Tension Inhibits Good Play

Tension is the greatest inhibiting factor in causing bad golf shots. The average player grips the club too tightly, grips it with the wrong part of the hands, has the arms and shoulders as tight as drums, all of which make it impossible to swing freely and therefore difficult to hit the ball.

Before I can do anything with a pupils swing I must have freedom of movement. To get freedom of movement there must be a total lack of tension in the whole body. My experience is that tension in a golf swing starts in the hands. Timothy Galway in his book the Inner Game of Golf talks about ‘grading’ your tension levels. I have found that to be an excellent concept.

He suggests you grip the club with both hands as tightly as you can and call that 10 out of 10. Hit some shots with that grip tension and observe the results. Then grip it at 8 out of ten and hit some shots, then 6 out of 10, then 4 then 2 and even 1. See which tension level produces the best results.

The next step from my point of view is to change the tension levels in each hand because I find most of my pupils have a stronger bottom hand grip than that with their top hand. The top hand should be the dominant hand in the golf swing so you should find that having your bottom hand gripping more softly than the top hand gives better results.

Different types of people do different things. Tom Watson and Arnold Palmer were known in the trade as ‘white knucklers’. They gripped it tightly with both hands, supposedly about 8 out of 10. Most of the other great players said they were in the 4 to 6 category in the top hand and softer in the bottom hand. I play best at 4/5 in the top hand and close to 0 in the bottom.

You will find that if you can lower the tension levels in your hands that softness will flow through your arms and shoulders making everything else work much more effectively during the swing. Sometimes that is all you have to do. The swing errors you perceived you were making disappear.