Do you know what your hands are really doing during the golf swing? Golf launch monitors measure almost everything about the golf ball flight. Video analysis reveals your body movement during the swing. But the golfer’s only connection to the club-your hands- has remained largely invisible. This guide explains why hand and finger forces may be one of the missing links in golf performance training. In this guide you will discover, how they influence release, clubface control, consistency in swing and putting and why only an objective measurement is opening a new chapter in coaching and player development. Estimated reading time: 12 minutes CTA: see real swing data
Why golf grip pressure matters more than most golfers think
Many golfers have heard the same advice from their coaches:
“relax your grip”
“you hold your club to tightly”
“use less force in your right hand”
“let the club release naturally”
“release through the ball”
“keep your hands quiet”
they sound totally simple, yet they are difficult to apply consistently. The reason is also simple. Almost every piece of traditional coaching tells you what to do-but very little explains what you hands are actually doing during the golf swing.
How tight is too tight?
How much pressure should each hand apply?
Should your grip stay constant throughout the swing, or does it change?
And if you change, how do you change?
What role do your fingers play during the release?
Can hand forces actually be measured?
Until recently, the answer was largely no.
Every movement of the club begins with hand forces and finger forces on the grip. With this, you control release timing, clubface and finally consistency of your swings and your ball flights, the result of the whole exercise.
3 Golf launch monitors measure ball speed, launch angle, spin rate and so on with very high accuracy.
Video analysis helped to understand and analyse your body movements at millisecond time frame through swing progression. But neither system tells you how your hands create those results!
The golfer’s hands.
The hands are the golfer’s only physical connection to the club. All forces, all movements are transmitted by the hands to the club.
Every shot-whether it’s an extreme long drive or a delicate chip or putting. Everything depends on how the hands interact with the club.
If that interaction changes then, also the club path , the clubface orientation changes. And consequently, the ballflight changes.
It is a simple chain of events, but until now, one of its most important links has been largely invisible. Imagine a golfer who repeatedly pulls the ball left.
A launch monitor might tell you the clubface was closed at impact. Video may show you an early release (however you define that exact point…). But neither explain why the clubface closed. Was trail-hand dominating? Force increases too early? Did the player release the club differently than on a previous swing? Those answers remain largely invisible.
The difference between feel and reality
A big challenge in golf is that, we think we know what our hands are doing because we feel it. However, our feel is often very different from reality! While one golfer may believe he is swinging very smoothly, the video may reveal rushed transitions. Many golfers think they maintain a constant grip throughout the swing-however this is not reality! In reality, hand force patterns are highly dynamic.
Hand forces change continuously from address to take away, through backswing, transition and especially downswing and impact, follow-through. Part of these forces and pressure shifts are dictated by physics (especially downswing-impact-follow-through). During the downswing you transfer the of movement energy of your arm over to your club, especially to your clubhead. At release the clubhead is taking over and determine and forces and movements. At release your hand slows down, but your club starts a rotational acceleration. The clubhead picks up speed through centrifugal force. This force is coming from the rotation of the club and the clubhead speed, it’s not a question of your personal biomechanics (like your arm length or muscle strength).
In contrast backswing is largely shaped by the golfer’s own movement pattern and techniques. This is how you prepare for downswing. This is a highly personal pattern and is largely determined by the way you have learnt golf years ago and also by your coach of course.
Coaches rely on experience and on watching the golfer. Players rely on their feel. Both are valuable, but neither provides objective data!
Why this matters for every golfer
Let us look at a situation every golfer has experienced
Consider two golfers which have very similar launch monitor data, for example:
same clubhead speed
Same carry distance
same launch angle
on paper, you expect that their swings will appear almost identical. If you check the video analysis you only see very slight differences in body movement.
But now ask them to need the same swing 20 or 30 time and then check the results. One golfer will deliver with every swing the same result. The other golfer, 5 will sometimes deliver the same result but sometimes too much to the left, or too much to the right, a slice, a hook and so on. The variability of the two golfers is totally different.
How can this happen? Do you know the situation? Have you ever experienced the same?
Normally you will start now investigating:
is the club fitting okay?
Is it too hot?
Am I tired?
Is the training box not good?
Are measurement correct?
Is the club too long? Is the club too flexible?
