You’ve got a crucial shot facing you.
One good swing is all that’s standing between you and glory. You have the yardage, you know what the wind is doing, and you’ve worked out the shot you’re going to hit.
You reach for what you believe to be the right club for the shot, and after a couple of nice, loose practice swings, you’re ready.
Everything still feels good as you take the club back, but somehow, as you complete your backswing, you feel the club move a little in your hands.
As you come into impact, the club now feels like you’re gripping a slippery eel. You watch in horror as your ball flies nowhere near its intended target, and your shot at glory is gone.
What happened? Why did the club feel different?
A quick check over the offending item reveals the answer. Looking at your grip, you can almost see your reflection because the grip is so worn.
It’s a common mistake.
Arguably, one of the most important elements of your golf equipment is often the most overlooked: the condition of your grips.
Our focus for this piece is to help you understand why you should pay more attention to the health of your grips and what the positive impact on your golf game can be.
To give you the full picture, we’ll cover the following areas:
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Understanding The Important Role Your Grips Play
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Spotting The Telltale Signs That You Need To Change Your Grips
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How Often Should You Replace Your Grips?
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Golf Grip Maintenance: Three Tips To Prolong The Life Of Your Grips
Understanding The Important Role Your Grips Play
Question. Would you go out and drive a car whose tyres were completely worn out?
Chances are you wouldn’t, because the car would be difficult to control, especially if the road surface was wet.
Golf grips do a similar job on your golf club. They help establish control. When they are good and healthy, they are an asset that helps control the clubface during the swing, and they can help reduce the risk of injury.
The risk of injury increases when the golf grips on our clubs are poor because the tendency is to grip the club a little tighter to maintain control.
Tightening our grip tightens the muscles in our hands, which then tighten the muscles in our forearms, and this pattern spreads up the rest of our arms and shoulders.
Hitting a lot of golf shots with tight muscles is not conducive to free-flowing swings, and more tension in muscles that help absorb the vibration of impact after impact can fatigue muscles more quickly and contribute to discomfort, strains, or overuse problems.
Injury is never good news, and if it is caused by grips that are long past their sell-by date, you wouldn’t be happy at all. Before getting anywhere near that stage, it’s time to check out what the key signs are that our grips are past it.
Spotting The Telltale Signs That You Need To Change Your Grips
There are four clear signs that your grips are no longer performing properly and may need to be replaced:
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Worn Logos, Colours or Alignment Markings
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Hard Grips
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Thumb/Finger Imprints
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Visible Shaft
Worn Logos, Colours or Alignment Markings
This is often the first warning sign that your grips may need attention. Many grips have logos, alignment aids, or colouring, which will all start to wear out the more often we play golf.
If the logo, colour pattern, or alignment markings on the grip have started to fade, rub away, or become harder to see, it usually means the outer surface of the grip is beginning to wear down.
That matters because the same surface wear that affects the markings can also reduce the grip’s original texture and tackiness. At this stage, the grip may not feel completely worn out, but it is often an early warning that it is no longer performing as well as it should.
Hard Grips
As the grip starts to wear further, it will often start to feel hard, with virtually no tackiness left to it. As the grip wears, the texture, channels, or cord designed to help manage moisture can become less effective. This situation can be really difficult to manage if you are facing a rainy day on the course. Look out for the grip starting to take on a shiny appearance, which is linked to the hardening of the rubber.
Thumb/Finger Imprints
Taking things a step further from worn logos and alignment aids comes the next stage of wear, which is imprints on the grip. A classic example is where your thumbs rest on the grip.
Gripping tighter because of the worsening state of your grips will start to create small indentations, which are a result of pressure being applied through your thumbs and fingers, causing the rubber compound to start to break down.
Visible Shaft
It might sound crazy, but some golfers still persevere with their worn-out grips even though the grip wear is so bad that the shaft is visible. By this point, the grip is absolutely useless; it won’t provide support in the dry or wet, and could start to cause skin issues or injuries, especially for the hand that is not gloved.
