If you're having distance and contact issues try FIRMING UP your grip…

Average Tour Pro grips at about 120-130 pounds of force… Avg amateur only grips at about 65-75 pounds…

Recently formed up my grip (strangled the "baby bird") and added about 13 yards per club…

I'm 70, shoot in 70s from 6500 yard tees and this simple move has really accelerated my swing speed and helped my ball-striking…

When I was in high school (1970-72 era), I took lessons from Henry Ransom - Ag Golf Coach at the time - and he stressed a tight grip…

It's really helped !!

Any data backing this up or source: trust me bro

It was a pretty hot topic last year and this at the World Scientific Congress of Golf (but well behind modeling of putting on a slope) now that the Sensor Edge guys have improved their technology. The Bertoli and Mucklow group both presented this data this year.

Grip Pressure: A Comparative Analysis Across Golfer Types
Liam Mucklow, Carson Hau, Jonathon Collins
The Golf Lab, PGA of Canada

A comparative study of grip pressure differences between Amateur and Tour
Golfers
Davide Bertoli
DB Golf Center

This has been pretty well known for a while but now the measurement technology has improved a lot so you don't have to drag a bunch of different caliber of golfers to your lab and you can go to them to collect data. In 1979 Budney published data that has been essentially unchanged since then: Budney D "Measuring Grip Pressure During the Golf Swing", Research Quarterly. Back in 2006 Schmidt had to entice all different types of players to make their way to the middle of nowhere England to publish her PhD thesis "Measurement of grip force and evaluation of its role in a golf shot". The Japanese group also struggled with this in 2006. S. Koike "An instrumented grip handle for golf clubs to measure forces and moments exerted by each hand during the swing motion". Ramey had a better time of it due to his location near a lot of high level players. Broker, J. and Ramey, M. (2008). "Understanding golf club control through grip pressure measurement"

Other primary sources that have given a good foundation to work from can be found in:

Komi ER, Roberts JR, Rothberg SJ. Measurement and analysis of grip force during a golf shot. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part P: Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology. 2008;222(1):23-35. doi:10.1243/17543371JSET9

Langlais, S. M., & Broker, J. P. (2014). Grip pressure distributions and associated variability in golf: a two-club comparison. Sports Biomechanics, 13(2), 109122. https://doi.org/10.1080/14763141.2013.878377

Holland S, Dickey J, Ferreira L, Lalone E. Investigating the grip forces exerted by individuals with and without hand arthritis while swinging a golf club with the use of a new wearable sensor technology. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part P: Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology. 2020;234(3):205-216. doi:10.1177/1754337120923838


The basics are that the pros have a much stronger baseline grip than ams, they grip the club much tighter in their lead hand and have much less variability in grip pressure throughout the swing than ams, professionals have a dip in their grip pressure in the early downswing not seen by even high level ams, the ratio between lead and trail hand pressure stays similar throughout the swing. High handicappers have far too much trail hand pressure compared to their lead hand pressure and the highest handicappers have a stronger trail hand grip than lead hand and the only group to show this, they grip it light at address and just continually increase the pressure throughout the swing, they have much less total grip strength.

Its actually a pretty difficult thing to measure when you consider "grip" is solely the radial force on the grip and you have to be able to tease out the hand couple, moment of the hand force, and total torque.

What about the whole Sam Snead hold it like a bird thing??

As it turns out, a chicken is a bird and Sam actually wanted you to choke that MFer

How many lbs of force is that? It's hard to quantify what he means, and what he means also doesn't correlate to an actual measurement of anything.

Measured data over multiple studies, continents, decades and methodologies have all come to the same conclusion. The pros have a stronger grip at address, they maintain a more consistent pressure, the lead hand does a huge majority of the work and they have a much stronger raw grip strength. The rabbit hole of the physics and studies runs deep but that's the TLDR.

In one of the studies above in a subjective rating out of 10 the pros (which includes over $20mil in PGA tour winnings) said they felt like they gripped it 5/10 at address, amateurs said 4/10. If we then look at what their actual grip strength (using a dynamometer, which is a fair to ok surrogate as it measures linear force vs a grip which is radial) the pros averaged 132lb of force and the amateurs averaged 93lb. I find that just like in most measurement studies of the PGA pros vs high level ams we find that guys that play professionally (including that Snead guy) are strong, athletic, flexible men a step above elite amateurs and miles ahead of the average. What may have been holding a bird in his hand could take 60-80% of an ams grip strength, I would also bet that could we actually run that study he'd kill a lot of birds.


https://wrxcdn.golfwrx.com/uploads/monthly_2024_07/grip-graph.jpg.c5b782f3c91e437fccbc611354d5c769.jpg

This graph has pretty strong agreement through all the studies I know about, it also all happens in less than 1 second and is a reaction to a movement of the whole system so good luck trying to control it willfully besides what you're doing at address.