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The club is gripped mainly by the last three fingers of the left hand and the middle two of the right, but be careful of your interpretation of the word grip. If there was a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being very light and 10 being very tight, the correct pressure would be about 6 to 7.

More players grip the club too much than too lightly, mainly in the fear that the club will go flying out of their hands if they do not do so. This has the effect of tensing the muscles, potentially inhibiting hand action in the swing. Tense or tight muscles do not work efficiently, and a tight grip slows down the muscles.

A good analogy for grip pressure is to grip the club only as tightly as you would grip a car steering wheel if you were driving at about 40 miles per hour along a smooth, straight road.

Next time you drive, make a mental note of how much pressure you apply to the steering wheel and how, if you tighten your grip it makes the wheel more difficult to control. Try to take your steering wheel grip to the golf course. It is only on shots sometimes from thick rough or some very specialist shots that you might wish to tighten the grip at address.

In the golf swing we need the hands to work very much as a unit and to that end I use and teach the overlapping, or Vardon grip, (named after Harry Vardon who popularized it).

However, there are two other methods that are acceptable where the hands are placed in the same fashion as with the overlapping grip, but where the position of the right little finger is different.

With the interlocking grip the right little finger is interlocked between the index and middle fingers of the left hand. I dislike this grip because I feel it takes some of the control away from the left hand, but several top class players use it most successfully.

The baseball grip is where both hands sit completely on the grip, and is often loved by youngger players, or those with very small hands, but if you use this, be sure that there is no gap between your hands.

GRIPS TO AVOID

One of the most common bad grips I see is where the left hand is placed in too weak a position (too far to the left), and the right in too strong a position (too far to the right). This really has nothing to commend it as the hands can not work together as a unit and usually the left wrist gets very much out of position in the backswing, preventing the hands from developing any power. The shaft of the club does not sit under the pad at the heel of the hand, but too much in the center of the palm.

If you recognize this when you look in the mirror, start rebuilding your grip right now, because whatever ability you may have is going to struggle to manifest itself with this grip.

If you have used either of these grips for some time I would not insist that you change them, providing that your hands are positioned on the grip according to the guidelines given. The placement of the hands, rather than the position of the right little finger, is far more crucial to good golf. However, it always pays to experiment a little in this game, and by hitting some shots with the overlapping grip you may decide to change to what is the most widely used grip in golf.

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Source by Bryan Noble

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