Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "Does Your Driver Grip Matter? | Shocking Results Testing Different Grips"

In today’s lesson…

…I'll show you the shocking differences in feel and distance with each grip type along with the pros and cons of each.

I'll also explain why there's on thing I'm really NOT a big fan of when it comes to your grip.

You may be surprised about what grip may work best for you.  Come check it out!

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:26

Video Transcription:

All right, the grip. This is a question I get all the time. What's the best grip? Should I have a weaker grip, a neutral grip or a stronger grip? Well, let's go over what those are. And I actually did a little test here today. We're hit five shots of each grip. And I'll tell you what it felt like to me

We're going to compare swing speed. We're going to compare carry distance, total distance and some of the pros and cons of each of these. There's one of these I really do not like for most all players, even though it can work. We'll go over that. So let's start off with the what I would say is a weaker grip and the way that I would classify this is if I held my club up, this would be toward the sky and I would take my grip to where my logo, my glove is toward the sky.

Now, it's still going to be in the fingers so when I'm looking here, it's kind of angled and it's below the the meaty part of the hand. Pretty much all of these groups are going to be like that. When I set up to the golf ball, you'll see the logo. My glove is almost toward the target in my right hand.

The little V between my thumb and forefinger is more vertical or straight up and down. That's a pretty weak grip by most people standards. Some players, it would been like this, maybe like Ben Hogan, Tiger Woods is not quite that weak, but he's on the weaker side of it. So there's some good players that have that kind of a grip.

But the thing that I don't like about this grip is if I want to get some shaft laying in the loft, it really have to bow my wrists a ton. I really have to you know, if I want to get it from the inside, I've got to look like Dustin Johnson or Brooks Koepka or some of those guys to really close it up to get that face square and get some shaft lean.

So for me, this is one of the more radical ones. So when I look at these numbers, here, when I go to the chart, I'm going to see that my average carry distance was 255, which is really low for me. Well, see, compared to the other ones, to 77 total, my ball speed was 160, my swing speed was 109.

So not the best numbers there that's we're going to compare to the other ones. I feel like I'm trying to hit all these really good, but man, that one feels like a lot of work. You'll also notice when I pull the screen back up to the, the shot patterns, the tracers, it was really sporadic for me. So I'm hitting some that are big slices and some that are big hooks.

It's so much of that rotation that it's very difficult for me to get an awareness of exactly where the face is. So I don't like this grip as much either for generating a ton of lag. It's not that you can't do it. It's just you have to have really flexible risk to be able to square that up, get the lag.

It just makes it a little bit tougher for most players. I find most players have trouble getting enough of that bone, and I think almost everybody could get more of that bowing of the wrist are turning of the wrist as they're coming through there. So let's not make it any harder on ourself. Now, the second grip would be just kind of a neutral one here, which would be exactly what I normally take.

So here, when I have this clubface toward the camera, my club is going to be slightly closed, probably ten, 15 degrees. And now the group is up toward the sky. When I set up to the club, you're going to see the V between my thumb, my fingers now kind of to my right side of my chin. My right hand is going to be more toward my right shoulder.

That's traditionally what most people would say is a pretty neutral grip that's what I usually do with my own grip. So if I look at the numbers there, remember 250 something carry 109 club speed. Now we're going to go to my neutral grip. 279 carry picked up about 22 yards per carry, 300 yards total driving distance average. I picked up seven miles an hour, a swing speed.

I picked up ten miles an hour of ball speed. Now you could argue that the reason that I did all those things, it's like, well, that's just a different grip. So yeah, Clay, you're going to play a little bit better if you use your normal grip than you would if you use a weaker grip that you're not used to.

But again, the swing speed, I just found that happening and really when we go into this third one, I'm gonna kind of disprove how playing with a different grip isn't necessarily what's going on now. I would say you look at the consistency of those strikes those are very, very consistent. That's mostly coming from what I was feeling like I was doing.

I knew where the clubface was. None of the other grips are going to be as consistent that because it's not just what I'm used to now. When I go over here and take my third grip, I'm actually going to use a really strong grip. So now that face is going to be almost probably 30, 45 degrees closed when the logo of my glove is up toward the sky.

