Reading hand pressure before you add tape wraps

Filed from the bay · Bay View, Milwaukee

Grip sizing is one of the few equipment variables where a golfer can feel the effect of a change immediately, in the shop, without a launch monitor. That makes it satisfying to work on. It also makes it very easy to change for the wrong reason, because the immediate feedback feels like confirmation.

What a wrap actually is

One layer of standard double sided grip tape adds around one hundredth of an inch to the diameter of the grip and roughly two grams of mass. Adding four wraps under the lower hand is approximately the same diameter change as going from a standard grip to a midsize, except that it can be applied to only the part of the grip where you want it.

That last point is the one worth holding onto. A midsize grip is bigger everywhere. Tape wraps can be applied to the lower hand only, the upper hand only, or graduated along the length. If your two hands want different things, and plenty of hands do, wraps are the only tool that can give it to them.

Read the old grip first

Before I size anything I look at the grip coming off. Rubber glazes where it is squeezed hardest and it wears where the hands slide. Between those two signals a used grip tells you a surprising amount.

• Heavy glazing in the lower hand fingers usually means the grip is too small for that hand. The fingers are digging in to find security they are not getting from surface contact.
• Wear concentrated on the upper hand pad with little in the fingers often means the grip is too large up there and the club is being controlled by the palm rather than held.
• A polished band right where the thumb sits is a pressure point, and it is frequently the physical signature of somebody fighting a club that wants to rotate on them.
• Even, unremarkable wear across the whole grip means the size is close to right and you should be extremely cautious about changing it.

The most common mistake I see is a golfer going up two sizes because their hands ache, when the ache was coming from a grip so hard and slick that they were strangling it.

Size is not the only variable

Compound hardness matters as much as diameter and gets discussed a tenth as often. A soft compound gives more surface friction, which means a golfer can hold on more lightly. A firm cord compound gives less cushioning but more feedback and is far better in the wet.

Around here, wet is not an edge case. Morning dew through September and October is heavy enough that a smooth rubber grip becomes genuinely slippery by the fourth hole, and a golfer whose hands are slipping will grip harder, which produces exactly the fatigue and tension that they will then try to fix by going up a size. The actual fix was a corded compound, and it costs the same money.

What larger grips do to the ball

A larger grip restricts how quickly the hands can rotate through impact. For a golfer whose miss is a closing face and a hook, that is genuinely useful and it is the clearest legitimate case for going up a size. For a golfer who already struggles to square the face, going up a size will make the slice worse, reliably.

So the honest sequence is: identify the miss, then size the grip. Not the other way around. A golfer who arrives certain they need midsize grips because their hands are large gets asked what the ball does before anything gets ordered, and about a third of the time the answer changes the recommendation.

Measure the hand, then ignore the chart

There is a standard measurement, wrist crease to the tip of the middle finger, and a chart that maps it to a grip size. I take the measurement on every fitting because it is a useful starting point and because it goes on the sheet. Then we test, because the chart has no idea whether you play in gloves, whether you have arthritis in one hand, or whether your grip pressure is naturally light or heavy.

Somewhere close to half of the golfers I size end up outside where the chart put them. That is not a criticism of the chart. It is what a chart is for: a place to begin.

Write the number down

Whatever you land on, get the wrap count recorded. It is field 07 on our sheet and it is the field most likely to be lost, because a grip gets changed by whoever is convenient at the time. If nobody knows that your 8 iron had three wraps under the lower hand, the next regrip will quietly return it to standard, and you will spend a month wondering why one club started feeling different.

There is a longer piece in this log on what that kind of drift does to a matched set, if you want the arithmetic.

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