Why You Need This: This video, "How To Grip The Golf Club | Crazy Detail", explains one of the most important parts of your golf game...

The grip.

Grip is the very beginning...

It all starts there and works its way through movement, swing, and release...

From novice to expert, the range of how to grip the golf club is very dynamic...

Each little point can help you control your swing all the way down to where the ball can land...

I'll help you understand where to place your hands and how that affects where the ball will go...

Watch the video now for my 3 tips, and I'll even introduce an awesome training aid as well!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:21

Video Transcription:

All right, so there’s thousands of videos on how to hold the golf club. But one of the major things is they don’t go into enough detail.

Maybe they hit in a couple of highlights, or they talk about whether the hand should be turned to the right or turned to the left, but they don’t go into details of exactly how the hands should fit on the club.

I’m going to give you the most detailed golf video you’ll ever see today, and I’m going to give you some great drills to help ingrain that, and a really cool training aid that you can use at the end of this, that’s going to help you to accelerate your progression.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

There’s nothing more frustrating in golf than that not knowing your yardage into the hole, hitting the wrong club, and ending up in trouble when you hit a good shot.

That’s why I recommend the Swing by Swing golf GPS app, it’s absolutely free, it has tons of details, and I recommend everybody use it, it’s the one I use for myself. So go to your app store, down the Swing by Swing GPS right now.

There’s three things that we want to accomplish when we’re taking the proper golf grip. Number one, we want to have our hands kind of melded together with the club, working together, that way we have complete control of the golf club.

Number two, we want to be able to hinge the club properly, that way as we get lag and then release lag in the golf swing, we’re going to be able to do that with the proper grip.

Then number three, we want to have the hands turned correctly to the right or to the left, that way we can hit some nice straight shots. So in this video I’m going to go over all of those pieces, and we’re going to start out with something called the short thumb.

What the short thumb is, a lot of times when I see beginning golfers, they’re going to hold the golf club almost like they’re making a fist.

When I do that, you can see that no matter if I’m using interlock, overlap, any of those grips, as I do that, you can see that my thumb goes well past my index finger.

So now you can see my thumb, the tip of my thumbnail is well past the bottom of my index finger, and that’s what I call a long thumb. That’s both in the left hand, and in the right hand, my thumb is very, very long.

The reason I don’t want to do this, is because as I grip the club this way, you can see there’s some big gaps in between my fingers and the palm of my hand, and I’m not really getting the full coverage on the grip that I should be getting.

So you can see there’s gaps in there, and now I can’t really feel the club. Now a great way to fix this is by using something that you already know how to do, which would be handing a very small object to somebody.

So if I took out a tee, and I was going to hand that to somebody, notice how my thumb and my index finger would be at about the same level. When I do this, what I’m doing is I’m having to spread out my fingers this way, and that’s going to give me more coverage on the club.

I’m going to get the exact same feeling now as I grip the golf club. I’m going to lose the tee for now, and as I take the grip of my left hand, I’m going to have that same kind of feeling that’s going to spread out my fingers, and now the tip of my thumb is almost level with my index finger.

Same thing with the right hand as I put it on there, now the tip of my right thumb is going to be level with my index finger. That’s called the short thumb, I don’t want to have my thumb way down here, I want to pull it back in.

You can feel a lot more coverage on the golf club as you dothat. Now the next piece we want to work on is to make sure we can hinge that club and get the speed like I talked about before.

We’re going to do this by setting the club in your left hand properly. If you open up your left hand, you’re going to see that there’s two pads, there’s one pad on the bottom of your thumb, so kind of the meaty pad there, and then one below your pinky.

If you feel all the way at the bottom of this pad, there’s a small circular bone at the very, very bottom. Now as I’m griping the club, I want to make sure that the top of the club, the top of the grip, all the way at the end of the grip, that that bone is resting just on top of that.

Now with my index finger, I’m going to make it a hook. Just like I’m a shooting a gun, as if I was going to pull the trigger. I’m going to do that at the bottom of the club. If I do this correctly, the top of my hand, that bone is at the top of the grip.

