Transcription
Henry Fall:
All right, back out at Superstition Mountain. Milo Lines, Henry Fall, we’re going to be talking about grip pressure in the golf swing and specifically touching on in transition. Some things we notice with grip pressure that’s going on that could be causing some issues, especially down at impact where it really matters. So stay tuned, we’ll talk about it.
Milo Lines:
So we’ve all heard that you want to have your grip light, and I would agree to some level that we want our grip fairly light. I don’t want to grip it so tight that it’s causing me to tighten up in my shoulders and in my elbows too much, but I also don’t want to grip it so loosely that the club gets out of control on me. Now what I’ve seen from just teaching thousands of golf lessons is a lot of people that struggle with the golf swing, they actually lose control up here at the top. When they swing this club up, they lose control of the club. This actually opens up, this opens up, so that they lose connection in both of those places. And then from there-
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
-nothing good ever happens.
Henry Fall:
Now, part of that has to do with not necessarily the firmness of the grip, but their actual grip structure.
Milo Lines:
Some of it has to do with how they hold the golf club.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
Some of it has to do with the fact that they are actually letting these back, these last three fingers loose on the golf club which makes the head drop, which we really don’t want to let that club get free. We want to make sure that when we’re holding onto that golf club, we’re holding it firmly enough so that I swing it to the top and I’ve got a fairly firm grip on it. The club doesn’t run away on me.
Henry Fall:
Right. Okay.
Milo Lines:
Also, connection points are really important. So I see people… If you lose that connection, you’re probably not very good. There’s a pretty good correlation there. So where the right hand is, when I hinge my wrist, that should stay connected and the club shouldn’t get away from my left fingers like that.
Henry Fall:
Yep.
Milo Lines:
So how… Henry, how tight do you feel like you’re gripping the golf club?
Henry Fall:
I mean, it varies a little bit on the shot. There’s actually some shots I increase my pressure.
Milo Lines:
Like you’re hitting out a deep rough, right, you’re going to-
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
-be holding onto the club more securely so that the club can’t twist in your hands.
Henry Fall:
Right, right. But I would say normally, like if it was on a scale of one to ten, I’m honestly probably above that five number most of the time. And a lot of people think they should be gripping it at like a one or two. But to me, I mean, I do have a fair amount of swing speed, so that’s part of it. So I need control over that club face and having some pressure in the fingers and in my grip is where I want it. I really don’t want a lot of tension up in my arms and forearms, but definitely down in the grip, I have a little more pressure.
Milo Lines:
And I’d say, because I hold the golf club really in my fingers…
Henry Fall:
Yep.
Milo Lines:
If you measured the pressure, it’s probably fairly strong. You know, I have-
Henry Fall:
It’s probably greater than a lot of people think, and compared to, I mean, with your swing speed, especially. So…
Milo Lines:
Especially since I’ve been doing this for a long time, my hands are pretty strong as far as just grip strength goes. So for me to be… What feels like not a lot of pressure because I definitely feel like I’m less than five. I feel like I’m holding onto the golf club probably at like a three.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
But my three, in motion…
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
It’s probably enough to hurt somebody’s hand, right?
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
It’s how hard I’m squeezing. So there’s a lot of pressure in it.
Henry Fall:
I guess my five plus is in relation to what my general understanding of this is, but yeah. I mean, I definitely… I acknowledge the fact that there is more pressure here than maybe some people think at starting point.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. So I start with enough pressure so that when I move off the golf ball, I can control the golf club. If I was gripping it super loose, when I move off the golf… The club would look like that.
Henry Fall:
Well, I think a lot of people, they kind of got struck in the nineties by Ernie Els and Fred Couples and Vijay Singh, and they kind of had these long fluid golf swings, and they think that they’re not swinging hard or gripping it tightly. When in reality, I guarantee you, if you bring them into a lab and did some testing, they’re swinging pretty aggressively. And I mean, I’ve heard Fred Couples say, “I swing as hard as I can”.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. I’ve hit balls next to Fred Couples and asked him, and he’s hitting as hard as he can. I’ve also… You think of those swings as being slow and smooth?
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
I challenge most of you to film your swing, set it side by side to one of those guys and watch and see who hits the ball first.
Henry Fall:
Yeah. They just have their flow and their sequencing is, I mean, world-class obviously.
Milo Lines:
Yeah.
Henry Fall:
So, all right. So let’s talk about the top though. Because that was kind of the topic of this. With this was from a YouTube question and it was as we start transitioning down, we know a lot of people struggle with this sort of pulling down. They’re trying to sort of, one, either create lag this way or they slide and they pull… Combination of things. Right. You get steep. So how do we combination the pivot that we’d like, right? That sequencing where we get in the ground, are we still pretty firm up here?
Milo Lines:
So my pressure actually I would guess it probably slightly increases as the club goes faster.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
So yeah, up at the top of the swing, there’s definitely enough pressure in my hands to keep the club from getting floppy on me.
Henry Fall:
Right.
Milo Lines:
And there’s enough structure in my arms to keep things from breaking down. So the real heat of the whole thing is kind of the timing of the change of direction.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
So what I see people do, you swing up here, you come to a stop and then you go to hit it. I’m out of order.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
Or they swing it up here and they go to hit it with their hands. Maybe they want to hit down on it or something. It’s hard to know exactly what’s in their head, but generally there’s something going on, their intention, what they’re trying to do is off.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
So what I’m trying to do with the golf club is I’m trying to… It’s basically like I’m throwing it back this way and then my body’s catching it. So the club goes here and my body catches it and turns it the other way. And naturally when that happened, you can see that that kind of sets the club and makes it fall back this way a little bit.
