Golf Lessons: Fundamentals of the Strong Grip

09/08/2013

Hi everybody, my name is Joseph Mayo.  And I’m here with my teaching partner, long time PGA Tour player Grant Waite, and we’re at the beautiful Southern Hills Plantation course outside Tampa, Florida.  In this video, we’re going to discuss the strong grip, and the ramifications of using a strong grip.  Grant, define the strong grip, and tell us about it.

Okay, so when I place my left hand on the club, if I’ve got my thumb running right down the center of that shaft, we’re going to say that’s at zero, or a very neutral condition.  As I turn my left hand over to the right, where the thumb is completely on the side of the shaft, I’ve turned my grip and my left hand about 90 degrees to the right.  No one plays from that far over, but that is a turned grip.  So if I have my grip—my left hand—turned that much to the right, let’s say 45 degrees, you can see the back of my left hand is actually pointed up toward the sky.  Now, if I put my right hand on with that, now that’s also turned so much to the right.  The ramifications of that is that if I go to the top with normal wrist conditions or rotations in my forearm and in my wrist, I’m going to get there and the club face is going to end up in a shut position.  Again, the problem with that is if I come back down into impact, if I have any rotation at all, the club face is going to end up being in a closed or left of target position.  Joe, what is the problem with that.

Well, if the club face is rotated to a position left of the flag, then that means the golf ball tends to start to the left of the flag, and the only way to play functional golf is to play a slice or a cut; because if it starts to the left, it’s got to curve back to the flag to the right.

So that means that we know the face is the start line, starting left.  What do we have to do with the path?  Now we’ve got to get this path going way to the left in order to cut the ball back to the right and we’re right back into the very problem we’re trying to get out of, which is stop slicing the ball and to start drawing the ball.

Right, because we’ve all heard that a strong grip helps stop the slice.  Grant, would you agree or disagree?

I don’t think that that will stop the slice at all.

Right, and we’re not saying that everybody that uses a strong grip is going to cut the ball; we’re not saying that.  We’re just identifying what we see on a day-to-day basis with our amateur golfers on the practice tee.  My name is Joseph Mayo, and for Grant Waite, thank you for watching our video, we will have more coming very soon.

Waite Mayo Golf