Grip Pressure Differences Between Amateur’s and Professional’s

Golf Lab Founder Liam Mucklow presents his findings from the recent Grip Pressure Study to the Coaches at Golf Magazine’s Top 100 Retreat. In this presentation, Liam provides insights into difference in grip pressure between players that slice the ball, hook the ball, have issues with solid contact and professional players as well as the effect grip pressure has on each segment’s movements.

And we’ll see Liam what’s up David yeah good morning yeah um just real quick we did uh welcome everyone to the stage last night all our new tub teachers you are one you were not here a big round of applause for Liam yeah yeah thanks everybody good to have you

Um I’m not gonna take up too much uh um everyone’s time with the intro I think most people know who Liam is what Liam has done a lot of research not only the golf world and the baseball world I was just reading up on you the your work in

The baseball field has filled like a billion dollars in salaries uh yeah I need I need that I need that yeah me too all right so but if if you’re set to go we’re all here and uh we’re excited um and there’ll be time for questions but but for this

Particular presentation if there are questions at the end we um we will need we we’ll need to use the mic okay uh so without further Ado Liam everyone awesome all right uh thanks nuns thanks uh thanks everybody for sticking around um you know gonna g to get right into it

Here right away but I guess you know before I get started uh thanks to the team at 8 AM golf for accommodating my inability to travel it’ll be uh should be fun doing it via Zoom hopefully it’s entertaining for you guys um hopefully uh the text all works out you know I

Guess before we get going I just wanted to share you know I suppose what what the objectives of this presentation are and really when it comes down to it my hope is that we’re going to arm everyone there in the room with information where you’ve got new you know new things to

Consider you know and so I hope that after we go through this we’re going to start to consider um you know things like grip size and grip pressure as you know viable means to hit the Easy Button you know ultimately help people get better faster make swing changes faster

Control their golf ball shoot lower scores so I’m going to uh switch over here and let me uh get rolling here okay all right now hopefully this is all working we’re going to get started um you know on the first thing for those of you out there

That have done research you guys know how much time it takes and I just wanted to be transparent you know a lot of the leg work that’s gone into the background of this uh while I’ve been involved in guided it I haven’t necessarily been you know boots

On the ground collecting the data so I wanted to give a shout out to Carson how uh he’s our managing part of the Toronto location 2022 PGA canidate teacher of the year brilliant guy unbelievable with tech um and also Jonathan Collins Johnny’s our head lab tech several of

You out there have met him some of you guys have had the chance to shoot cont content with him um so not only did he do a lot of the data capture the data cation but also has helped a lot with visualization of you know what we found

So hopefully that’s uh helpful for you guys um we’re going to go back to kind of Step One not going to spend much time on it this is presented 2018 World scientific Congress of golf really simple study on grip size we had like 11 different sizes of grip in our Pro Shop

Um every Club comes with standard grips on it didn’t really make sense to me going through testing we found out a couple key things uh number one when you step on your teaching tea you get back to work just know that four out of five people do not have the right grip size

As it pertains to optimize and control the golf ball the second thing I want you to know is that we found a 0.00 correlation between hand length and grip size so this is something you have to test there’s a ton of variability don’t need to go too much into it but just

Know that we saw an average a 35% Improvement reduction of shot dispersion with seven irons across a large sample set of golfers so huge opportunity there you know the next step we went into was a preliminary study on grip pressure and for this particular one similar to the

Big one I’m going to introduce we use a sensor grip from sensor Edge we used gears full body motion capture we used our GC quad to measure ball flight Club delivery and of course swing Catalyst to start off we did a low handicap group and a high handicap group to see is

There any difference in the way people apply pressure to the handle of the golf club here’s the process was pretty simple you know we wanted to mimic what it’s like when these golfers go to play golf so instead of having a structured warm-up routine that may be too many

Shots for some people not enough shots for other it’s literally are you ready to go to the first te we use a dynamometer Get Grip strength of lead and Trail hand uh we go through a grip calibration process to let you guys know how that works got a club here basically

As we get started it’ll have us squeeze the club as hard as we can with both hands then lead hand only Trail hand only that’s how it calibrates for hand width and also for um a Max grip pressure per individual and you guys will get a chance to see some of that

