How to Grip a Golf Club

The grip is the only part of your body that touches the golf club, which makes it the one fundamental where a small error propagates into everything else. It is also the easiest thing in golf to fix, because it happens before you move — you can correct it standing still, in your living room, without a ball.

The steps below are written for a right-handed golfer. If you play left-handed, reverse left and right throughout; everything else is identical. Our left-handed clubs guide covers the equipment side of that.

Why the grip matters more than it looks

The clubface has to be square to your target at the moment of impact. It is connected to you only through your hands, so where your hands sit determines where the face points and how freely it can rotate through the ball.

This is why the overwhelming majority of beginner slices — the ball starting left and curving hard right — trace back to a grip that leaves the clubface open. Fixing that at the hands is free. Fixing it by buying an anti-slice driver is not, and it treats the symptom.

The five steps

Step 1 — the club goes in your fingers

Hold the club in front of you with the face square. Lay the grip across the base of the fingers of your left hand, running diagonally from the base of the index finger to the fleshy pad below the little finger.

This is the single most commonly-missed detail. Most beginners instinctively hold the club in the palm, like a hammer. A palm grip locks the wrists, and locked wrists cannot hinge or release properly — which costs both distance and control.

Step 2 — close the hand, count the knuckles

Wrap your fingers around the grip and lay your left thumb slightly right of center on top. Now look down. You should see two to three knuckles on the back of your left hand.

One knuckle means your grip is “weak” — the hand rotated towards the target — which tends to leave the face open and produce a slice. Four knuckles is “strong”, which closes the face and can produce a hook. Two to three is the neutral middle, and a beginner who slices should experiment towards the stronger end.

Step 3 — add the right hand

Bring your right hand to the club with the palm facing the target. Again, the grip runs through the fingers, not across the palm. The lifeline of your right hand should sit neatly over your left thumb, so the two hands are joined rather than fighting each other.

Step 4 — join the hands

There are three standard ways to connect them, and all three are entirely legitimate.

• Overlap (Vardon). The right little finger rests on top of the gap between the left index and middle fingers. The most common grip in golf, and it suits larger hands.
• Interlock. The right little finger and left index finger hook together. Good for smaller hands or shorter fingers, and used by several of the best players in history.
• Ten-finger (baseball).All ten fingers on the club, none overlapping. The easiest for outright beginners and for anyone with reduced hand strength — there is no shame in it whatsoever.

Try each for a few swings and keep the one that feels most secure. The goal is simply that both hands act as a single unit rather than as two independent hands with different opinions.

Step 5 — check the Vs, then relax

Both thumb-and-index-finger junctions form a V shape. Both should point roughly towards your right shoulder. If one points at your chin and the other at your shoulder, your hands are working against each other.

Then, most importantly, loosen your hold. On a scale of one to ten, aim for about four or five — firm enough that the club will not move, loose enough that your forearms stay soft.

Grip pressure — the fault nearly everyone has

If you take one thing from this page, take this. Beginners hold the club far too tightly, because the club feels unfamiliar and the swing feels fast and there is an instinct to control it by squeezing.

Tight hands tense the forearms. Tense forearms cannot rotate through impact. A clubface that does not rotate stays open, and an open face at impact produces the slice you are trying to prevent. The squeezing causes the very problem it is meant to solve.

Two practical fixes. Wear a glove on your lead hand, which removes the fear of the club slipping and prevents the blisters that come from over-gripping. And if your hands are small, or you have arthritis or reduced grip strength, fit oversized grips — they let you hold the club securely with far less effort, and they are one of the cheapest genuine improvements available.

When your grips themselves are the problem

Rubber grips harden and go shiny with age. A hard, slick grip makes you squeeze harder, which brings back every problem above. If your clubs are more than a couple of years old, or came secondhand, look at them: a grip that feels slippery and polished rather than slightly tacky needs replacing.

Re-gripping a set is one of the cheapest meaningful upgrades in golf — a fraction of the price of a single new club, and it improves every club you own. It is also the first thing to check on any used clubs, as our used versus new guide explains.

How long until it feels normal?

A correct grip feels strange for a while, and that is the honest reason most beginners abandon it. Your hands have decades of experience holding hammers, tennis racquets and door handles, and none of those is held like a golf club.

Give it a few weeks of holding a club correctly for a minute a day, at home, without hitting anything. That costs nothing and does more for your golf than any equipment purchase on this site. Once it feels natural, our getting started guide covers the rest of the first-round basics, and the slice guide handles the ball flight that brought most people here.