How to create the perfect golf grip. Breaking down the different parts of the golf grip, from the club face, the rubber handle, the hand placement, and the setup.
Coach Jacob is a PGA golf instructor at Trophy Club Country Club in North Fort Worth, Texas.
If you’re in the DFW area, Book a lesson here:
https://www.coachjacobmarta.com
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Golf with Coach Jacob Marta
00:11 Mastering the Golf Grip
00:44 Understanding the Club Head
00:57 What is the Sweet Spot
01:41 Importance of Hand Position and Grip
02:06 The Rubber Grip
03:14 Hand Position
04:22 Make A Lever
05:25 The L Position and Swing Mechanics
07:31 The Sixth Finger
11:58 The Setup and Practice Tips
hi my name is coach Jacob Marta and I have been teaching golf for over 25 years and I’m here to help the process of learning golf a whole lot simpler one of the things that a lot of new golfers struggle with is gripping the golf club it is very awkward and one of the problems is you can’t just grip it any way you want it has a very very specific way to hold the golf club and partly because there’s a very specific way that we’re supposed to be swinging the golf club so a lot of people will try to grip the Golf Club familiar with like a baseball bat or like a broom the problem with that is that this while this part of the golf club is round and symmetrical and it may make sense what we’re trying to swing is this part right here this is the club head and this is the club face you can see it’s tilted and more importantly where you’re going to get all your control and distance to see that golf ball go fly up in the air is right here when what we call the sweet spot so this right here this big circle here that is what we call The Sweet Spot that is basically like the center of a tennis racket so imagine playing tennis and hitting the ball on the rim of the tennis racket all the time you get pretty frustrated playing the game of tennis so that’s why golf in some respect is get a little frustrating when you try and hit as hard as you can and you hit it here on the X’s you know even though this club head may be going 100 miles per hour if you hit on the X’s ball may only go 10 20 ft so it gets frustrating so that’s why the sweet spot is super important and you can see that it’s at an angle and every golf club is a little bit different angle and every Golf Club has Al also a different length to it and even included in that length is something called Flex of the shaft the shaft actually bends and actually supposed to bend so a big part of your job of your grip is to be able to feel how much Bend you create but also more importantly be able to control the direction part of the golf club which is the club face so if the face is Twisted this way the balls are going to go that way the face is pointed that way it’s going to go that way if it stays straight it’s going to go right to your Target and so that’s why your hands have such a specific role so if you’ve ever tried to learn the grip you’re like I just it just feels really awkward so we’re going to walk through the steps to help you kind of get a little bit more comfortable with it and and really unlock some of the reasons why these specifics are the way they are one of the features of the golf club is the rubber grip up here it’s actually it’s tapered up so it’s going to actually make it really easy for you to hold on the golf club I know some people are afraid they’re going to let go of the club but it’s actually designed that way on purpose so that you won’t feel like you’re letting go of the club the other way it’s a rubber grip it’s definitely it’s very tacky so those players who kind of holding on the golf club for fear letting go of it you don’t have to do that it’s it’s designed specifically for that reason now you can see there some of the grips you can look at your clubs but they all of them have some little design here on the grip really what it’s trying to do is it’s trying to help you line up your hands and line up the club so here with the will the logo and even the shaft logo are going straight up and down in a line so that tells me this is where I want to start trying to grip the golf club if I try to grip it this way now if you look down at the club head you can see how it’s turned that’s not the right direction I want it to go I want it to go that way so that’s Begins the whole idea of aiming and keeping the club face straight so now that grip is in a good spot where I can start and I can actually really easily without even thinking a whole lot about it just put my thumb my left thumb down the shaft this is and then my right hand is going to cover up the left thumb I’m actually going to use the logo here or the design to make sure it’s on the right side and then my my thumb is going to go right in the lifeline on my right hand you can see my my right thumb is on this side of the logo just putting your lead hand up on top and having your right hand low is just sort of a basic grip idea there is a lot of other things that are very specific about that grip that we’re going to go into next one of the things with the hands is that you want them to work together like they’re one unit you don’t want this hand being really low down the shaft you them to be one unit being up on top of each other like this simple idea is to keep the the fingers touching each other so if my pinky is on the club here I’m going to make sure that the pinky and the Index P finger are holding on to each other and so that allows the hands to get control over more remember we’re trying to control the club head now the other thing that’s really important about the golf club is that sometimes players when they what makes it hard is that the club feels heavy and so a lot of times they’ll just hold on to the golf golf club because they’re trying to heave the club over their back cuz that’s what