So if you’ve decided that the fairway wood is the correct shot of choice, we now need to make sure that when we stand to the golf ball, we’ve got all the fundamentals exactly right for this particular shot. So the first fundamental we’re going to assess is the grip. So as we align the club face up we want to make sure that face is pointing exactly towards the target then we can go and place our hands on the golf club in the right way. Now the left hand is going to go on the top of the grip first, this is for the right handed golfer.

First thing is just make sure you’re not gripping right at the very end, the fairway wood is a long club if you’re gripping with your hand half falling off the end, you’ll really start to lose a lot of control it’s better just a grip half an inch down with a back at the left top hand. And as you bring the club down into the fingers, the club sits through the fingers when we look down at the back of that front hand always being able to count two and a half knuckles so the big sort of punching knuckles if you like on the back of your hand two or two and a half knuckles should be visible.

Then try and make sure the thumb and the fore fingers sit nicely together we don’t want to see that top thumb creeping round to the side here and touching the fingers it sits on the just the right centre of the shaft just down the middle line. And the V is then created between the right from the fore finger points nicely towards that rear shoulder. So the front hand points the V, at the rear shoulder.

Then you’ve got two choices really. I say two, some people would say three. You’ve got a baseball choice, the baseball grip is just for hands on there, not my preferred option, I would rather you go for an overlapping grip which is how actually I play my own golf in an overlapping grip; but a lot of people I teach prefer an interlinking grip. And I’m quite comfortable teaching people an interlinking grip I think most people actually find that grip interlinking the fingers more comfortable. The way we take that, we put the hands on slide them together, the two fingers that touch swap places. And once we’ve got that interlinking grip, we should find that the bottom hand now comes over on top of the top thumb so the bottom hand now goes over the top. That thumb will now disappear because the bottom hand sits on top of it.

Then you’ve got another V that’s been created, the V this time created by this thumb and fore finger, now we try to get that as neutral as possible pointing that straight to the chin. So, the top hand points at the rear shoulder and the bottom hand points up at the chin. Having that hand round to the right is a very common issue. Now with your fairway woods having that right hand round to the bottom will often make the club face aim too far left, de-loft the shot and actually hook it away quite violently and lose a lot of height. So we’ve got good top hand, good bottom hand nicely relaxed.

One of the issues we often see with the grip in the fairway wood is people over tighten their grip. They get quite nervous about this shot; they’re trying to hit the ball a long way with the fairway wood, so they really strangle it and grip it too tightly. Really important you keep it nicely relaxed, nice and lose, have a little waggle if you need to just to loosen the grip off and then once you’re happy that you’ve got a good grip, go ahead and rip it down the middle.