The bottom of the hand, the index finger is wrapped around, and now I’m just going to grip with the rest of the hand. Again, I’m using my short thumb as I’m doing this. That’s going to allow me to hinge the club, and to get a lot more speed as I learn the proper swing.

As I mentioned, the hands not only want to work together with the club, they want to work together with each other. That’s why we’ve got to make sure that the hands are touching and really interlocking into each other, melding together properly.

So if I go ahead and take my proper left-hand grip as we’ve been going over, the upper part of my right thumb, so from the top of my knuckle here, there piece of my thumb, that meaty part of my thumb, is going to fit right into the pads, or the crease in the right hand.

So I have the bottom pad, and the thumb pad, the upper part of my thumb is going to fit right into there as I grip the club properly. So if my hand is way down here, that’s not correct. If it’s up there, it’s not correct.

I’m going to split the pads of my hand with that thumb as I’m doing this, and as I hold the club. I’m going to take my left-hand grip, and now you can see as I slide my right hand on, the upper right part of the thumb is going to split the right hand, or sorry, the left thumb is going to split the right hand.

If we’re looking at it from this direction, we can see there that that’s going to slide right down on it. Now my hands are completely working together as one unit. I feel like I have complete control of the club, and the club’s not going to slip or move around in my hands as I’m making a swing.

One of the most common things that people talk about is whether we go overlapped grip, interlocked grip, or a baseball grip. You can do any of those three and be a very, very successful golfer.

I’m going to go over those briefly and talk about what we can expect if we’re using those. First let’s go over baseball grip, that’s when your index finger of your left hand and your pinky finger of your right hand are lined up this way just like you’d be swinging a baseball bat.

That’s the least popular in golf grips, this is an OK grip to use if you have smaller hands, maybe you don’t have as much strength because you’re going to have more of your hands on the club, and you’re going to feel like you have a little bit more power.

So people who don’t feel like they have a lot of strength, or they have very, very small hands, they may want to use the baseball grip. Some people will tell you, “Oh, you can’t play good golf with a baseball grip.”

I have a player that I played with in college, was on my college team, went on to play in the mini tours, has won hundreds of thousands of dollars using the baseball grip, and he hits the ball awesome. So if he can do it, anybody can use the baseball grip. It’s not that big of a deal if you don’t overlap or interlock.

The most popular one is the overlap, so basically I’m going to take my left hand, grip the club, and then I’m going to take my pinky of my right hand and overlap the index finger of my left hand. So that looks something like this, and we can see as we’re doing this, that’s going to get the hands working together as a unit.

That’s a great grip, one of the most popular grips. A lot of pros use this grip. My personal favorite, and what feels the best to me, feels like I have the best control of the club, is what’s called an interlock.

So I’m simply going to take the index finger of my left hand, the pinky finger of my right hand, and interlock those two in together. Now I really feel like they’re locked in together, I feel like I have complete control of the club.

That’s my personal favorite, but you can use any three of those. Some popular players with the interlock; Tiger Woods uses the interlock. Greg Norman, I believe, uses an interlock, so a lot of good players use these.

You can use any three, but the key is not necessarily how you interlock your hands or overlap your hands, it’s how the hands are on the club and working together themselves that we’re going over in other pieces of this video.

Another popular thing that you’ll probably here is where the Vs in your fingers should be pointing.

Now ideally if we have what’s called a neutral grip, that means our hands aren’t turned too far to the right or left, which we’ll go over in a minute, the V that’s created between my thumb and my index finger with my left hand, should be roughly pointing up to the right side of my head, or my right ear.

The V with my right hand, so the line formed between my thumb and my index finger with my right hand should be pointing a little bit to the right of that. So if it’s going up toward the inside of my right shoulder, that would be a completely neutral grip.

Now there’s been really good players that have played with this type of grip, Tiger Woods’ grip looks very, very similar to this. There’s also been very good players that have used a very strong grip, where those Vs are going way more to the right.

So David Duvall back in the ‘90s, number one player in the world, had a very, very strong grip where his Vs in his hands were turned to the right like this. Everything else we talked about was very similar, how he’s holding the club and how he’s holding his hands together, everything is just turned more to the right.

