There is no correct golf grip — that’s why you see pros gripping it so many different ways. But if there is a wrong way to grip the golf club, GOLFTEC student Tyler Griffith came about as close as you can to finding out.
Generally speaking, teachers use a neutral grip as a starting point: That means gripping the golf club in the fingers, not the palm, and seeing the first two knuckles on your lead hand. When Tyler looked down at his grip, he didn’t see any knuckles on his lead hand, and his trail hand was almost completely on on top of the grip.
“Tyler had a setup for disaster, with one of the weakest glove-hand grips I’ve ever seen, ” Ashley Thomas, a coach at GOLFTEC’s Blue Ash location, says. (If you want to book a swing evolution at your local GOLFTEC, follow this link.) “He sets up to every shot as if he were going to hit a greenside flop shot.”
His poor grip had the unfortunate side-effect of pointing his shoulders to the left …
…which caused him to come over the top, because after all, if your shoulders are pointing that much to the left, that’s probably where your club path is going to go.
And he did all this with a clubface that was very open throughout his swing, which is why Thomas likened it to a greenside flop shot.
The results weren’t pretty.
“He has the general body movements to make a nice backswing,” GOLFTEC’s Thomas says, “but he really didn’t understand how the swing direction and clubface angle throughout the entire swing contributed to his terrible contact and slices.”
Swing Evaluation for GOLF.com Readers!
How GOLFTEC fixed it
The first step was the setup, strengthening his golf grip and squaring them up to help utilize his athleticism.
“We turned his grip to the right with both hands and squared up his shoulders,” Thomas says. “He’s got a fighting chance now.”
Now that he’s setup correctly, the next step was coaching Tyler out of some of the bad habits he had created to compensate for his bad grip. That meant adjusting his takeaway, so his hands moved more inward, which boosted his turn for more power, and made him a lot less laid-off.
“Moving his hands more inward on the backswing has made a big change to his swing path,” Thomas says, but the work continues. Specifically on the downswing, where the pair used a pool noodle to promote a more in-to-out swing path.
It all goes to show that a good golf grip is the foundation to a good golf swing. My friend-and-colleague Tim Reilly refuses to change his terrible grip, which is sad. But don’t be like Tim. Be like Tyler, who made the change and is coming out better on the other side.
You can book your own lesson at GOLFTEC right here, or down below.