Data com to life here shortly go ahead had him hit 10 shots with one Club process all the data here’s an ugly spreadsheet deal with these a lot um and this is what we saw so uh we presented this at the 2022 World scientific Congress of golf Carson

And I um what we see with a low handicap players represented the Blue Line we saw them starting with less lead hand pressure more variability throughout the swing you know a Dro in lead hand G pressure from top of back swing down through shaft parallel and then sorry

Lead arm parallel and then ramping back up quickly with the high handicap players we saw uh increasing in trail hand grip pressure and overall kind of more constant less variability one of my favorite things about this was when we were actually 2021 at Pinehurst um Nick Clearwater with Gtech

Presented a similar study and our takeaway was like yes the matches love it it’s always a good thing now uh let’s dive into what we’ve been spending the past gosh we’re December holy spoked it’s been 11 and a half months so what we wanted to do is

Take that kind of really simple initial study you know really broad spectrum of golfers and let’s try and narrow it down you know for us specifically let’s narrow it down into the subsets of golfers that we deal with on a day-to-day basis we’re all so fortunate that we were able to get professional

Players to opt in so we could use them as a bit of a baseline for like what do we see with good players we had a group of players that chronically fight hooks group of players that chronically slice and a group of players that just really struggle with contact in general as

Opposed to just using one club’s truck off the ground we also expanded this study to include driver iron and then we did high and low uh 30 yard wedge shots once again uh we use the sensor grip technology from sensor Edge gears full body motion capture what you’ll notice

This time it was different about gears is we use the wrist calibration I’m going to show you guys some videos so for some of you that are familiar with gears if you see the hands looking a little different on the club it’s slightly different uh Avatar configuration uh GC quad for ball flight

And uh 2D video and ground forest with our swing catalyst now uh also for the golf clubs we wanted to provide something that was a little closer I guess to what the players used we use a stealth 2 10.5 head we would adjust the Loft to try and

Get a configuration as close as possible to what that player used uh for the seven irons we used a ping i525 same thing again we would go ahead and adjust the L angle to match what that current uh what that player’s current specs were not what we think

They should use but what they did use and uh we used Cobra for the 58 degree wedges kept the LI angle or sorry The Loft constant and again adjusted the lle for that player in terms of shafts you know we used uh Club connects interchangeable shaft system so we had two different

Driver shafts M4 and M5 flex two different seven iron shafts from La golf again M4 M5 and the same thing with the wedges so uh group one professional players uh still small sample set best we could get uh three people in each group there you can see our combined grip strength the

Grip strength differential with these professional players was a little bit surprising um but you know it is what it is take a look there’s our players at hook interestingly enough even though they’re amateurs they had higher grip strength we’re not expecting that although one of those particular players

Is also a long driver so may have skewed the averages up a little bit there’s the players that slice and there’s our poor contact players so um you know with our members at the lab we call them our lab rats we were able to try and we were able to

Pick kind of I guess we’ll say players that we thought were your quintessential slicers or quintessential hookers trying to get people that are you know say more normal for what we deal with day in day out not so much the outliers now again we get into the process subjective warmup if you say

You’re ready we’ll believe you we want to replicate what you’re like on the first te same thing got grip strength from both hands with the dynamometer and then we just had them take 10 shots with their own driver and their own seven iron to get a baseline of their full

Swing from there we went through you know the grip calibration squeeze stuff that I talked to you about and of course the gears uh wrist calibration which has the additional marker sets on the hands uh we increased the sample size of shot capture this time so we got 15 shots

With the driver 15 with a seven iron 15 high wedges 15 low wedges um and then you get spreadsheets like this so uh let me see you guys can probably read this easier than I am but you know we basically charted anything that we thought might matter uh obviously grip

Pressure is in there foot pressure is in there uh you know pelvis turn rib cage turn lead arm adduction wrist set angle you know a ton of stuff um what we did in order to synchronize the different Technologies this was a challenge uh the sensor grip product it’s good at identifying impact point

From the actual vibration yet it uses a webcam which has lag so we Ed the techbase identification of the uh the pressure spike and impact uh the synchronized machine learning cameras from swing Catalyst and the impact timing on the gear system and then actually had to work back off of

