Good golf starts before the club ever moves. Grip, stance, posture: these three set up everything that comes after. Get them right and half of the “swing problems” you worry about simply never appear. In Dutch lessons we even give them a name, GOH — grip, opstelling (stance), houding (posture). It is Lesson 1 for a reason.
I have taught this to complete beginners and to golfers who played for years the wrong way. The beginners often learn faster. Why? They have nothing to unlearn. So let me walk you through the basics, the few things that really matter.
Why is the grip the most important fundamental in golf?
Your grip is the only place your body touches the club. That is the whole reason it matters so much. Every good thing and every bad thing in your swing travels down the shaft and through your hands. Hold the club wrong and the face arrives crooked at the ball. Then you get a slice, a hook, or a weak little strike, no matter how nice your swing looks.
I think of the grip as the steering wheel of the car. A lot of golfers tell me the same story: they spent years trying to fix their swing, changing this and that, and the real fault was sitting quietly in their hands the whole time. One player described how a tiny turn of his trail hand had bent his whole shot pattern for decades. Small cause, big effect.
So we start here. Always.
How do you find your correct grip — and which type suits you?
Start with a neutral grip, because it balances power and accuracy. Look down at your lead hand on the club. You want to see about two to two-and-a-half knuckles, and the “V” shapes made by your thumbs and forefingers pointing up toward your trail eye. That is your home base.
From home base you can lean two ways. A strong grip turns the lead hand away from the target, so you see three or more knuckles; it closes the face a little, helps a right-to-left draw, and can add ten to twenty yards of roll on your driver. A weak grip shows fewer knuckles, opens the face, and often gives that fade or slice.
Now, which style holds the two hands together? There are three, and none is “wrong”:
- Overlapping (Vardon): the trail pinky rests on top. Most adult golfers use this.
- Interlocking: the pinky and lead index lock together. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods both play this way.
- Ten-finger (baseball): all fingers on the club. Lovely for juniors, for true beginners, and for anyone with smaller or weaker hands or sore joints.
Two things I watch for most in new golfers. First, hold the club in your fingers, not deep in your palm. A palm grip locks your wrists and leaves the face open, a very common beginner mistake. Second, softness. Grip pressure of about four or five out of ten is plenty: firm enough that the club will not slip, soft enough that your forearms stay quiet. If I can see tension in your forearms at address, you are squeezing too hard.
One honest warning. A new grip feels wrong at first. Many experienced golfers on the forums say the same thing. They picked up five to seven shots after fixing their grip — their own count, not a lab study — yet almost everyone admits the new position felt strange for three or four weeks, and most people give up before the new habit sets. Do not be most people. Give it those weeks. Grooving a change over the quiet winter months indoors is a smart way to let it settle.
If your ball keeps curving hard, the grip is usually the first suspect. See how it feeds a slice or a hook .
What does a proper golf stance look like?
A good stance is a stable, athletic base: wide enough to stay balanced, free enough to turn. Width changes with the club in your hand. For the driver, set your feet just outside shoulder-width, roughly two inches beyond each shoulder. For a 9-iron, bring each foot in about two inches. Wedges are the narrowest of all.
Balance sits in the middle. Weight fifty-fifty between your feet, resting on the middle of each foot, never on your toes or heels. Add a soft bend in the knees, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five degrees. That little flex loads your legs and lets you push off the ground on the way down. Too much of it and you will stand up out of the shot and catch it fat.
Then check your lines. Feet, knees, hips and shoulders all run parallel to your target line, like two rails of a railway track: one rail your body, the other rail the ball to the flag. When beginners start pulling and pushing shots, crooked rails are very often the reason.
How far should you stand from the ball — and where does the ball go?
Let your arms hang. That is the secret. Stand up to the ball, bend into your posture, and let both arms drop relaxed from your shoulders. Wherever your hands land, that is your distance. As a quick check, you want about one hand-width, roughly four to six inches, between the end of the grip and your front thigh.
Get this wrong and the ball tells you. Stand too close and your arms feel crowded; you catch the heel and fight shanks and slices. Stand too far and your arms lock out straight, your rhythm disappears, and you top the ball or fall forward off balance.
Ball position moves with the club too. The driver sits far forward, opposite the instep of your lead foot. As the clubs get shorter, the ball creeps back toward the centre of your stance. Even the best players shift it only about two to three inches from driver to 9-iron. Small changes, big difference in contact. When the strike goes fat or thin, ball position and posture are usually talking to each other. More on that in stop hitting it fat and thin .
What is correct golf posture and how do you bend from the hips?
Bend from your hips, not your waist. This is the heart of good posture. Push your hips back and tilt your upper body forward with a long, straight spine, somewhere around thirty-five to forty-five degrees depending on your build and the club. Your back stays flat, your neck follows the line of your spine, and your arms hang free underneath.
The fault I see most is the rounded back. The shoulders slump, the chest caves, and the spine curves like the letter C. It feels comfortable, but it quietly blocks your turn. A rounded upper back can steal twenty to thirty degrees of shoulder rotation, and then the arms take over and do all the work the body should share. Long spine, proud chest. That one thought fixes so much.
Dutch readers will know these words from their own lessons: houding for posture, stand for stance. Same fundamentals, same order, in every clubhouse.
How do grip, stance and posture connect — and what breaks first?
They are one system, not three separate tips. Your posture sets the height and angle your arms hang from, which decides your distance from the ball, which decides where the clubface can return. Change one and the others must answer.
And here is the lovely part. When you keep your spine angle from address all the way through impact, the bottom of your swing stays in the same place every time, so clean contact stops being luck and starts being a habit. Posture is not decoration. It is what makes the strike predictable. These same fundamentals scale right down to the short game, where your setup matters just as much when you chip and putt the short ones .
So which do you build first? Posture and balance, honestly. A wise Top-50 coach once welcomed back a student who had not swung a club in over ten years, and instead of any clever swing tip he rebuilt the man entirely from posture, balance and the hip-hinge before touching the swing itself. His conclusion stayed with me: a balanced, turnable setup is worth more than any move you can copy from television. Fix the platform, and the swing has a real chance.
Come and build your foundation
Here in the Netherlands this is exactly where every beginner starts. The NGF baanpermissie, your first course permission , is built on six starter lessons plus one free theory evening, and those lessons are GOH, these very fundamentals. Pass it and around a hundred and ten Dutch courses open their doors to you.
When the grip finally feels natural, the fun really begins. A clean, quiet strike on a calm morning is a feeling I still love after all these years. If you would like a pair of eyes on your grip, stance and posture, come and find me at Chi Chi Golf in Utrecht or Golfschool Hoenderdaal in Driebergen, and you can see how it works on the pricing page. Small steps. Small steps win in golf.