(ball cracking) – There are lots of ways to grip the club. You can have an interlock grip, you can have an overlap grip, you can even have a 10 finger grip. You can have a weak grip, where
your thumbs are more on top, or you can have a strong grip, where your thumbs are more on the side. Any combination of those, you can play really great golf with. It comes more down to personal preference and what matches well
with the other things that you're doing in your swing. But there is one thing that
you have to get correct with the grip if you want to
have power and consistency. And this is one thing that I
see so many players get wrong, and that is how our lead
hand attaches to the club. So if you look here, I
have some pads on my hand, and it's very easy to see on the grip, or on the glove here,
because it shows them.
So I have my heel pad here
and I have my thumb pad here. When I see players struggle, they have the thumb pad
more on top of the grip. And when you do that, it puts it too much in the hands, in the palm of the hands here. And it puts you at a
mechanical disadvantage because it doesn't allow
you to get this club to hinge up very much in the downswing, and you get the club lagging behind you.
When I do that, I'm not
gonna be able to get that whip of speed through impact, 'cause I'm gonna be dumping
my angles very quickly. And I'm also not gonna
be able to get the hands ahead of the golf ball
impact to get shaft lean and to de-loft the face to give me that really good compression. So I'm losing speed and
I'm losing compression and it's gonna be very, very difficult to play good golf when you're doing that. So we want to learn the proper
way to put the lead hand on the grip and I have an awesome drill that makes it so easy. So what we're gonna do is
you're gonna start out, and you're just gonna create a hook with your pointer finger. And you're gonna set the
club down in that hook. And then, what you're gonna do is you're gonna take your heel pad and put that on top of the grip.
Remember, players that
struggle put the thumb pad on top of the grip. We want to put the heel
pad on top of the grip. And if you can support the
club, like I'm doing right here, then you know that
you're doing it correct. If I don't put my heel pad
enough on top of the grip, if I put it right there, it's gonna tend to want
to come out of my hand, just like that. So just create your hook
with your pointer finger, support the club, and then, from there, you can wrap your other fingers on there, put your thumb down, and then you can also put your
other hand on there as well.
Now this works with whether
you have a weak grip, a neutral grip, or a strong grip. So if I have a weaker grip,
what I'm going to do is, when I put this club
and I set it in my hook, I'm gonna set it down more in
the lower part of my finger. So I'm creating my hook. I'm gonna put more in the
lower part of the finger and I'm gonna put my heel pad on top. And there I go. I have my weak grip, but I
have my left hand on there, my lead hand on there, in the correct way. Now, if I have a stronger grip, that club is gonna be
supported more on the tip of my fingers. So if I create my hook, it's gonna be more on the
top of my finger there. My heel pad is gonna be more on top. And there, I have my strong grip. Now, to put the lead hand
on there, also very easy. We have the heel pad and the
thumb pad, and between those, we have what's called
the lifeline of the hand.
Now that lifeline of the hand is what's gonna come into contact with the thumb of your lead hand. Now, if you're someone that struggles with getting the club face closed, you tend to leave the face open, you hit a lot of slices
and things like that, where a lot pushes out to the
right for right-handed golfer, you're gonna want to put that lifeline more on the side of your thumb. So if I have my grip
here, I'm gonna want to put my lifeline more on
the side of my thumb.
And that puts my trail hand
in a stronger position, which makes it a lot easier
to get that club face closed. Now, if I'm struggling with
getting the ball too far to the left, or hooking a lot of shots, I'm struggling with getting
the club face too closed. You may want to put that lifeline
more on top of the thumb, more on top of the thumbnail. And that's gonna put your trail hand in a weaker position, which is gonna make it easier for you not to close the face too much. So depending on the issue
that you have there, will be what you want to do. So play around with that to
find what works best for you.
Now, to train this is very easy. I have a lot of students that I work with and when we make a grip change, they always tell me how hard
it is to make a grip change. Because, in the beginning,
it is very awkward, but making a grip change is
actually one of the easiest things to change, because you
can work on it a lot more. So if you're strategic about
when you're working on it, it makes it very easy. So what I'd recommend doing
is have a club at the office, have a club in the kitchen, have a club next to your
recliner or something like that.
So that way, whenever you're doing a
conference call at the office or you're cooking, or you need to wait, or you're watching the news, you can just pick up the
club and start working on it. And I'm telling you, you work
on this for 10, 15 minutes a day for a week or two, it's
gonna become very, very easy. It's a very easy thing to train. There aren't a lot of things
you can train with your swing that happen that quickly.
So have it by ya, do the
drill, create the hook, support the club, wrap
your hand around there, then put your lead, or excuse
me, your trail hand on there. And you can even take a
swing if you have some space, then take your lead hand off, start over, and start doing it again. Go through it 10 to 15 minutes a day. I'm telling ya, that grip change is
gonna be very, very easy. And when I do that, when I get the club in
the hook of my hand, I get the club in the right
place, in my lead hand, now I'm able to create lag in the start of my downswing here.
I'm able to get that
club lagging behind me. So now I can whip the club through contact and I can also get the hands in front. And that's where we're
gonna get our compression, more power, and we're gonna
play some much more consistent golf when you do that. So work on those, correct your grip, and start playing some better golf. So now that we've got the
hand in the correct way on the club, now we can start
working on the transition of the downswing. To me, this is one of
the most important parts of the golf swing, because
if we don't have the club in the right place from
the top of the swing to this lead arm parallel position, it just makes it very, very
difficult to be any good.
Because from here to the golf
ball, it's a split second. So if that club is out of position, you're gonna have to make
some sort of compensation really quickly, and everything
gets dependent on timing. And you're gonna be really
inconsistent when you do that. So what I recommend doing is
working on getting this club in the correct place and
getting this club face in a more square position
and getting that club in the right position on the downswing. So that way you can stay in your posture. You can just turn through, you can just turn through,
basically, as hard as you can. And you know you're gonna have
that club in the right place and that face square, every single time. So I have a bonus video
for ya, where Clay Ballard, the founder of Top Speed Golf, is gonna show you one
of my favorite drills to get this right.
And that is the tennis racket drill. So I'm gonna play a preview of that drill here in just a second. But if you'd like to see the whole video, all you have to do is click the i card that's gonna appear up in
the corner of the screen. If you don't see the i card, no worries, just click the link in
the description below. Play well, and I'll talk to you soon. – Good player problems. We're gonna talk about
shallowing that club shaft out as we're starting down, as we're doing this rotating of the face that we worked on in the last video.
As we start this
downswing, what you'll see with basically all of the top players is instead of coming kind of over the top and letting the hands come
out away from their body, letting the club come out
away from their body, again, coming down steep into the ball,
and then having to open up, kind of filet open the
face and add loft to it. The flattening of the shaft should happen as soon as we start down. So as we start this downswing, what we want to have happening here.
You can imagine that if I draw a line from the hozzle of my club
up through my right elbow, that's my swing plane
line, my elbow plane. As I go to the top of the swing, I'm gonna be slightly above that. And then, as I start down, I want my hands to start to shallow out. I want the club to shallow out
inside of this elbow plane. And at the same time,
I'm gonna be rotating..