How Often Should You Replace Your Golf Grips?
There is no exact science behind how often you should replace your golf grips, but we would say that, on average, the most common window for changing grips is between twelve and eighteen months.
If you play a lot of golf, you may need to consider golf grip installation sooner than the usual twelve-month mark.
You might also consider using a scale of thirty up to a maximum of forty rounds as an additional point of reference.
Overall, this may seem like rather broad estimates, but again, it’s important to remember how frequently you play and how heavy you are on your grips, which will dictate when exactly the right time is to re-grip your clubs.
Some players will opt to change grips at the start of every season if they play in a lot of competitions. You may also find you need to change grips more frequently for clubs you are using the most, such as the driver and wedges. You may also find that the grips on the clubs you practice the most with will also start to wear out quicker, and will need to be changed.
Golf Grip Maintenance: Three Tips To Prolong The Life Of Your Grips
You can maximise the lifespan of your golf club grips by following these three simple tips:
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Dry Grips Properly After Wet Rounds
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Clean Your Grips Regularly
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Store Your Clubs Sensibly
Dry Grips Properly After Wet Rounds
The weather can play its part during a round of golf. Sunshine one minute, pouring rain the next. If you get caught out by the weather, the important thing when you are finished is to dry your clubs and grips properly.
For grips, use a dry towel to remove moisture, then find a warm, dry space to let all your clubs dry out properly.
Clean Your Grips Regularly
If you’re fortunate enough to play in warm, sunny conditions more often than not, chances are you’re going to apply suntan lotion at some point out on the course. As much as you might clean your hands, there’s a good chance that some of the lotion will transfer to your grips.
Dirt can be transferred to your golf grips from picking up divots, or if the rake you were using to rake a bunker had excess sand in the handle, which can all inadvertently make your grips dirty.
Cleaning golf grips is not a difficult task. You simply need warm soapy water, a scrubbing pad or rough cloth, and a dry towel.
If you don’t have a lot of space, wash your golf grips over the kitchen sink and scrub the grip towards the butt end while it’s positioned over the sink to let the water drain away.
Store Your Clubs Sensibly
Having some decent storage space makes a huge difference in extending the life of your golf grips, and by extension, your golf clubs.
If you have played in wet conditions and need to leave the course immediately after the round, make sure you can get your clubs out of the car and into a dry space as quickly as possible when you get home.
If you are limited for space, at least carry some spare towels in the boot of your car so you can give your clubs a wipe down.
The main point is not to leave your clubs lying in the boot of your car for any major amount of time if they are wet, or if the weather is extremely hot, where the car’s temperature can rise drastically inside when not in use, which is highly detrimental to prolonging the life of your grips.
Improving golf performance comes down to many factors; some seem obvious, while others, like the health of the grips on your clubs, are something that, in many cases, is often overlooked.
Your only contact with the golf club is the grip, so it actually plays a very important role.
Healthy grips provide better clubhead control and help you maintain the correct grip pressure without having to feel like you are strangling the club to obtain control.
There are no hard and fast rules for when you should change your grips, but pay attention to the telltale signs that your grips require attention and need to be replaced. In the interim, you can also help preserve the life of your grips by following a few basic cleaning and storage rules.
When it comes to custom-fitting golf clubs at Nine By Nine Golf, grips are an important part of the customising of your equipment. Grip choice is very much a personal matter; the style of grip, colour combinations, logo up or logo down, and whether you prefer cord, non-cord, or even leather, are all taken into consideration.
What’s equally important is ensuring your grips are the correct thickness based on your hand size, which also helps improve clubhead control.
At Nine By Nine Golf, you can browse our grip selection from the likes of Golf Pride, IOmic, and SuperStroke, and place an order for the number of grips you need, along with selecting details like grip size and width.
When you’re booked in for a custom-fitting session at our studio, our experienced fitters are on hand to talk through the grip options that are available and assess which grip thickness will be ideally suited to help you improve your game.