30 Years of Golf Grip Wisdom in 33 Minutes

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The Golf Grip Fundamentals Every Player Must Know (5 Key Lessons)
I wish a golf coach had told me this from the start—how to hold a golf club the right way. The grip is the foundation of your swing, and fixing it can instantly improve your ball striking, stop slices and hooks, and add consistency to your game.

In this lesson, Coach Ed breaks down the 5 most important fundamentals of the golf grip—the same tips he’s taught over 40,000 lessons:

What You’ll Learn

Fingers vs. Palms – Why the club belongs in your fingers, not your palms, for better swing path and solid contact.

Thumb & Finger Role – How your index finger and thumb should connect to control the clubface.

Interlock vs. Overlap vs. 10-Finger – Which grip is best for your hands, and how to test each.

Grip Pressure – Forget “holding it like a baby bird.” Learn the real way to apply pressure so you can hinge properly and release the club.

Grip Size – How different grip thicknesses affect ball flight, clubface control, and tension in your swing.

Practice Tips

Use a mirror or raise the club in front of your face to check hand position.

Practice at home with an old club while watching TV—make the grip second nature.

Experiment with grip size (standard, midsize, jumbo) to see what feels best for your swing and hand strength.

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I wish a golf coach had told me what I’m going to tell you about how to hold a golf club from the very beginning. Would have saved me years of trial and error figuring it out. But I’m going to save you all that time. Stay tuned. We’re going to talk about grip. We’re going to talk about what’s important and it’s really going to improve your golf game. I’m going to share with you five key things that I think really matter and what you should consider as you’re learning to hold the golf club correctly. The first thing to consider when you’re talking about grip or how to hold the club is to understand how important the fingers are in the golf swing and for how you hold the club. As an instructor, I find far too many people hold the club in the palms of their hands rather than the fingers. And especially your bottom hand, the right hand for a right-hand player, the bottom hand really needs to be in the fingers more than the palm. If you look at other implements like a baseball bat or a tennis racket, the handles with those are a lot thicker than a golf grip, even a jumbo golf grip. And the reason why a golf club is skinnier is because it is really designed to be held in the fingers. And frankly, I think a lot of your swing faults go back to how you hold the club. And if it’s in the palm too much, you’re really gonna have a difficult swinging on the correct path or the correct plane. And I’ll kind of show you that if if I hold it a lot in the palm of my right hand, um it is really difficult to swing on the right plane. I’m either going to go this way to try to hit the ball or I’ve got to go that way to try to hit the ball. And if you’re having trouble hitting fat and thin shots and everything you try doesn’t seem to work, it’s probably how you’re holding the club and it’s in the palm too much. So, I really like with the bottom hand, you can make the hookum’s horns um thing and you can really see to where that goes in the fingers um and where that club is placed. And it’s very important that it’s in the fingers. The top hand or the left hand for right-handers should also be more in the fingers than the palm. However, it it will slightly cross the palm. And a key point I want to make here is that not everybody holds it exactly the same way because our hands aren’t built like everybody else’s. Your hands are pretty much like your fingerprint where it’s a personal thing and there’s so many little bones and ligaments in your hand structure that it makes it difficult to tell each and every person this is exactly how you should hold the club. So keep that in mind. Our hands purpose and our fingers purpose in the golf swing is to hold the club in such a way that we can keep a square club face and we can swing the club on the proper path. And that is really the key issue. And if we’re holding it incorrectly from the very beginning, there’s no way in the world you’re really going to achieve a good golf swing. So keep that in mind. And I hope you find this rest of this video interesting. Of the fingers and the thumb, the two most important in my opinion, number two on my list is that how do my fingers and my thumbs hold onto the club correctly. And what do they look like? One of the things that I like to show is that I like if you make a crook with your index finger, your thumb should fit in that spot. And that index finger should actually be longer than your thumb as you hold on to the club. So, as I hold on to the club with my top hand, you can see that my index finger is longer than my thumb and there’s no space here. And then if I hold my bottom hand like that on there correctly, it’s the same thing. And you can see with my bottom hand that I’ve actually got a space here between my index finger and my middle finger. What I see incorrectly all the time is people’s whose thumbs are a lot longer than that index finger with both hands and they tend to hold the club like this. What’s wrong with that is it makes the your hands and the club on too much of a 90 degree angle. And the club doesn’t swing on a 90° angle. It swings on a tilted inclined angle. And so we want this club in our hands to have an incline in there. And that makes it much easier