Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you become a smarter, better golfer.

Recreational golfers often ask about the same thing: spin. They watch the pros each weekend put english on the ball around the greens and can’t wait to pull it off themselves. The problem is, they have no idea where to begin.

Spin is a great tool if you know how to use it. It allows you to hit a vast variety of different shots and gives you tons of control over your ball. When you can manipulate your ball with spin, you unlock a whole new level in your short game.

Now, there are many ingredients necessary for hitting a pitch shot with tons of spin, and it would require a full dissertation to break it all down in depth. However, if you’re looking for a quick trick that will help you generate more backspin, you’re in luck. In the video below, GOLF Top 100 Teacher Jeff Smith explains how making a small grip tweak can give you boatloads of backspin.

A grip tweak for major spin

A shot with tons of spin is a “specialty” shot, so your setup should feature specialty characteristics. Throw all of your “stock” setup tools out the window. For this shot, that means taking a bit of a different approach to how you hold the club.

“You should use a specialty grip for a specialty shot,” Smith says.

Most golfers use either an interlock or overlap grip, but for this shot, Smith suggests using a reverse overlap. That means gripping the club with all the fingers of your trail hand on the club and then overlapping your lead hand index finger over the pinky of your trail hand.

“Now what’s going to happen is you’re going to own control over this club a whole lot more,” Smith says. “You can control how steep it gets coming into the ball [and] you can control how hard you hit it better.”

With your trail hand gripping the club so prominently, it becomes a lot easier to generate speed through the impact area, which is a key component for generating spin. All you need to do from there is open the clubface a bit and focus on hitting down on the ball.

If you do that, your ball will come out with more spin than you’ve ever seen before.

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