Impact we’re not able to work at a swing start position so let’s see what we see all right driver thankfully this is pretty similar to what we saw before um so these graphs you’re going to see these go pretty consistently if you look across at number one right that’s address soon as

The club starts moving we’re no longer at the address position so right here if we walk through this graph we see this um our professional players you know they start with grip pressure skewed almost 65% towards the Top Hand we see a slight drop as the shafts parallel

Fairly flat line as it gets to the top drop and grip pressure as I get down to lead arm parallel and then quite a big spike in that top hand grip pressure as I approach impact now just to give you an idea here’s sort of what it looks like in real life

So the numbers the big number in the middle is the distribution of grip pressure and the small number at the bottom that’s the percentage of Max based on the squeeze test that’s done at the beginning and the pixelated graph it’s a little tricky to read at the start but

It allows us to see kind of down to each finger exactly what’s going on bottom left now you can see lead wris owner deviation which you know we kind of paired up to look at with uh shift in pressure distribution 2.5 into out angle of attack slightly up um also apologize in advance

You know we’re Canadian 35% of our golfers are lefties so some of you out there might not be used to kicking your brain back and forth between righty Lefty apologize but that’s uh what we deal with in a hockey country okay so here we’ve got um the

Group of hookers and so this is interesting they started with more lead hand pressure but also in that first move found it interesting that they increase pressure from there it was a steady drop not just you know dropping from here to the top of the back swing

But continuing to drop down we see a little bit of a Spike as from lead arm parallel the shaft parallel but then we see a drop in that lead hand distribution now um you know one of the things I think you know when I think

About a lot of players at hook I’ve felt like for a you know a long time a lot of them maybe not all but they use that trail hand to rotate the club face closed and so if that trail hand was to apply pressure that last instant Clos in the club face

Well that explains the drop in lead hand pressure right that relationship of lead hand to Trail hand is always going to add up to 100% okay here we go with the slicers all right now again um we see a little bit of a A Drop In transition but

Then again we see quite a you know from lead arm parallel to shaft parallel we see a pretty good Spike and you know initially in kind of flat lines so you know again I feel like that early Trail hand pressure to me is synonymous with pushing that Center of mass of the club

Pushing the club head farther away from the body leading to an out to in path in which case I’m going to have to leave the face open in order to try and create any type of playable golf shot now here’s our four contact High handicap whatever you want to call it

Super interesting pattern here again kind of synonymous with what we found in the first study um you know starts really really really high continues to drop all the way into the down swing and then I see that trail hand kind of start to take over and apply pressure to the

Club here’s all four of them uh imposed on top of each other now one of the things I find interesting um you know when I look at the blue line at the good players they start with the least amount of lead hand grip pressure so let’s say you know the

Most balanced for a 50/50 grip not saying that’s good but if it keeps popping up maybe it’s a good starting point and then when we get all the way to the end to contact we see that that low handicap player has the most distribution of pressure again still

With the lead hand so big variability within it but uh driven by the lead hand pressure now what I’ve got here is just a quick video I’m going to play you’re going to see there’s one of our professionals on one side and one of the high handicappers on the other side see

This contrast in real time now this graph is showing us uh the percentage of Max that’s also reflected by the white numbers underneath the big numbers in the circle work through this again I know a lot going on uh I found this to be really interesting is looking at the

Speed generation curve right so with gears we can map out the club head speed but when we look at the slope of that club head speed we can see the acceleration get down here to shop parallel massive change in distribution and huge change in slope of the club

Head speed generation and I think those graphs make it pretty easy to see just how different the uh you know pressure application is you know to the club here’s the last one I want you guys to take a look at this is uh slicer on

The left hook on the right so one of the things we observed with the players that hook when they get to that shaft parallel position they had the highest amount of lead hand pressure and they had the least amount of pelvis rotation here we can see this the uh

Players that slice tended to have the most amount of pelvis rotation at this position and also the most amount of Trail hand pressure so interesting to see the way those two work together to create Club delivery everything from you see 9 degrees inside out to not sure

What it was six to seven outside in so going through these drivers couple things I guess observations right so we can’t we can’t say we know we can’t say it’s fact but things that we kept seeing um when we look at weaker players that means High handicap four ball Strikers

They had less variability of grip pressure over the course of the Swing so the way I think about that is almost like they started off squeezing it Pretty stinking tight and they just kept hanging on for deer life you know moving that club around the body um and I think

