Better your golf game

If clubface alignment at impact is golf’s critical “geometrical” factor, then how the golfer holds his club — and thus controls this alignment — is the supreme factor determining the success or failure of his shots.

Much as many golfers would like to be able to ignore this fact, it is inescapable. The old saw, that you never see a good golfer with a bad grip or a bad golfer with a good grip, is pretty true. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned player seeking improvement, finding a grip that naturally returns the clubface square to your swing line is your absolute first priority; your inescapable starting point. If you are an established golfer, but feel you have never reached your full potential at the game, it is a 5-to-l chance that your grip is at the root of your problems.

The majority of golfers never develop a proper grip. Quite naturally, they want to get on with hitting the ball. They regard the way they hold the club as a minor and relatively boring aspect of the game, compared to the fascinating technical intricacies of the swing itself. Even if they do make an effort to develop a correct grip, few persevere because any change feels so uncomfortable at first. I hate to preach, but this is a cart-before-horse approach that will always limit you as a golfer. If you want to play golf to the maximum of your potential, you must develop a correct grip.

What is a correct grip?

First, I want you to forget anything you have read or heard that suggests that there is one, and only one, way to hold a golf club. Everybody has a correct grip, but finding it is not a matter of arranging the hands on the club in a standard position, as so many websites suggest. It is a matter of finding the grip that enables you (not Jack Nicklaus nor Tom Watson nor Seve Ballesteros) to face your club in the direction you are swinging it at impact, while swinging at speed.

At the risk of laboring the point, I repeat: it is to make this possible — and only this — that the golf club is held in a particular way.

Down the long history of golf, a certain pattern of placing the hands and fingers on the club has been found to make returning the clubhead square to the swing line at speed easiest for the greatest number of people. Let’s look at this basic system first, then at the variations you may need to adopt to suit your own physical make-up.

To start with, you place the club diagonally in your open left hand, so that it lies in the crook of the first finger and across the palm under the butt of your thumb. Next, you close this hand over the shaft, with the left thumb riding just to the right side of the shaft. If you do this properly, you will find that you are holding the club with your last three fingers pushing it firmly against your palm; and that the “V” formed by the thumb and forefinger is pointing more or less at your right shoulder when you ground the club with its face square to your target. You will also probably find, looking down, that you can see between two and three knuckles of your left hand.

to read part 2 of Your golf grip and how it will improve your game please click here

You should keep your golf clubs from rusting and pitting by getting them out of your car when it starts getting cold (below 40 degrees). The constant up and down of the temperature can lead to condensation on the clubs causing rust damge on the outside and inside of the golf club shaft and golf club head.

• Never to hit the ball until you had decided exactly what you were trying to do.

• Never to attempt more than you could reasonably expect to achieve.

• Try your utmost on every shot.

This golf advice is applicable to every golfer, whether he scores in the sixties or the hundreds: three thoughts to serve as a basic text in any keen golfer’s approach to the game — something almost to write on the back of your glove or carry around the course on a prominent placard in your mind’s eye. Let’s look at the tenets individually.

Never hit the ball until you know what you are trying to do.

This really has two meanings. One obviously relates to summing up the shot in terms of distance, trajectory, ground and wind conditions, the lie of the ball, potential trouble areas, and so on. Thousands of golfers give insufficient attention to such matters. They simply grab a club and whale away almost blindly and wonder why, even when hitting the ball well, they never make a decent score.

Every golf hole and every golf shot requires thought. The better you can picture a given shot in your mind’s eye, and the clearer your mind is about the shot you intend to play, the greater your chance of accomplishing it. Even that simple lesson alone would substantially lower many handicaps.

But there is more than assessing the shot in knowing what you are trying to do at golf. You want to know not only what the ball should do, but what you yourself are trying to do to get the ball to behave in that way. You need to know, consciously, what you are trying to do with your swing.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a good swing, or an agricultural heave; if you have a single focal thought, you will have a better chance of making it work, not once in a while but repetitively. Repetition is the golden key to golf, and it usually starts with a repetitive thought pattern.

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Wishing You Lots Of Golfing Success

James Conley
Better-your-golf-game.com