And when I take a look at that one, I call this kind of a hammer grip, actually, let me go grab a hammer. I'll show you exactly what I mean by that. Now, at this hammer, kind of a dinky hammer here, I don't have a big one laying around, but if I take this normal or if I take this stronger grip, my hand is kind of turned more to the right like that.

Again, the club would be closed compared to my wrist angle here. It's almost like if I had a hammer like this, if I'm grabbing a hammer straight up and down like a hammer nail. And I turned it this way, and now this golf ball, I'm going to hammer the back of the golf ball like that. So my grip is really turned sideways.

That's kind of a Paul Azinger grip. That's kind of a some of the stronger grips that you might see on on the PGA Tour. And the right hand would be the same thing. It's turn much more under like this, and it's almost like the right hand is going to hammer the back of that golf ball. The advantage of this one is I don't have to get as much of the rolling of the wrist.

So we're looking at D.J. really bow in the wrist or are you looking at those guys that have the wrist really bow through, impact the right wrist, the riight knuckles really bent back. You don't have to do that if you have the hammer grip. But I actually took that hammer grip and I did that same thing. It would actually be over closed too much for Kathleen, too little lost too much of a hook, which most players need a lot more of that.

So when I tried that grip out, I got to tell you, it actually felt the best on the contact. If I go back, I'll actually go back to the first couple drivers here on my driver. The smash factor averaged 1.48 on my normal driver averaged 1.47 on my weak grip driver and I averaged 1.48 on my stronger driver.

Now, I had one bad missed it in there where it was only a 1.43, but I had one which was the highest a 1.51 I got to tell you, that felt amazing. 278 carry 295 distance a little bit shorter than my normal one 170 ball speed, 115 and a half club head speed pretty similar on there. So what I found by this and I think this is a kind of an interesting one and I think this would actually be a good grip to experiment with from some players is when I take this really strong hammer grip, it automatically sets me more to the right what I call stable fluid spine it automatically gets me in a

position where I feel like it's really easy to get lag. It's almost impossible with this grip to come over the top like that. You take this strong grip, you're automatically going to be coming from the inside, shallowing that club out, getting it from the inside. That way it's probably what I would call the cheater grip. This is like the kind of cheater position.

You really get it strong hand, man. You can get a lot of those positions without having to work as hard on that. So I'd say most players tend toward the stronger grip type. Now, the disadvantage of this is it was so strong that in my brain, if I move my body the way a golf swing should move and I have a pretty good fundamentals on my swing, it feels like it is going to hook like crazy.

I feel like I'm just going crazy. Duck hooks are left, so I have to really feel like I'm kind of holding off on it. And I don't like that feeling as much for some players because it's really easy if I feel like I'm holding off to almost fall back a little bit and maybe hit some chunks on there.

So that would be the one disadvantage with that stronger grip. Now, the real key to this, the real takeaway from this was I'm not a big fan of the weaker grip for most players, but you can use a variety of grips. Hogan played fantastic with a weak grip policing and played fantastic with a strong grip. Everybody else fell somewhere in between those two players.

So there's all different variations of this that you can play with. What this really shows is find a grip that's comfortable for you. Test out weaker and stronger, grip, see what you like the best but as long as you get a lot of lag and you release it in front, the club is going to be working through contact very, very well.

That's what the top speed golf system is you do the five fundamentals of the top golf system. It doesn't make a hill of beans difference what kind of grip you take. So test out the different grips for yourself. But I want you to challenge yourself to do what I call the number one fundamental. If you want to hit it good with any of these grips, go over to the stable fluid spine section and what we're going to do here, we're going to get a little bump away from the target and then I'm going to teach my body how to rotate around that spine angle.

So I'm extremely consistent. Notice when I do that, look at my head doesn't even really move at all. My head's almost dead still as I'm making my entire swing. That allows you to have consistency, that allows you to hit the ground the same spot every time. The grip won't do that for you. The grip, you might have a personal preference, but there's nothing that's going to be the magic fix for all of it.

So if you want to get that real consistency, go to the instruction tab, click on top speed system, go to the stable fluid spine and work through just one video in the stable fluid spine section. And what I want you to do is you work through that, try out the three different groups, see which one feels best to you and you're going to start to make some great headway.

I challenge you to do one video today. Go ahead, watch that video, finish it off this week, and you're going to get hooked. You're going to start hitting a lot more consistent you're going have fun and it's going to become automatic. I'll see in the stable fluids spine.