This is normal when I talk to a lot of high handicap players are trying to eliminate moving Parts eliminate variability so it seems natural to me that trying to squeeze the club and have it move in a constant Arc would be logical for them to make sense and I

Think you know we’ve got a great opportunity for Education right when we can teach people what really happens we can change our perception when we change our perception we can change behavior when we change Behavior we change performance the end of the day people see us to change

Performance there we see our better players have more variability of grip pressure and the lead hand was much more dominant as we talked about and saw in that second last video um you see again this kind of double pressure or double Peak little squeeze here relax big squeeze here down

Through contact not sure if it’s something we actively want to teach but it’s good to know that it’s happening all right um that bottom one I want to just highlight for a second um within each subject you know n is one sample size one whatever you want to

Call it uh for both good and bad shots the grip pressure application over the course of the Swing is quite consistent system right so it’s the subtleties of contact point and face angle control um you know is where we see the difference between controlling consistently I guess

Creating the same shot shape as opposed to not doing so and yeah uh simple but the people with the highest grip strengths had the highest Club head speeds it’s something that we’ve now integrated start of our standardized intake process and we’re also going to be implementing uh quarterly annual

Checks along the way to make sure that we at least maintain it and if it’s going down we can educate our clients and at least try and you know help them know like hey you should maintain this if you want to maintain Club head speed all right let’s talk a little bit about

Wedges and uh then we’ll see if anyone has any energy left we’ll open the floor for questions okay so remember we tested uh low shots and high shots uh 30 yards the yellow line is showing me the low wedge The Gray Line is showing me the high wedge

So I didn’t really know what to expect on this all I could do is think about my feels the feels I have I definitely felt like you know say when I was a good wedge player when I used to practice and all that good stuff I did feel like I

Was pretty Trail hand dominant and I also gravitated much you know much more towards the high shots you know if I had to play the ball down a bump and run I would do it by changing the Loft as opposed to changing technique so when I looked at this initially you know it

Seemed kind of logical I suppose um let’s go here and we’re just going to look at our high handicap players this was super interesting so um I’m applying the same amount of pressure with each hand and the same basic pattern over the course of the entire motion no wonder our you know higher

Handicap amateur golfers don’t have the ability to effectively manipulate control when I apply same forces through the club you know it’s unlikely I’m going to get a different result now of course there could be some modifications where people will change you know some ball position or some alignment stuff that we didn’t account

For and we can get some subtle uh you know subtle changes in ball flight but I really did think this was quite telling um here’s those two again I just wanted to put these two up side by side so you’re able to just see how different

This is um and I’m going to go yeah so here’s all of the different groups and again what I what I what I found super interesting about this study is like when we’re looking at the full swing we start our professional players we started with the least amount of lead

Hand pressure and at contact we got to the most amount of lead hand pressure and when we looked at people that struggle with ball striking skills they started with you know the opposite they ended up with more Trail hand pressure at contact literally just doing it

Backwards of what we saw with the good players and now in the wedges we see the exact opposite so when we see low lead hand pressure we know there’s High Trail hand pressure and you know we see the highest Trail hand pressure coming from the best players and we see the highest

Lead hand pressure coming from you know those that have admittedly struggled with short game so I just think there’s such interesting coaching applications across all shots not just one particular one now we got uh one video here hopefully this does a pretty good job of illustrating just how different pretty massive difference

There now the other thing too not only is it distribution different but look at how different the magnitudes are right that high handicap player is squeezing the club so hard it’s actually harder with both hands than when they did the calibration as opposed to you see you

Know a professional player at a much lower uh uh magnitude so with uh you know with the wedge play our professional players had the most Trail hand pressure they had the the most consistent so there actually wasn’t a ton of variability unlike in the full swing where they exhibited amount of

Variability over the course of the Swing uh we look at if we look at the the change in pressure distribution for a professional player hitting a low shot to a high shot there was twice as much change right twice as much Delta and increased pressure that

Trail hand for them to hit the high shot versus the low shot and I think there’s something significant to be teased out there uh and also the professional players had a much lower percentage of the maximum grip pressure that they displayed during the calibration process now

