Learning how to hold the golf club correctly is vital if you are to become a good golfer as it is the only contact that you have with the club.

How you hold the club dictates your directional control over the golf ball and also dictates whether you will hinge your wrists correctly during your swing, which in turn affects the strike you make on the ball and the distance that you achieve with your shots.

If we initially look at your hand position in a natural situation, let your arms and hands dangle freely without holding anything. In this natural position, you can now notice that your hands hang palm inwards towards your body and slightly in front of you. Because you are going to play your golf shot with your hands in front of your body, it follows that your hands naturally will need to be palm inwards to you. If you place your hand deliberately palm outwards on the club and then hold, even though the club face is aiming at the target to start with, if you swing the club away and then back down to where the golf ball would be, you can see that your hand has naturally rotated towards being palm inwards and the club face has not returned to its start position. This will obviously give you directional control issues.

In order to get your hands on the golf club as closely to being palm inwards as possible, for right handed golfers, place your left hand with your fingers pointing directly down at the ground. Place the club handle across your hand so that it touches the middle joint of your index finger and the pad of your hand under your little finger. Close your fingers around the back of the handle and place your thumb over the top. This is the crucial part. Now take a coin and place it between your thumb and hand. This will keep your thumb next to your hand as you do not want a gap here and it will keep your thumb short, which is a vital requirement of holding the club correctly. Rotate your hand until the coin is pointing to your right shoulder and your thumb bone is parallel to the handle and on the right side of it. Position this hand at the end, or top, of the club’s handle.

Position your right hand with your fingers pointing directly downwards at the ground. Again the handle should be positioned across the middle joint of your index finger and the callous pad of your little finger. Then close your fingers around the back and place your thumb over the top. Do this much lower down on the handle than where your left hand is. Now hold the club up so that it is vertical and slide your right hand down towards your left so that your right palm slides over your left thumb and your right little finger touches your left index finger.

You can now either overlap these two fingers which sees your right little finger sitting in the ridge between your left index finger and left middle finger, or you can overlap the little and index fingers. However, if you interlock your fingers, do this so that the webbing between the bottom of your fingers and your hands does not touch. If it does, your left thumb will be pulled out of place and cause you problems with rotating your forearms correctly and hinging your wrists correctly during your swing. If you chose to interlock, do this without the webbing of your left and right hand touching.

Make sure you can hold a coin between your left thumb and hand and ensure that this coin is pointing towards your right shoulder with your left thumb short and parallel to the handle of the golf club. Your right hand will sit on your left thumb which will position your right hand correctly now. But whether you overlap or interlock is really a matter of comfort to you, provided that if you do interlock you do this in a shallow way, without your finger webbing on each hand touching.