they see players do but in reality you can make the golf club really light by adding levers so one of the reasons my thumb is down the shaft is because it’s actually going to create a lever with my wrist that actually makes the club a little bit lighter and it’s going to make it easier for me to get the club off the ground on the back swing so instead of me starting the club like this like I’m trying to pull a sack of potatoes over my shoulder and then slam it down to the ground I’m actually going to feel like I’m holding something more precise like a pencil or a pen or a knife and hold it in my my wrist this way and that’s going to allow me to effortlessly kind of lift that club off the ground and not have to use a whole lot of my shoulders or my head one of the keys in Gulf is that you don’t want to have a lot of extra moving parts and so the grip being this specific is the first step in that whole process of trying to keep everything real simple one of the reasons why the levers are so important is because in the back swing we are needing the golf club to get up in this position here see this little angle that we have here sometimes they call it l the L position so you’re getting the club in this L position and some players can get it more sharp so you can really make a sharp L position some players can have hardly any L position but this wrist has to have the ability to manage and mitigate what sort of hinge you’re going to create if your wrist is like that then the club is just sort of tugging on your arms and you have no idea what it’s going to do so you’ve got to have Precision control over this club head at this point in the golf swing and then on the follow through the same thing’s going to happen over here that wrist and that hinge are going to be really important you can see it almost mirrors it whatever I do back here is going to be something that’s going to happen over here and so the grip in your hand has to maintain itself if during the swing my hands come off the club and they do this then I’m not going to be able to get the hinge on the other side so once we get that grip comfortable and we’re set the goal is to keep that grip in your hands together the same way all the way through the swing my grip in my hands don’t get here and then change it to hit the ball they start one way and then they finish the same way they don’t start and finish in two different positions they start that way and they finish that way that’s probably one of the hardest things as teaching golf as long as I have I see that happen a lot where players may start with a beautiful grip it looks great but because they have the wrong intentions they’re trying to do something different all of a sudden it changes at the top of their swing and then they flick at it with their hands what we do that situation we really work on you know getting them to get real simple L position here and L position here without any sort of excitement with the hands so it’s a real passive swing from L to l l to L so if you struggle with regripping the golf club or just even getting a feel for the weight of the golf club and The Leverage just do that drill that just goes from L position to L position you don’t need need to hit a golf ball with it but you you can feel it you also see on your grip that there’s a little white line here it’s really important that you grip below that white line and you’re going to want to grip it in what I call the six finger this is the best part of golf this is what makes that lever work so a lot of players will want to grip the club in their Palm like this their fingers around like that the problem is the weight of the golf club will just slide right out of your hands so what you need is something to sort of Leverage against that and that’s what I call the six finger here which is basically the pad from your pinky right all the way back to where the end of your wrist is or where your wrist starts and you set that right up against there and then your pinkies wrap around your index finger comes down and now you have a lever that you could push down to help it up one of the ways to test to see if you have that lever is actually take your pinkies off the club and if you can hold on to that golf club with just one finger and your six finger there you know you’re on the right track and then might just bring my hands on like that from there to there and then from that position there I can just bring my right hand on to cover up thumb like I was trying to do before you notice here when I’m doing this leverage you see how the grip is really in my fingers you can’t really do the lever if the grip is in your palms a lot of players will want to grip that club in their fingers like this way but how you get it into your fingers is kind of tricky you can see the first knuckle of my index finger here I’m going to rest that golf club right on that spot right there and then you can see how it runs right up into the base of my pinky there so that’s going to help me just sort of curl my fingers around there and then this is the this is the weird part there’s a lot of people that gets really uncomfortable a lot of players want to come here and pull the club up but I’m actually going to take this thumb and put it on the right side of that line right there and that’s going to be where I want my fingers that’s what a finger grip looks like okay this is a palm grip see see how these Knuckles aren’t folded at all you want to be able to get those Knuckles involved it’d be similar like if you had a bucket of water and you would have the weight of that bucket pulling on your fingers in there like that so that’s going to be one of the first things that makes golf more uncomfortable is that it’s not a really intuitive thing to do with this golf grip to grab it that way in your fingers and so from in my experience it takes a lot of swings to kind of get