Um at the golf lab we found this really interesting I hope that you guys sitting there in Phoenix right now find it interesting but at the end of the day it’s like what do we do with it so here’s some stuff we’ started doing well the first going back to that very first

Piece of information one of the first sessions for every single new golf lab client is going to be grip size optimization where we built a grip fitting kit it’s pretty simple five shafts five different sizes of grips and we’re literally just looking at dispersion what’s going to give us the

Tightest dispersion what gives us more consistent closure rate um one thing that we have not done yet but I expect we’ll start experimenting with on the back side of this study if we see different op Optimum pressure application patterns for different shot types it leads me to believe that

Different sizes of grips on different clubs could assist in that pattern development for different players uh I found myself giving a lot of grip modification drills you know whether that’s Classics like uh Hogan’s three fingers you know taking this off the club do a lot more lead hand swings

Both in warm-up and drill work for full swing to do a lot more uh Trail hand uh short game only stuff that just helps you know help people get those feels get that kinesthetic awareness that they can then transfer to when they put both hands on the

Club uh you know this has been interesting for me just personally as a coach um when I was new and I had no Tech and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing all I would talk about is my field and what I thought like I did when I

Used to play pretty good golf uh you know and then you get in this world of measurables and uh we have so much more information and started to find myself giving a lot more dialogue about gross motor patterns about footwork and pressure shifts whether sequencing whatever it is and now with this

Information I feel like I’m back to where feel like it’s you know again responsible or maybe more responsible I can speak in a more educated way to things to feel in the hands you know little things like once you get to the top feel like you let go with your right

Hand on the way down you know and not everything’s perfect but it’s like a whole new language of cues a whole new dialogue I can have with a client uh you know and some things that for all of us to learn what’s the best way to deliver this information I’m sure it’s different

With different people but you know I’m a right-handed player so does that I best receive queuing about my right hand or should it be about the hand that’s supposed to exert the most pressure the least pressure we don’t know but these are the things we’re experimenting with with different people every

Day and you know grip strength testing and maintenance I alluded to that earlier you know significant portion of our membership is north of 50 you know as I say they’re on a constant state of decay and one of the simplest things that we can do is help them maintain

Their grip pressure to Main maintain their Club head speed when they maintain their Club head speed they maintain their distance when they maintain their distance they keep playing when they keep playing they keep renewing their membership when they keep renewing their membership we get to have a vacation in

The winter so um pretty simple economics there that uh that concludes all the information I had prepared so I’m actually going to just work my way back in here to my seat and see if anyone had any questions on on any of that stuff any questions I’ve got a

Mic hi I was just wondering about um if you did any studies about the position of the grip like does that make a difference if they have a weak or a strong grip because you know I teach a lot of ladies and they have very weak

Grips so the club head will twist when they hit it is it because their grip is weak uh or is it because the club is twisting the ball yeah great question um it was measured and I’m going to say at this point I don’t know so with the risk

Calibration similar if you’re familiar with an amm we’re able to take a look at basically like the Top Hand pronation bottom hand super Nation to extract the actual hand placement on the handle um we just haven’t been able to process that data yet and you know one thing and

You know open to comment from anyone in the room and you can always send stuff out through social media with a sample set that small one question I have would be should we look at all the strong grips together sorry bad term but you know left hand on top together or should

We further subcategorize it by uh professional player strong grip uh you know High handicap or strong grip so sorry I don’t have the answers I’ve only got questions but um definitely something I think would have an effect that’s great any other questions okay Liam I just this is Kelly I just

Want to say thank you so much you are absolutely the man for being here and we wish you all the best and we hope that you’re feeling better soon but really great great presentation awesome thanks Kelly uh again thanks everyone at 8 a.m. for putting this on I wish I could be there

I hope everyone in the room appreciates how special these gatherings are enjoys your time out there and man I hope to see you guys next year and uh you know don’t hesitate to reach out directly through uh social or you know whatever if there’s any other questions I can

Help with thanks again everybody thank you and I and I just add a little bit to that you know people like me need people like you because a lot of what I do is by Instinct and I see things that work but when we get the scientists and the

People that measure everything and they come back with well yes this is what you should be doing and this is why it’s just s super helpful to all the teachers so thank you once again I appreciate it thanks Kelly we’re uh we’re doing what we can great