I’m sure you have experience with such an endless flood of questions, why something is not happening as expected.
Traditional measurement systems often describe the results and the results only. They do not always explain the cause.
Misconceptions
There are also some misconceptions. Our hands are not only “holding” the club and the rest is done by body movement.
Our hands and fingers actively guide the forces into the club and how quickly or slowly these forces are developed.
Our fingers, left hand and right-hand, do the fine orientation of the clubface. Sometimes they turn the club even around its axis (very slightly), sometimes not. With a launch monitor alone, you will never see such a change- you only see the result.
Our hands do not merrily hold the club. The actively guide it throughout the swing.
However, these small changes, often in a timeframe of milliseconds determine the final result!
If this forces could be measured an entirely new layer of understanding to golf training could be added
Hand force is more than “holding the club”
Many golfers still think of grip pressure in single numbers (because they have been trained like this):
“grip so lightly as if you are holding a bird”
“grip lightly”
“grip firmly but not too hard”
The reality is far more complex than this (as we all know).
The grip pressure is not static. Also, the understanding that the hand grip is similar like a homogeneous “force ring” around the grip, is wrong. Although you hold the club with both hands, the force and pressure is not distributed evenly on the grip. Your individual fingers exert very different forces onto the club. The different areas of your hand palm provide very different forces respectively pressure to your grip.
It is not a static force, neither homogeneous around the grip.
During the swing, hand forces develop a specific pattern. While during the backswing the force pattern is largely governed by your biomechanics e.g. how you have learnt to play golf and make your body movement, the downswing, impact and follow-through does have personal feature, but is heavily governed by the physics of the movement (especially by the centrifugal forces after release). 7 Here just one short word:
“grip so lightly as if you are holding a bird “-is a common advice. If you think about the details of release, it is clear that this advice only holds at the moment of release.
Holding your club like a bird during the centrifugal acceleration of your clubhead would just tear your club out of your hands. Your club would fly away.
This phrase helps many golfers for their swings. I think there is absolute truth in it however, you need to also define when this light grip is appropriate. It is certainly not throughout the whole swing. We will come back to this specific point in a little
Understanding the dynamic of forces and their interaction with the club opens new coaching possibilities and new possibilities for player development. Instead of only asking:
“how hard should I hold my club?”
We can begin asking:
when should my pressure and force curve increase?
Which hand should have which force during the swing?
What is my thumb exactly doing during the swing and when?
Does the pressure pattern remain consistent from swing to swing?
How does my force curve’s change under pressure respectively when I’m stressed? How does it look when I’m tired?
What is the cause of my swing results variability?
These are questions golfers have rarely been able to answer objectively.
Completing the picture
golf launch monitor was transformed golf by helping us understand the golf ball flight. 8 High-speed video recordings transformed golf by helping us to understand body movements. The next step may be understanding the interaction between golfer and club. It’s not to replace coaching nor to replace launch monitors or to replace experience.
But to complement them!
What we think would be ideal:
imagine to combine all that information:
ball flight data
club delivery data
video
body movement and
objective and force analysis
instead of seeing only what has happened, golfers and coaches begin to understand why it has happened. And this is the only way you can improve something! First you need to see it!
That is a fundamentally different way of looking at golf performance
A new way to think about improvements
For many years golfers have just accepted that certain aspects of the swing simply could not be measured.
Grip pressure and hand forces there often described using subjective wording like:
“6/10”
“relaxed”
“firm but not strong”
“active”
These descriptions remain useful, but they are very subjective.
Objective measurements have changed many other areas of the golf sport. There is every reason to believe it can do the same for the hands.
Our understanding of how grip pressure changes throughout the swing-and how those changes relate to release timing, clubface orientation and also putting-may become one of the next frontier golf performance trainings.
Because before golfers can improve what they hands are doing…
They first need to understand what they hands are actually doing!
Before we analyse what happens during the swing, the first need a common language. Throughout this guide will use a number of technical terms. This unscientific, but there actually quite simple-and they’ll help you understand the rest of the article much more easily
Understanding the language of hand force analysis
Before we analyse what happens during the swing, the first need a common language. Throughout this guide will use a number of technical terms. This unscientific, but there actually quite simple-and they’ll help you understand the rest of the article much more easily