Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Here we're going to look overlapping grip versus an interlocking grip. Now, your grip is the most important area of your golf swingweight because this is the only connection that you have with the club. And if you're holding the club correctly you're then going to have much more control over the clubface and the angle of the clubface is aiming at as you come back into the ball.

So getting the correct way to hold the club, the correct grip is really important. There isn’t a great deal of difference between an overlapping or an interlocking grip. The only difference that there is, is that with an overlapping grip, the little finger on the right hand sit on top of the index finger of the left or it sits in the little cradle in the little gap and channel there that's created between the index and the second finger. If you interlock the index finger and the little finger just wrap under and over each other that's the only difference between interlocking and overlapping.

Hand position needs to be absolutely the same. So whether you should go for an overlapping grip or an interlocking grip, it really doesn’t matter as long as your hands are on in the way we're going to talk about now. The only time that one will become a better grip to have than the other is if you're interlocking rather than having the shallow interlock where the fingers just wrap over and under if you're starting to get the webbing of our fingers really forced into each other, it will affect where your hands are on the handle and that is a bad grip. That is not a good thing to do.

So if it's just an overlap, or a shallow interlock where its just actually the fingers have just gone over and under each other is fine, but really pushing the webbing together in those fingers is the wrong to do. So let's look at how to create the correct grip. We're going to go with the left hand first. So if you're pointing your fingers directly down at the ground, we want the club to sit diagonally across from the middle joint of the index finger to the heel of the palm. We're then going to wrap the fingers around the back and place them up on top. Now, this is the absolutely key par for either of the grips that we use. You must keep your left thumb short. You must keep your left thumb right next to your hand.

The best way to do that is just take a coin and place it between your thumb and your hand. That is the correct position. What you don’t want to do is have your thumb out hanging over the side of the handle or away from your hand where you wouldn't be able to hold on to the coin, so push the thumb into the handle and then you want to rotate that thumb so that its parallel to the handle. Also that the line that's created between the thumb and the index finger or the coin are pointing up at your right shoulder that's a absolute key.

Thumb next to the hand and this line, this coin pointing up at the right shoulder. We're now going to put the right hand on doing a similar thing where we're pointing at the fingers down at the ground. We place the club diagonally from the middle join of the index finger to the heel, wrap the fingers around and place the thumb on top. And now we're going to slide the right hand up, so it sits on top of the left thumb. This hand will locate because the scooped part of this hand will locate onto the left thumb, so provided the left hand is on correctly, the right hand is going to locate correctly onto the handle.

And now we just need to make a decision or if we're going to just overlap gently with those hands so that the hand position stays the same, but within to lock the fingers, or if we're going to keep the hands in that position and overlap, but whether you overlap or interlock doesn’t matter as long as the hands are on in this way. Again with the right hand keep the thumb close to the index finger, so again we got aligned where we would be able to hold the coin going at the right shoulder and this time, the right thumb is just off center to the left. So work on holding and improving how you hold the club into this way. You're going to find that you'll get a lot more directional control over the clubface and also just consider how tight you're holding the club just squeezing as tightly as you possibly can, we call that 10. The correct pressure to have in your hands is just the full so work on improving your hold. You should say that your golf shots improve.