Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you become a smarter, better golfer.
Your hands are the only connection between you and the golf club, so it’s crucial that you understand how to properly hold the club. We’ve written lots about how you should grip the club in recent weeks, and today that theme will continue.
If you’ve read any of our previous stories, you likely know the basics of how to hold the club properly and how to learn the best grip for your swing. Today, we take it a step further and discuss how hard you should be gripping the club.
Check out the video below where GOLF Top 100 Teacher Tony Ruggiero explains.
How firmly you should grip your clubs
How hard you squeeze the club during the swing might seem like a trivial topic, but it can have tons of impact on how you strike the ball. Grip it too hard and you’ll produce tension in your body, but grip it too loose and you’ll lose control of the clubface. The key is finding somewhere right in the middle.
“I always equate the golf swing back to other sports,” Ruggiero says. “You wouldn’t have a pitcher throw a ball barely holding [it]. I think you’ve gotta grip the club tight enough to feel like you have control of it.”
Ruggiero says when teaching his students how firmly to grip the club, he always thinks back to a conversation he had with Ben Crenshaw. In their talk, Ruggiero asked him about how one should grip the club.
“He brought up something with his old mentor and teacher Harvey Penick,” Ruggiero says. “He used to look at the forearms. And he used to look to see that there was no tension in the forearms … Too much tension in the arms is bad, but enough grip strength to hold the club is good.”
At the end of the day, you want to find that sweet spot right in the middle where you have a firm grasp on the club and can control the clubface, but no so much that the tension is spreading to the rest of your body. If you can do that, you’ll be in the perfect position to make solid golf swings.
