How Hand Placement Affects Golf Ball Flight (Video) - by Pete Styles
How Hand Placement Affects Golf Ball Flight (Video) - by Pete Styles

As a golfer trying to improve in the game of golf, one of the first and most fundamental aspects of getting that improvement started would be to make sure that you’re gripping the golf club in the right fashion, making sure your hand placement is very good. You’ve also got to understand the relationship between the hand placement and the control of the club face and therefore ultimately the control of the ball flight because we can often see that key attributes to the way you hold the club will have a direct result and effect on how the golf ball flies.

So generally, we’ll break the ball flight down into two sides. It’s going to move – well, it’s going to go straight ideally but if it’s going to move one way or another, it might move from right to left or from left to right. And then in the gripping of the club, we can grip in a neutral position or a stronger grip or a weaker grip. And the strong grip and the weak grip don’t necessarily apply to the pressure that you put on the club. It’s more about the position that you put your hands and actually, the grip will have a direct result in the club face position and therefore the ball flight. So often we’d see somebody with a strong grip turning the ball more from right to left as a drill or the hook shot and the weaker grip more on to the left side for the right-handed golfer would have more of a fade bias and more of a left to right for the right-handed golfer. And that’s okay if we can understand that relationship. We can use our grip to create the right shape of shot, the desired shape of shot. And I think one thing we got to be careful of is as a golfer, we don’t have a grip that’s going to produce one shot and then try and swing the club to produce a different shot. Those two things don’t marry up very well and we suggest that your grip is at odds with the ball flight you’re trying to produce. Then one last thing to consider is that once you’ve gone ahead to make your good grip, you really want to try and keep your hands in a nice consistent place through all of your shots for all of your clubs for a long period of time. We don’t really want to be in a position where we change the hands for a draw and we change them back for the next shot for a fade. We try and stick with a neutral grip that’s going to produce nice consistent ball flights ongoing from shot to shot but also from round to round. 2016-05-09

As a golfer trying to improve in the game of golf, one of the first and most fundamental aspects of getting that improvement started would be to make sure that you’re gripping the golf club in the right fashion, making sure your hand placement is very good. You’ve also got to understand the relationship between the hand placement and the control of the club face and therefore ultimately the control of the ball flight because we can often see that key attributes to the way you hold the club will have a direct result and effect on how the golf ball flies.

So generally, we’ll break the ball flight down into two sides. It’s going to move – well, it’s going to go straight ideally but if it’s going to move one way or another, it might move from right to left or from left to right. And then in the gripping of the club, we can grip in a neutral position or a stronger grip or a weaker grip. And the strong grip and the weak grip don’t necessarily apply to the pressure that you put on the club. It’s more about the position that you put your hands and actually, the grip will have a direct result in the club face position and therefore the ball flight. So often we’d see somebody with a strong grip turning the ball more from right to left as a drill or the hook shot and the weaker grip more on to the left side for the right-handed golfer would have more of a fade bias and more of a left to right for the right-handed golfer. And that’s okay if we can understand that relationship. We can use our grip to create the right shape of shot, the desired shape of shot.

And I think one thing we got to be careful of is as a golfer, we don’t have a grip that’s going to produce one shot and then try and swing the club to produce a different shot. Those two things don’t marry up very well and we suggest that your grip is at odds with the ball flight you’re trying to produce. Then one last thing to consider is that once you’ve gone ahead to make your good grip, you really want to try and keep your hands in a nice consistent place through all of your shots for all of your clubs for a long period of time. We don’t really want to be in a position where we change the hands for a draw and we change them back for the next shot for a fade. We try and stick with a neutral grip that’s going to produce nice consistent ball flights ongoing from shot to shot but also from round to round.