Proper Putting Grip to Improve Your Golf Game

I have a question for you. In your bag you have fourteen clubs, true? How many grips do you have for those fourteen clubs. I only know of two. There is one grip for thirteen clubs and then there is a grip for one other. The one other is your putter, so let's talk about your putter grip. How does it vary from a regular full swing grip? Well first of all when you take your putting grip you are taking a grip that demotes hand action. We don't want any hand action. It is what we call a lifeline grip. I have illustrated the lifeline of my two hands and I am going to show you how they go on the golf club.

You put the top hand against the left side of the top of the grip. As you can see my putter grip is running along my lifeline. Because of that there is a hole under my left hand and then I put my right hand on and the lifeline also goes on. The thumb muscles of the each hand sit on top of the club. Did you ever wonder why the top of a putter is flat? It is for those thumb muscles to sit on and it looks like this. So the thumbs in putting go down the grip and the lifeline goes alongside the side of your grip. What that does is it basically freezes your wrists.

Here is what I mean. If I grip like in the full swing and the club is gripped in my fingers that allows my wrists joints to engage, that is wrist cock, at least with one hand it is. But when I put the club along the lifeline that wrists joint does not move near as much which takes a lot of that activity out of the hands. Good putters don't use their hands they use their shoulders.

So the second part of the grip, we have lifeline, lifeline, and the second part is we take the lead index finger, that is the top hand index finger, out, slide the bottom hand up to the top hand and run that index finger on the outside of the fingers of the bottom hand. Once again. Lifeline, lifeline, thumbs on top, lift up the left hand lifeline, slide the right hand up to the left, put the left hand index finger on the outside of your right hand, you are now set to put.

The other advantage of this is when you grip in your lifeline it fits the lie angle of your putter compared to the lie angle of your irons and woods. As you go to the lifeline that fits this line here on the putter shaft, meaning on your grip, you then lower the ground, the clubhead sits flat on the ground, lifeline, lifeline, index finger outside. The grand finale of all this is called the reverse overlap. The left index finger is not where it normally is, it is reversed. It is outside where it is normally against the club itself. From there the ideal is, if you watch my two wrists, they don't move. The question is what is moving? That is another lesson.