How does your grip affect your swingweight?
Swingweight, which you can read on in our full length deep dive here, can be a tricky subject to talk about, but when you break it down to it’s basics, as we described in that deep dive, it becomes pretty simple. The more weight you add to the tip section of the golf club the heavier the swingweight is going to get and the more you’ll feel the weight of the clubhead. The more weight you put towards the handle section of the golf club, the lighter the swingweight will be and the more weight you’ll feel in your hands. But how does your grip selection affect swingweight? With some help from our sponsor SuperStroke USA, let’s find out.
There are two ways that the grips you choose can affect your swingweight. Size and material. We will be focusing on club grips for the rest of this topic, but keep in mind that all of this information also applies to putter grips as well.
Once you have selected the right grip for your game, you have to decide what size is best. How that choice affects your swingweight should not be a factor in the decision of what size to play, but rather a note after the fact. If you’re getting your clubs rebuilt or custom built for the first time, your builder will take it from here. Once you have selected the right grip and size for your game, your club builder will compensate for the weight of the grip regardless of its size by adjusting the clubhead weighting using tip weights.
Size
For most of our readers, you are probably wondering how changing grips from the stock ones that came on your clubs is going to affect your swingweight and the feel of your clubs.
Let’s assume that you had something like the SuperStroke S-Techs on the clubs that you bought from the store. Most stock sets are going to have standard size grips on them. But if you’ve got bigger hands, or desire the larger size of the midsize grips you’ll have to pull those off and replace them. When you make that replacement you’ll be adding 15 grams of weight to the handle section of the club. The general rule of thumb for swingweight changes in the handle is that every 4 grams of added weight is going to decrease swingweight by about 1 point. So 15 grams of additional weight will be a decrease of somewhere between 3 and 4 points. 3 to 4 points is enough of a change that most golfers will notice a difference in feel. Conversely, say you rip off some old Midsize grips and switch to the lighter Regular grips; you’d be increasing swingweight somewhere between 3 and 4 points.
Does it matter?
The problem with this is that at this much of a difference, you will notice performance changes. 3 to 4 points is enough to throw off the transition of your swing, as well as your positions at impact. A heavier swingweight will typically cause players to hit their shots thin as their body raises its arms at impact to accommodate the club head weight. A lighter swingweight, which would happen when switching from regular grips to midsize grips, would likely cause a player to hit their shots a little bit fat. This is assuming of course that the original build was the correct swingweight for that player.
The second factor of grip choice that’s going to affect your swingweight is the material choice that you use. There are some companies where the material choice that you make can make enough of a difference in swingweight to feel it and be affected by it. Companies like SuperStroke have made efforts to make their entire lineups similar, so that somebody replacing their grips for sake of material, so long as they stay within the same size, will not have their swingweight affected. For example if you moved from the SuperStroke S-Tech to the SuperStroke Traxion Wrap, you’d only be losing 1 gram of weight which isn’t enough to affect the swingweight of your clubs.
You can look up the weight of any grip that you are looking to purchase to see if it may affect the swingweight of your clubs. If you are set on switching grips and worried that they may affect your swingweight, fear not!, you can always take your clubs to a reputable builder and have them rebuild the clubs with the new grips back to the same swingweight.
Thanks to our sponsors at SuperStroke USA for providing us with the grips you saw in today’s demonstrations. For more information about the entire lineup of SuperStroke products visit their website at superstrokeusa.com
