stranglehold of all from golfers. It often is the case that when a player wishes to drive the ball with pure power and distance as the main objective, the more unwanted grip pressure seeps in. This death grip certainly does not yield distance; it freezes the wrists, reducing club head speed, and therefore, distance.
Finding an ideal grip pressure that promotes accuracy and distance is fairly easy. Set-up to a ball and then let the club head hover ever so slightly above the ground and behind the ball. In other words, copy Jack Nicklaus and do not ground the club while at address. That is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining that same grip pressure throughout the entire swing.
There is no shortcut here. You simply have to take a lot of practice swings with and without a ball present, becoming aware of any inconsistencies in your grip pressure and working it out.