used to it but what happens is people will it’s just like driving a car or riding a bike all of a sudden you don’t even feel like it feels that weird anymore after you take a handful of Swings with it like that so that’s that’s the left hand or the lead hand now if you’re right if you’re left-handed all of this is the same thing you’re just doing it with the opposite hand so if you’re left-handed your right hand is on top and your left hand is the one coming in underneath and they’re staying together like that most right-handed golfers they don’t use their left hand very much and so the left hand is sort of the weak the weak Link in the swing and so there’s a lot of focus on the left hand because of that and so a lot of players will because it’s weak they they they’ll have a hard time creating this this lever in there so again that goes back to just even though it feels odd and may not feel like it’s a good thing to do that’s getting that six finger in there is going to be the first step and sort of eventually getting to the point where this feels okay I can do this and the muscles around your fingers and your wrist and your hand there that left hand which is weak will eventually get stronger and it know its job now most of you guys all right-handed so the right hand’s just going to get on here and just sort of snap onto this thing like it’s ready to clobber it because he’s your he’s your instinct he’s going to get there and swing as hard as you can at that ball but this is where the discipline of the right hand comes on you need really need to also focus on getting the grip in your fingers of your right hand so I take that right hand fingers it’s the same line okay so you can actually do this you can put your left hand on the club get your fingers wrapped around that Golf Club in there and I’m just going to sort of slide my fingers in there so now I’m just like plugging my fingers right into there and that’s going to keep that hand those hands together but it’s also going to more importantly keep the club in the fingers now again why is in the fingers why not in the Palm when we go back to what we talked about before is we have a very specific sweet spot that we’re trying to navigate I know when I write you know use my my fingertips to control the tip of the pen so my hands and all these little detailed my finger around my index finger my thumb can make and manipulate the tips of tip of that Golf Club really easily a lot better than if I had it like this now my whole body is manipulating I have no idea what it’s going to do so again get in the fingers slide it in there like that that’s going to help you get a little bit better grip in your fingers so how do you start beginning the grip you saw me holding the club up here like this and a lot of players will try and do this up here this is fine to to kind of get a handle of it of kind of figuring the pieces of it where do my fingers go and everything but when you’re actually going to go take a swing at it you don’t want to spend a lot of time up here doing this this is a good a simple way to kind of get into that position if you think about if I’m just standing here with my arms hanging down you see how my knuckle my left Knuckles are kind of turned in my thumb’s kind of turned in like that so what I want to do when I’m trying to get a grip a golf club to be able to swing I just want my arm to hang down I don’t want to have it starting here and thinking I got to hold the club like this to lift it this what I see a lot of players start their swing like this and see how it’s right in the palm and then if I try and tell them to turn it over it’s like oh it feels really awkward so I always try and get the players to start with their arms just hanging down to their side and try and just hold on the golf club from here and you can see I got the logo straight up and down it’s not twisted and so from this position here I kind of already naturally get the club in my fingers okay you can see that it’s already just resting in those fingers and the six finger is already there if it’s in here like this it’s going to feel really a I won’t be able to hinge it up very well it’s going to feel really weird okay so if it’s in that position there now I can just hinge it up and I can put the club out in front of me like this and I can bring my right hand on and do a nice top position like that and then that’s going to allow me to set the club back down in position so we’ll try that again so standing up nice and Tall letting my arms hang down I’m able to leverage that club up to sort of like like if the club was resting on a table here and then I can just bring my right hand on and get those fingers on that club in my right hand and then from this position here go through the The Stance and set the club down next to the ball but that’s going to be a simple way to go through all the complicated stuff that you’re doing here you can definitely spend some time at home with a grip in your hand trying to fiddle around with all these things like playing a flute or an instrument you have it’s just like having the fingers in the right positions takes a while to get used to it but to go actually into it and trying to hit a ball do the best you can of you know as long as you got you’re gripping it below here do your best you can to get that six finger but really make sure you get those hands connected together and then when you get set up remember the goal here is not to swing the club like a sack of potatoes we got something very precise at the bottom of that club that we’re trying to to control and the the wrist and the hands are the ones that control it and they’re trying to just get a little B lift Club up off the ground versus trying to swing and lift the whole thing up in the air thank you for watching like And subscribe and if you have any questions about the grip comment below [Music]