to to swing on the correct path in the correct plane. So that’s very important to understand. A lot of people for the new players, that’s how I teach them to hold the club is to put their thumbs and forefingers like this. Place them on the club and hold it in the fingers with their back three fingers. And if they can get their thumb and forefingers to look like this and hold the club, it really matters. The the top thumb fits right into the heel pad of the top hand. There’s a groove right in the heel pan that’s shaped just like your thumb. And that should fit right into that pad comfortably. Learn to hold your pincher fingers and thumbs correctly. and it’ll go a long ways for you to make a correct golf swing. The last part of understanding what your fingers are supposed to do is what to do with the pinky finger of your bottom hand. And um there’s three ways to do it. You can hold on with all 10 fingers on the club. Uh you can interlock and you can overlap. Is one better than the other? Not really. Do different players do it differently? Yes. Since Tiger Wood’s era of golf, um, I probably see a lot more interlocking grips among players, amateur players, because that’s the way he did it, and it’s also the way Nicholas did it. You could argue the two best players that ever lived were interlockers. So maybe that’s what we should do. But the answer really is you should experiment with all all three in your game and figure out what you hit the best shots with. If you are an interlocker, the only thing I’ll warn you about is that I see a most of the players that I see interlocking are are interlocking too deep in their hands and their fingers and then that gets the club too much in the palm of their hand. And so that’s the one thing I will warn you about if you’re an interlocker is do it in such a way that the club is still held in your fingers of your bottom hand and not in the palm. If you can see your thumb uh your top thumb in between your hand on the grip, you’ll know that you’re interlocking too deep and the your bottom hand is too much in the palm. I hold the club with an overlap grip. And if you see how my hands look as I hold the club, this would be if I interlocked. And this would be if I did all 10 fingers. And you can see that my thumbs and forefingers don’t change. I’m still in the fingers with my hands, but the only thing that changed was that pinky. So experiment is what I would say. It it just depends on what produces the best ball flight for you and um it might depend on how big your hands are, small or large. But uh find something that’s comfortable. In my opinion, what’s more important than the fing than the pinky finger is what you do with your thumbs and your forefingers and that the club is in your fingers. You can see that if I hold it in the palms of my hands too much that for me to reach the ground with the club head that I have lots of tension and everything in my wrist and forearms. But if I hold it in the fingers correctly, you should see how much more relaxed my arms and my wrist and my hands look. And that’s what we’re trying to create is is something that feels very comfortable and very relaxed at the same time. The other thing that I would tell you about what to do with your pinky might depend on your ball flight. Um, frankly, most professional and top amateur players, almost all of them overlap. Um, even though interlocking has really caught on, like I said earlier with the Tiger Woods phenomena, but um, for players that tend to hit hooks, probably the overlap or what’s also called a Varden grip is probably recommended for those people. And for people that tend to slice or fade the ball, uh, an interlocking grip can help in that case as well. And a 10finger grip can really help those that have smaller hands um and maybe not as much grip strength uh and arm strength. Uh you might find that you’re a lot stronger with a 10finger grip. Uh most women that are new players, I recommend starting out 10 fingers and most juniors I recommend starting out with a 10finger grip just for that reason. Number two on my list of grip topics is what is your hands roll? What are your hands supposed to do as you hold the club? Uh very important because frankly your hands control whether the club face is open or closed or square at impact. And so, frankly, what we’re trying to do is to hold the club in such a way that it becomes easier to strike the ball with a square club face. And to do that, your hands should really be the club face, especially your bottom hand. The bottom hand, the palm of your bottom hand should really be like the club face on the club. It is your club face, frankly. And so if if my hand starts out in a square position, the palm of my hand with the club face, well then I’m going to have a lot better chance maybe thinking about hand position at impact to deliver a square club face. And so for me as an instructor for a long long time, more than 30 years, man, I see lots of people with a bottom hand that looks like this. And you can see the club face is pointing that way and their palms pointing straight up. And they’re if they end up with their right hand um squared to the ball at impact, they’re obviously going to have a closed club face. Um, I also see a lot of players, and I don’t hear about it as much as I used to, but I have a lot of people that are slicers, and so they’re trying to put their bottom hand more and more over the top of the club, thinking that’ll eliminate their slice. But it’s actually contributes to it more because the more I get this hand on top with the palm facing down, the more on my back swing that my arms, the