The Golf Grip Nobody Teaches — And Why It Changes Everything

Hello there. Now, if you do not grip the club correctly, you are setting yourself up for complete failure. Now, I've been posting videos over the last few weeks on shorts and you've probably seen them. We've got so many new subscribers and I've been talking a lot about the grip. I've been getting some mixed feedback. Some people saying this is the best thing they've ever tried. Some people saying that look at the likes of Mo Norman and Bryson DeChambeau, they grip it in the palm so surely it's okay. Now, we're going to go into it in full detail today. I'm going to break the grip down completely so that if you are still uncertain about which grip is best for you, I'm going to show you today why the opposite forces grip is the best grip that you could be adopting right away and what it's going to do for your game going forward and how you can take from the grip to go through the rest of the fundamentals to be able to swing the golf club as good as you know you can. Maybe we've all hit some good shots but the consistency isn't there and a lot of that comes down to the fundamentals. Now, if you are new here, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any future videos. This is going to be the best channel for your golf. We're going to get rid of confusion. We're going to explain everything and nothing is going to be uncertain after you watch these videos. I'm going to go through the whole system in this series. Today's the grip and if you're a returning viewer, I really appreciate your support. These full videos are going to be coming out every single week now and as a little bonus, what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave a little link in the description for a practice plan on how to adopt this grip step by step but today we're just going to explain it fully so let's get right into it. Now, what we see 99% of the time is amateurs holding the club in the palms of their hands like this so they come on from the side and grab it like this in the palm, come on from the side, grab it like this in the palm. Now, it makes sense. It's a natural way to grab something if you haven't been taught but it's not great for golf and let me show you why. First things first, the two hands are working away from each other so watch this. Now, look at how much wiggle room I have. My hands easily want to rotate left and right. The forearms have so much freedom to rotate and look what that does to the club face. Massive rotation in that club face so if I'm swinging it all over the place and my arms are rotating throughout the swing, I can bring it in open, I can bring it in close and there's inconsistency. We need the opposite. We need to have the club face under extreme control where it's very hard for that face to rotate and be manipulated. If we can do that, if we can control the club face then the rest of it becomes so much easier but the grip does not feel comfortable. The other issue we have with the palmy grip is that our wrists do not hinge correctly. We need the club to be set and hinged to be released for maximum speed and for the right attack angle and for the right strike and for compression but what people do is when they hold it like this, the lead wrist will bend like this and as it comes down the trail wrist will do this and look there's the casting, there's the flipping, there's what we see in so many amateur golfers and it all stems from the grip. So we've got to get away from this palmy grip. Now, the one argument I do hear from people is, oh look at Bryson DeChambeau, look at Mo Norman, the greatest ball striker of all time. Mo Norman is a complete outlier and a complete exception. Mo Norman probably hit five, six, seven million golf balls. I don't know how many he hit but it was probably, it's definitely in the millions. It could even be 10 million, I don't know but it's a lot, okay. You don't have that time, I don't have that time. Mo Norman was obsessive, he lived in his car. Bryson DeChambeau, another outlier because what he does is he stems everything from the palmy grip. Everything in his swing is based around the palmy grip, the jumbo grips on his clubs but I can tell you for certain that Bryson DeChambeau does have opposing forces as he applies that. It's just very very hard to do and for you as a less skilled player it's going to be so much harder and again you're going to have to hit so many balls to maintain that, okay. If we look at the top top player in the world, Scotty Sheffler, what does he do? He has a grip trainer on his club with grooves that get him into this opposite forces grip with strong lead hand and weak trail hand and he does that every warm-up session. You can see him on the range before tournaments using that nine iron that he has with the grip trainer on it. He says he needs to constantly maintain his grip and so do you. Scotty Sheffler's number one player in the world. We see Rory McIlroy adopt a grip like this, Tiger Woods adopted a grip like this and okay they had good things to say about Mo Norman but they aren't Mo Norman okay and Bryson DeChambeau is a whole different level as well. An outlier. You're not an outlier. If you were you'd have hit loads and loads of golf balls and you'd be on the tour by now. So hopefully that explains why the palmy grip is not going to work for you and I'm going to show you this grip and okay it's going to be a bit of a change. It's going to be a bit uncomfortable but guess what if we don't do something and get out of our comfort zone then we're never going to improve. We're in a situation where we're