What that’s doing, is that’s closing the club face, that’s going to make it easier to hit a draw, or easier to get that club to turn on over. If we do that a little too much, it can get dangerous, so I recommend staying somewhere close to neutral.

If you want to go a little to the right, that’s fine. Another great player, Ben Hogan, used the opposite of that, where he had a very weak grip where the Vs are now pointing more to the left side of his body, and my right hand is more on top of the club like this. For most people, I would say that would be the least popular.

Most people struggle with hitting a slice or not getting the ball to turn over right to left. I would highly recommend you go more to the right instead of a weaker grip like this.

But for pro players, for players that struggle maybe hooking the ball, having a weaker grip with those Vs turned to the left will be completely fine. Lastly, if we want to have that perfectly neutral grip, there’s a great way to check this.

As I grip the club, I’m going to go through all the check points that I’ve had earlier in this video, and if I grip the club properly, if I hold up my hand going directly out straight ahead from my shoulder, and the back of my left hand is parallel with the ground, the club face should also be parallel with the ground.

So if you’re looking at it from this direction, you can see that my club face and the back of my hand are basically lined up and both of those are facing towards the sky when I do this.

If I had a very closed grip, or if my hand was turning to the right like this, well now you can see as my wrist is flat, now the club face closes. Or if we’re going more like a Ben Hogan, it would be open like this.

So if you want to get that neutral grip, you want to have a quick, easy way to check that, hold your hand out, and we’re going to check to make sure that the face of the club is matching the back of the left hand.

All right, so now I’m going to show you one of my favorite training aids that makes this all very, very simple, it hits a lot of the key check points that we talked about today, it’s called the Golf Grip.

They’re not paying me to promote this, I just really enjoy this grip, but what I like about this, is that you can snap it on and off of any club. So let’s say you’re going to the range, you want to work on your grip really quick, but you want to use your pitching wedge to hit some shots.

Snap it on the pitching wedge, hit some shots, and you want to go switch over to the driver, but you still want to work on your grip, you can snap it off, snap it on the driver, and it’s really easy to use.

Whereas if you have the molded grips like you’ll see that are a solid, rubber grip, you have to have a special club for that, it’s not very practical. This one, snap it off, put it in your pocket, and use it for another day. So it’s very, very simple, I’ll go over really quickly how to put this on.

All you’re going to do is there’s a little white line that we can see on the top of the grip. I’m going to line that up with my club face, so I’m simply going to put my left hand on, I’m going to see about where I need this.

I’m going to snap it on really quickly here, it fits really firmly on the grip, and now as I line this up, I’m going to put that white line lined up with the club face, and now that I know this is a neutral grip.

So again, as I grip this club, I’m going to slide it to make sure that that bone is lined up at the right height of the grip. Now it’s going to make me have a short thumb, it’s gonna have my index finger and my thumb working together.

If I slide my right hand on, the right thumb is going to fit right into my…or the left thumb is going to fit right into my right hand, and t’s also going to have me pinch with a short thumb on my right hand. So I really like this grip, very, very easy to use.

Another cool feature about this, because we can twist this on the club, let’s say you want to use a little bit of a stronger grip, or turning the hands to the right. All I’ve got to do is instead of lining this up with the face, I can simply twist it a little to the right, so now it’s lined up to the side slightly and I can use a bit of a stronger grip as I’m setting up.

Same thing with a weaker grip, if I want to go more of a Ben Hogan, I can slide it to the left and now I’m using a bit of a weaker grip. That’s going to allow me to adjust this however that I like, and however I see fit.

This is a great training aid, super effective, super cheap. Go through these check points, work on this. I recommend doing this in your living room.

Watch this video, take some notes on this, and go through each one of these check points and give it as many hours as you can, taking the proper grip and building muscle memory, so that you’re going to naturally grip the club that way without even having to think about it, and you’re going to play some better golf.

It’s going to help you to hit it more consistent, it’s going to help you to hit it farther, and it’s definitely going to help you to have better control of the club.

So good luck to you guys, I’ll see you all soon.