way my hands rotate really gets the club in a very open position back there. And so it’s very difficult. They these players have they roll going back and they’ve got to really roll and swing steep on the way down to square the face up. And so I don’t like changing grips the first time I see somebody unless I think that the grip’s 90% of their issue. That’s my rule as an instructor. But as I get to know the player, I will start mentioning grip and recommending that they change once they see progression maybe in in a better path and a better club face at the top of their swing. And so, um, a lot of instructors and a lot of people that try to help you play better golf, if especially if you’re a slicer, they try to get you to turn your hands more and more into what’s called a strong position. But at some point, if you get it in too strong a position, you’re gonna have as much trouble. I prefer for most players to really learn to play from a more neutral position. And in the long run, you’ll be a much better player. And so, be careful of really having exaggerated grips. One of the things that’s interesting, if you watch a tour player, there more and more these days, you’re seeing tour players with with pretty strong grips where their where their hands for a right-handed player are turned to the right. Um, but almost all those players that have real strong grips actually hit fades. And so they never really release their hands. is they end up at impact in the same position with their hands that they start and they pretty much hit fades from that position, not draws. So, think about that. If you’re trying to strengthen your grip to hit draws, it probably is not the right answer. The right answer is learning to get the club’s face to square earlier in your down swing. So, the palm of my right hand should be the club face. And the back of my top hand, the back of my left hand since I’m right-handed, should also be the club face. And if I have both my hands on the club correctly, the palms of my hands mimic the club face at a dress. And that’s my recommendation to you as a player. When I do that, I do make a line here with my thumb and forefinger with both hands. And what I’m trying to look at and see is that if those lines are parallel to each other. If they are, I know my hands are opposed. And that’s correct. Um, if the lines are crisscrossed one way or the other, my hands are going to work against each other. So, that’s very important to understand. The other thing about the hands position is they also influence how much wrist hinge a player has. And that’s I’ve hardly ever seen this talked about online before. But the stronger my grip is, the the more freedom I have in a wrist hinge to really hinge a lot. the weaker my hand is placed on the club or more to the left dramatically limits how much wrist hinge that I get. Now, I do think for players that have trouble topping the ball and reaching the ground, the more wrist hinge that you get, the more you make the club go up and down, it’ll probably help you a lot. However, you’ll see a lot of tour players that Scotty Sheoffller is one for instance that does not have very much wrist hinge at the top of his back swing. But it’s because of the way he’s holding the club. He’s still hinging as much as he can, but the way he holds on to the club with both hands in a weaker position tends to limit how much wrist hinge he has. That’s another factor. If you’re a player that you can tell at the top you have a lot of wrist hinge and the club gets way past parallel by weakening your grip with both hands, it might limit that hinge and shorten your back swing up automatically. So the way you hold a club can also influence the length of your back swing. So keep that in mind and you’ll end up being a better player. The other issue with the hands is if you’re going to be in a pretty neutral position, when you make these lines or V’s with your thumbs and your forefingers, I kind of like them to point at at your trail collarbone. That’s the right collar bone for a right-handed player. Um, a weaker grip, they would point right at your chin. And a stronger grip, they might point at your shoulder. But somewhere between your chin and your shoulder is probably the parameters for holding the club correctly. And for most players, especially you new players, I think the more neutral you hold it at the beginning, the better a chance you’ll have to play the golf eventually that you want to play. So, I like the collar bone or the right ear is a good place for those V’s all to point. Hey, Patrick, we’re pretty excited we partnered with Chapter. Um, they’re a Medicare advisory company. You’ll have your own designated contact person, a real person, uh, that you can talk to. The whole process takes less than an hour. They will evaluate your specific situation and give you recommendations on what would fit your needs. um going forward in the future. So, I I recommend that you call them. You don’t have anything to lose. It doesn’t cost you anything. If your plan is already the one that’s right for you, uh they’ll tell you that. That’s right. I think on average, they save people around $1,100, which means you could probably buy a fancy new driver with that savings if you want to. That’s right. So, give them a call. Yep. And the website’s askter.org/golf. That’s right. The third area, number three on my list to discuss on how to hold a club is grip pressure. Um, gosh, there’s so many thoughts over the years on that and so many misconceptions. Um, frankly, even though he’s one of the greatest players of all time, Sam Sneed said you should hold the golf club