inconsistent right. You're inconsistent so you're going to have to make a change to become consistent and that's going to be uncomfortable. The fact that it's uncomfortable is a good thing. It means you're improving. It means you're progressing. It means you're bettering yourself. So let's get right into this grip and how to adopt it. So as I said we want it in the fingers and it should look like this right. I'll zoom in on that. I'm going to show you how to apply this grip. Now it takes time. I recommend we do it in pieces and we really focus on one hand at a time okay. So this is the opposing forces grip. Now what does that mean? It means my hands are coming on to the club from opposite sides of the grip and what I'm doing is I'm applying forces against each other and if I apply forces against each other then that stabilizes the club completely and one other advantage to this is look it's really hard for me to manipulate that club. It's really hard for me to get it. I can move it a little bit but with the palmy grip I could move it that much. Now for me to move it as much as I did with the palmy grip look at what I have to do. I have to literally do this with my shoulders and my arms and but that's just not natural. You're not going to do that in your golf swing. So this is a superior grip. Now let's get into how we do it. So the first thing that I always try and get people to understand is that the grip is going to run from the base of your index finger on the lead hand the glove hand and come up to sort of in this ridge here just below where the knuckle would be on the pinky finger. You can see on my glove there I've got a little kind of groove here. I want it running right up there and it's going to rest here. It's going to rest there. It's not going to be up in the palm. I'm not going to be using the pad of the thumb to grip the club at all and to hold leverage in the club. I'm going to be using this pad down here. So pause that and check that. Now once I get that it's completely in the fingers. Then when I wrap over look at this we get a much stronger hand. I can see three knuckles the v-shape as we all know is pointing up towards the right shoulder but what I've also done is I've created a little hook so I've almost separated this finger a touch okay slightly from the middle finger. That gives me this kind of trigger feeling right and this is essential because it gets our hand locked in the correct angle right. When I do that the hand is locked in the angle. When I let the thumb get long my wrist does this and this is no good. It's very hard to get freedom in the wrist and we need freedom in the wrist to get that whipping action. If it's here and it's set like this and we've got a little bit of a curve here it's much easier to get that whipping action. So we get that trigger finger feeling and the thumb there. That is the lead hand locked on okay. Then when it comes to the trail hand the thumb here on the lead hand is going to be pinched so that I can connect the hands correctly. Also this serves another function for connecting the two hands. I'm going to show you that in a second. So what I want is this sort of padded area in here where I could pinch my finger right. That is going to grip on and lock on to that lead thumb on the grip. So I've got that there. I'm going to get my padded area, that pinching area and I'm going to lock that in. Also look what you can see. This is completely in my fingers. It's not even touching the palm. The palm is grabbing onto the thumb on the lead hand and now I have opposite forces and it's incredible. One other thing to notice here is I also have the trigger finger in action. The index finger is slightly separated from the middle finger again and I've got that trigger action and if you look there you can see that the index finger is further down or longer than the thumb. That is a key. Too many people go like this and again look at that. The angle of this wrist dead. Here I've got that little curve and I can get compression. Oh all of a sudden I'm going to be able to do that. Incredible. So here we lock onto that thumb on the lead hand with the pad of the trail hand and I get the finger long. You can see it's kind of separated. You'll see this in a lot of tour players if you watch them from this angle. You see that thumb like that. This is the best grip in the world. Opposing forces. We can control the clubface. Look how much easier it is for me to get that hinge on the way back. It's much more natural. I don't have to force the hinge. It's much more natural. I hear a lot of people saying oh I can't hinge it. I've tried it. I've tried it. I've tried it. That's because the wrists are in this position in the palms. It's very hard to do that. I mean I immediately wanted to do this and there's a lot of people do that in the swing. So we're starting to figure out how much the grip affects all the little tendencies or flaws we see in people's swings. I like to call them compensations or manipulations based on the fundamentals. So now we've got that. I mean this is dialed in. It doesn't get any better than this. Now it's going to feel really really strange so I do recommend you start with this lead hand. Get it correct first. With the trailhand you're trying your best to get it up over because with the trailhand we're always trying to grab. We're trying to grab and control and feel comfortable. What this is actually going to feel like is almost like your right hand isn't on the club at all. It's going to feel very weak which it is. You can see that the v-shape on the trailhand is pointing more up straight