Henry Fall:
Right. So it looks like his pressure’s gone from like, maybe a 10 down to like a five, because of the supination of that trail arm. And now the right hand is basically getting more underneath or on the side of this club.
Milo Lines:
Uh-huh (affirmative). The other thing that people get mistaken, they think that supination is opening the face, but supination of this arm, if you actually look at that face, the face is not opening.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
So I don’t want it to do this.
Henry Fall:
Right.
Milo Lines:
This would be an ugly mess, because now I’ve got to recover from something terrible. So as this supinates-
Henry Fall:
That’s quite pretty physically challenging to do though. I would imagine, right? Like this…
Milo Lines:
Well, yeah I-
Henry Fall:
I guess the-
Milo Lines:
Supination and external rotation in that shoulder, too much. But I see a lot of people when they feel like they’re letting the club shallow out, they do this.
Henry Fall:
Yeah. Okay.
Milo Lines:
And now that… Now we’ve got the face pointed straight at the sky. What I really want to see when that changes directions, you can see-
Henry Fall:
Still in a strong position.
Milo Lines:
It’s still square-ish. Once it gets down in here, you can see that that club, that face is ready to go. I don’t want to see it opening up in transition.
Henry Fall:
But there’s really no necessarily softening or lightening of the grip. But it is, I guess, at a pressure level that still allows that for it to happen. Because if you go up softly, where it’s almost too soft-
Milo Lines:
And then you grab it.
Henry Fall:
-then at some point you have to increase that pressure.
Milo Lines:
And if you increase the pressure…
Henry Fall:
Because that club’s moving a hundred miles an hour.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. If you increase the pressure out of the top, you’ll get that look.
Henry Fall:
Right.
Milo Lines:
I want to feel like…
Henry Fall:
Or if your hands come off or something like that…
Milo Lines:
Or if your hand comes off and you’re already guaranteed that it’s not going to go where you want it to. This-
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
Odds are pretty slim that you can recover from that.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
A lot of timing.
Henry Fall:
So show us a slow one where you sequence, and that club, it’s going to shallow a little bit. Now you guys at home, might look like his pressure’s almost decreasing at the top, but it’s really not. Pressure’s still there. It’s just what’s happening with his pivot and getting into the ground. That sequencing is what causes that to look more languid, I guess. Just like… (silence) …if you were tipping a baseball bat. I bet baseball players don’t have a light grip at the top.
Milo Lines:
Not when they change directions. I would guarantee that there’s…
Henry Fall:
Yep.
Milo Lines:
No, they’ve got… That bat’s heavy. They got to be holding onto it tight enough so that…
Henry Fall:
I mean, there’s no way they’re hitting home runs over the Green Monster with a light grip pressure. So I think there’s probably some similarities. You see it with that pressure as well.
Milo Lines:
Right. I don’t really feel like I do anything different with my golf swing than I did when I was a kid playing baseball. I felt like the two motions are really similar. Just some different alignments with how my hands work.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
But the way that the motions work and the way that the pressure work and the way that the change of direction works.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
Pretty similar.
Henry Fall:
So one thing we’ve talked about before too, is sort of laddering or building things up, right? So whether it’s building up the speed or in any case, if you want to feel this sort of shallow move, and sequencing, right? At the top, you can have a light grip pressure just to feel that, feel the club weight behind you, but you better hit it off a tee and only hit it like 20 yards, right?
Milo Lines:
So you’re feeling really soft, but going-
Henry Fall:
Really slow.
Milo Lines:
-really slowly.
Henry Fall:
What club is that?
Milo Lines:
It’s a 7 iron.
Henry Fall:
And he’s hitting it, maybe carrying a hundred.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. Maybe.
Henry Fall:
It wasn’t even shorter for it.
Milo Lines:
So I’ll go.
Henry Fall:
So let’s do your grip pressure at a one right now.
Milo Lines:
A one.
Henry Fall:
Right. So you can hit something like that. And you probably could see that sort of this motion right here. But if you’re doing this in a full swing at full speed, you can’t do it with a grip pressure one, it’s just not going to work.
Milo Lines:
One won’t work. So my grip pressure is going to be… And it basically starts off right off the ball. My grip pressure is going to be enough to control the club. Yeah. So if I’m going to hit this ball, like my normal 7 iron 195. That’s going to be… Definitely from the beginning, there was more pressure in the grip.
Henry Fall:
Right.
Milo Lines:
Because otherwise I would’ve lost control because I moved that club off the ball pretty fast.
Henry Fall:
All right. So just to sum up this video on grip pressure, again, a lot of you are probably pulling down from the top because of how light you were at the beginning and then your grip structure might’ve not been the best. So then you get kind of loose here, you pull down, you’re trying to create lag or hit down on the ball, whatever it may be. So don’t be afraid to mess around with grip pressure and you can have it higher than you think, a little tighter than you think, so.
Milo Lines:
The real key is your grip. The pressure is fairly tight in the fingers, but you’ve got to have the loose wrists and arms. So you can grip it as tight as you want, as long as you have freedom to move the golf club.
Henry Fall:
Yeah. So if you guys liked this video, make sure you subscribe, hit the bell icon so you get notified when a new video is up. We appreciate your support. Leave a comment with future video requests and be sure to check out milolinesgolf.com. Check out the academy, we do monthly now, says on there as well. And we’ll see you guys next time.