like you’re holding a baby bird. And all I can tell you is I’ve talked to a lot of great competitive players over the years. I always ask them how firmly do they hold the club and I’ve never had one of them tell me they hold it like they’re holding a baby bird trying not to crush it. And so I don’t believe anybody holds it that light. In fact, I think if you think you hold it that light at the beginning, I promise you, you always squeeze tighter on the way back before you come to the ball anyway. So, here’s my thoughts on grip pressure. What the What’s the correct grip pressure? Well, it kind of depends. It kind of depends on your ball flight. If you tend to hit hooks, uh your pressure might be different than somebody that tends to slice it. And I’ll discuss that in a minute. But I think grip pressure is really important. I found for most players, especially new players, um I frankly try to get them to hold on to the club with equal pressure with every finger and every thumb. Um Hogan in his book talked about holding with the top hand with the last three fingers extra firm and with the pincher fingers of his right hand. um work for Hogan, might work for you, too. If you tend to hook the ball, um with a lot of hookers, what I find is they actually let go while they’re swinging with these last three fingers, and then the right hand forces the grip out of their hand and closes their face. And if you can’t figure out why you’re hooking a ball with your path looks good and your club face looks good, you’re probably letting go with the last three fingers of your top hand. So check that out. So hookers boy hold on with these three fingers will probably help you. Slicers holding on with the pincher fingers with both hands more than the fingers will probably help you. I show this to slicers all the time. If I hold a club and take my last three fingers of both hands on and I let the weight of the club swing, you should really see how much force that creates to flip my hands over just the weight of the club head alone. So, if you’re having trouble releasing the club, you want a great drill, hold on with your thumbs and your forefingers and just let it swing. And and you’ll really feel rotation in your arms and it’ll probably help you a lot. Um, the other thing I would tell you is this. Your hands are supposed to hinge in the golf swing. And so, a hinge is this direction. If I squeeze as tight as I can, I am unable to hinge. And so I tell people to hold on as firmly as you can with your fingers. And I’ll talk about that more in a minute, but hold on as firmly as you can with your fingers, but then still be able to make a hinge with the club. And as you get tighter, you’ll see that I won’t be able to hinge. If I’m holding it like a baby bird, well, it’ll hinge a lot, but hold it as firm as you can and still get a complete wrist hinge. And that’s probably the correct grip pressure for you. The other thing that I told you I’d mention in a minute is this. I think the best players, it’s an acquired thing. You have to practice doing it. But I think the best players have learned to hold the club only with their fingers and not with the palm of their hand like they’re squeezing a ball. And so I think it’s an acquired thing to learn to hold on only using the muscles in your fingers. And that leaves your palm and your wrist and your forearms very relaxed. And I think that’s a huge thing that nobody talks about. But if you’re having trouble with slices and fades and fat and thin shots, if you’ll experiment with holding it only in the fingers and being relaxed enough to be able to hinge your hands, I think it will help you a lot. So think about grip pressure. It’s a big deal. Not everybody does it the same, so I can’t say there’s one best way to do it. It kind of depends on your ball flight, but if you’ll experiment with it a little bit, it’ll help you a lot. Number four on my list is a quick one, but so how do you learn to change your grip? How do you practice it? Probably the worst way to do it is to try to hit balls and change your grip right at the beginning. Gosh, for somebody, especially if you played for a long time, even moving your hands a quarter of an inch on the club will feel so weird that even though it might be the best thing to do, you you won’t you just won’t do it because it doesn’t feel right. And so that’s one of the reasons why I seldom change grips of a player the first time I meet them because they’re going to hate me for one thing for probably weeks as they try to figure out how to hold the club a different way even if I’ve only moved their hands slightly. And so how do you practice it? Well, the best way to do it, in my opinion, um, is to learn to take the club to have the face square and to learn to take the club with your hands out in front of your face. So, you can see what your fingers look like, your thumb and forefinger. You can see it’s in the fingers. You can see the face is square. You can see it’s in the fingers with these hands. And you can see where the lines or the V’s of your hands point in relation to your body with what you’re trying to do. Gosh, you know, if you’ve watched Scotty Sheffller set up to a golf ball every time he’s puts his hands right up in front of his face and drops a club head down and hits it. He’s probably done it since he was 10 years old. It’s how he was taught. I recommend it a lot. Uh you can also get in a mirror. The mirror could be in front of you and face it and therefore you can see where the V’s of your hands point and you can see there too. So I like sitting in your family room watching the Golf Sensei YouTube channel