towards my face or my left eye. It's not over here like you see many coaches preaching that it needs to be here. This is just an attempt to try and get you to help close the club face more. When we start closing the club face more then we're going to have to start manipulating to keep it open. So then that creates more problems. This is a long-term fix that is going to help you move correctly in your golf swing the way you need to move in your golf swing which is to create a coil and release. Let the arms do their thing naturally not forced. So it doesn't get any better than this. Now as it feels weird what I recommend you do is you come in to the range try this. First of all try it at home first. Get in front of a mirror and check it in front of the mirror. Also reference. Take some videos. Mirror is good but take some videos. Take some pictures. Feel free to send them to me on Instagram if you want. It's michaelalexandergolf. So it's going to feel weird. So once you've tried it at home and you've got a good feeling then you're going to want to come to the driving range with the grip locked in. And now the the big thing here is expectation right. You shouldn't be expecting to be striping it like Rory McIlroy straight away okay. What you should be expecting is to be able to get comfortable with this grip and it's going to take about 50-60 balls maybe a full bucket before it feels comfortable. After that we can start to judge and assess what the ball flight does but any of the ball flights when you're getting used to this and it doesn't feel comfortable they don't matter. So you've got to get that in your head as well. It doesn't matter. What you want to do when you come to the range is a lot of practice swings. Holding it in that grip doing a lot of little half swings. You're going to feel so much freedom in your wrists for the first time ever okay. And you're just trying to swing it back and through and try and get the club to land in the same spot just after the golf ball. Start this with the mid iron. That's the best place to start. Once you then get used to that you want to be hitting balls with the half swing. We're not putting force. We're not putting speed. We're not putting energy into the shot. It's just a little half swing. So get yourself into the shot. Just a little half swing to here. A little half swing through without much force. Literally trying to hit a nine iron like 80 yards is your goal. I mean that just flies perfectly straight. Nice little shallow divot. Great little strike. I mean it doesn't get much better than that and you want to hit all your balls like that. So I recommend doing like five practice swings with that feel. Then hit a shot trying to hit it about 80 yards with a nine iron. After one range session this grip is going to feel really a lot more natural okay and it's going to feel good and then you're going to be able to move on to the next step and if it's not one range session it might be two but it also depends on how well you apply it. If you start to creep back to what feels comfortable then you're going to be moving your way back to the position you've always been in with your golf which is inconsistent. You've got to be making change. It's got to feel uncomfortable and then you're going to start to see progress okay. So once you've then done a couple of range sessions and this is feeling good and you've taken pictures and you've taken videos on the range I recommend you've got to take your camera to the range. That's going to be in the practice plan. You've got to be videoing this to see it to get reference on what the real thing is and what you're feeling because the feeling will sort of lie to you. It'll tell you that it's wrong because it's different but when you look at it in camera you'll go home holy smokes that is correct. As soon as that feels normal after one range change one range session or two range sessions then you are going to be like wow if we put you back into your old grip you'd be like oh my goodness there's no way I gripped the club like that. So then once it starts to feel normal then you can start to apply a little bit more speed into it trying to hit the ball a little bit further. Bullet straight. Full control of the club face. Perfect divot. This works so you've got to adopt this grip. Let me hit one more on a full shot so you can see what we will be building in the future. Perfect ball strike. Perfect flight. Super straight. Unbelievable. So that's the grip guys. Appreciate you watching this video. It means the world to me. If you could subscribe that would be fantastic because well not only for me it helps me grow the channel helps me help you get better by subscribing but it's also going to help you so you're not going to miss any of the future videos. We're releasing this step by step with all the fundamentals. Next up is going to be set up and posture okay and that's a big one. You apply the grip and the posture you're already going to be knocking five to ten strokes off your score never mind what we can do with the rest of the swing in the rest of the game. So again click the link down below so you can get that free practice plan that I've designed for you so that you can actually figure out how to be able to adopt this with structure in your practice. We've got to start getting some structure into your practice and please do let me know in the comments what you think of this you know what else how do you find the grip what's uncomfortable because the more you tell me easier it is for me to make better videos for you. So thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one.