One of the things that has been surprisingly difficult in learning how to play left-handed is getting comfortable with my grip. No matter how much time I spent in front of the mirror or just looking down at my hands, it never quite felt comfortable. I decided to pull the trigger and order a lefty training grip.
I bought a generic knock-off training grip from Amazon, and at first I was a little annoyed that it did not have any sort of alignment mark on it. Typically a grip will have a line or something else to indicate how it should be aligned relative to the club head. As it turns out, I’m not sure that this would have made a difference, as different players may want to have different strength in their grips. I’m glad that I switched over to the air compressor method for installing grips. I gave it my best shot for alignment the first time, but I was able to rotate the grip by a few degrees after a few days to get what I expect to be the best “strength” for me.
There were no revelations when I first gripped the club – nothing immediately stood out as being different. However, I almost immediately started feeling more comfortable with my grip. Over the last week I’ve handled the club with the training grip as much as possible. I keep it in my office and pick it up a few times during the day. I’ll also handle it quite a bit while walking on the treadmill, and of course use it for practice swings in the mirror. I have to say that I truly feel like it is making a difference. I only hit balls once last week using the grip, and that was into the net, before adjusting it to make it a bit stronger. While I don’t really know yet how this will translate to actually hitting balls, I am pretty confident that this is going to generally help me more comfortable with my lefty swing.
Aside from that, I did not do much in the way of golf specific work. I did get out to the practice green one day and chipped and potted for about half an hour as a break in the work day. I also spent just a few minutes doing some basic drills in the mirror each day. Otherwise I just stayed on top of my general fitness routine. I had a window to go to the range while in the neighboring town, but it was overcast and right at freezing and I decided it probably wasn’t worth it. It will hopefully be a bit warmer this upcoming weekend, so hopefully I’ll be able to get out and either play or at least hit some balls.
Alternate Golf 