on your television and taking an old golf club and just putting your hands on there the way you want to hold it and just set it on your shoulder and watch television. If you do that every night for a week or two, it’ll feel like you’ve held the golf club that way all your life. And that’s my recommendation for learning how to improve your grip and to make changes with it if you think it’s necessary. The other thing that I didn’t mention to keep in mind also in this section is where do we hold where does our top hand fit at the end of the club? And if you’ll notice that your golf club tapers up and gets rather thick right on the very end. And they do things on purpose. And it’s on purpose that it tapers and gets wider. Well, your little finger should crook or just in front of where that knob starts. And you should have an inch or so, maybe an inch and a half from where the your little pinky finger on your top hand is to the butt end of the club. And the pad of your hand there should be where the club is. So I see a lot of players that put their finger all the way on the end and this pad is hanging over the edge and you don’t have as good a hold on the club. What happens is you swing with the force of the club head, it actually pulls away from you. And as this gets thicker on this end and you have this this pinky finger locked in front of that knob, it makes it almost impossible for the club to slip or move out of your hands. But if you’re holding it at the very end, then it’s pretty easy for that club to slip a little bit. The final thing I’ll say in this segment is I get asked a lot. Somebody will show me their golf glove and it’ll have a hole in it. usually up here in the heel pad somewhere. And they say, “Does that mean I’m holding it incorrectly?” Well, the answer is it depends. But what I found is nine out of 10 times that the reason that you’re wearing a hole in your club in your glove is because you’re not hitting the ball in the center of the club face. It’s either hitting it on the toe or the heel and it’s twisting in your hand and you’re not strong enough to hold it. And that twisting motion of the grip in the palm of your hand there is wearing a hole in your glove. Now, if the hole’s too closer up here to the middle of your hand, you’re definitely holding it in the palm too much. But boy, if you’re wearing it out down here where the club is correctly and you’re still seeing a war mark, it’s just that you’re not hitting the ball solid enough to prevent the club head from twisting. Number five on this list is another short and simple one. Does size matter? Boy, that’s a great question. Um, as I’ve gotten older over the last few years, I’ve experimented with grip size. Um, I’ve settled on midsize. I have midsize grip now. Um, I don’t have the biggest hands. I’ve tried jumbo grips last year and I kind of liked them, but I thought they were too cushy. And so, I’ve gone back to midsize. At my age, with a little arthritis in my hands and not as strong as I used to be, I find that a little bit larger grip allows me to really hold on to the club without having as much tension as if I would have with a smaller diameter grip. I do think your hand size matters on what size grip you should have. Um, when you put your lead hand on, um, I don’t think the fingers should touch the pad of your thumb. you should have a little space there. Okay. Um but it also depends how you set up um with the club itself. Um Bryson’s a pretty good example. Plays with big jumbo thick grips, but gosh, he sets up with his arms and his hands and the club very much upright here with the handle. And the more the club is up this way, the more you hold it in the palms. And the more you hold it in the palms, you’re probably better off with a bigger size grip. And the more you hold it in the fingers, a lot of guys have the handle lower. Fuzzy Zeller in the old days would have been a great example, and they really hold it in the fingers of the left hand and the handles down. Well, you might like smaller grips. What’s your answer? Experiment. If you think maybe a larger grip would work for you, put one on your seven iron and go hit balls and see what happens. The proof’s in the pudding. It’s just a matter of figuring out what’s best for you. Everybody’s different. They’ve been a lot of studies lately on grip size. Um they’ve kind of the results are pretty interesting, but still preliminary in my opinion. But for players that tend to hook it, there’s a lot less um club rotation with larger grips. That’s probably another reason why Bryson’s using big grips. Um Scotty puts six or seven wraps under a midsize grip. He’s got pretty big hands though. Big guy. Um so keep that in mind. And but experiment. And one of the things that we found in the old days, everybody said the thinner the grip, the more club head speed you could generate. But there have been studies that I’ve seen here recently that show hardly any significant difference between real thin grips and jumbo grips in terms of club head speed. So that might just be an old wives tale that um you’ll get more club head speed with thinner grips. And especially for you guys that are my age that watch our channel, um you might find that larger grips let you hold on to the club with a lot less tension and that in itself might increase club head speed and let you hit it further. Hey, if you’ve enjoyed this video, I worked with Patrick a few weeks ago and we did a video where I tweaked his grip, had him hold on with the last three fingers of his top hand because he was hitting a lot of hooks and it really helped him. So check it out. The links above.