The XControl Golf Grips Work Exactly as Advertised. There’s Just One Problem.

I have never been able to hit my 5-iron. Not with any real consistency. It’s the club I trust least in my bag.

The problem for me with long irons in general and with the 5-iron that I still for some reason carry but barely use is that I can’t seem to repeatably or reliably square up the clubface. It’s been an issue for years.

Then I put an XControl grip on it, and on my very first round I hit a couple of the best 5-irons of my life. Not good-for-me 5-irons. I’m talking the best ones I’ve ever hit. Dead square, effortless, right out of the middle of the face. And I didn’t change a thing about my swing to do it.

I should have walked off thrilled. Instead, I’m a little conflicted.

Because the grip that just fixed the worst club in my bag is a grip I’m not even allowed to play.

That’s the whole story with these things, and it only gets more complicated the longer you sit with it.

Let me explain.

A Tennis Guy Who Got Fed Up with Round Grips

XControl comes from a company called GXO Golf. And the whole idea started with a former tennis coach.

He realized that he could control the face of a tennis racquet without thinking about it, but he couldn’t control a golf clubface with anywhere near the same reliability. Then he realized the handle had something to do with that.

A round grip, like what we’ve all got on our golf clubs, tells you nothing about where the face is pointed. A racquet grip tells you plenty.

So he started messing with designs, and what came out got built and tested by a team of Australian biomechanics guys who went through 19 versions over two years before they landed on this one.

The shape is the whole story. Instead of a round tube, you get an octagonal shape. Each part of the surface of the grip is flat, just like on a tennis racquet.

On the XControl grips, there’s a flat top and bottom, two large flat sides, and then these smaller beveled flat channels running between the top/bottom and the sides.

I handed one of my re-gripped clubs to my son, who plays tennis, and before I could say anything he turned it over and went, “Oh yeah, this is totally like a tennis grip.”

In your hands, it feels kind of like one of those grip training aids that forces you into a proper hand position. The flats give your hands a reference, so you always have a sense of where the face is aimed.

XControl refers to the term proprioception. It’s your body’s sense of where it is in space without looking. The thing that lets you touch your nose with your eyes closed.

On a round grip, the face can be a couple degrees open or shut and you won’t know it until you watch the ball fly offline.

The flat edges on these XControl grips feed that information straight to your hands while you’re swinging.

And for me, there’s no question that it works. It’s actually a bit difficult to describe. I found that while, yes, I can better feel the clubface, what actually blew me away was that my brain seems to understand what to do intuitively without me even thinking about it.

Now I will say that it takes a bit of getting used to. If you’ve ever tried to change your grip (as in the way you put your hands on the club), you know how weird that can feel. This is basically exactly like that except you’re not changing your hand positions at all.

The Clubface Squares Itself at Address

I actually saw how this grip design could help me before I ever even took my first swing with them.

I’ve got a bad habit where I’ll set up with the face square but then somewhere between setting up and taking the club back, my left hand squeezes a little too hard and closes the face just slightly.

The result is a lot of pulled shots when I don’t catch it and re-check before I pull the trigger.

With the XControl grip, I set the club down behind the ball, and it’s perfectly square. The flat top gives my hands a fixed reference, and I found that I’m not fighting my own tendency to unconsciously close the face down.

So for me, as someone who’s struggled with a square clubface at address, that’s huge. I’m not even sure that’s part of what they intended with this design, but it’s working for me big time.

The Various XControl Sizes and What I Went With

So basically, just like with all grip manufacturers, XControl makes these in four sizes: small, standard, midsize, and oversize.

My hand size puts me right in between a standard or a midsize, and I usually play standard.

For this test, I went standard on the 5-iron and standard on the 4-hybrid, since the long clubs are where I lose the face and I wanted to see if the XControl grips helped me. I opted for a midsize grip on my 5-wood for pretty much the same reason. And I put an oversize on my 56-degree wedge because I was just curious to see if a bigger grip might quiet my hands and simplify my short game. I did not test the small size XControl grips.

As I mentioned earlier, the long clubs are where the grips really shined for me.

The wedge was a different deal. Around the greens, I like to hit all kinds of different shots with my 56. Sometimes I’m laying the face wide open for a high, soft one. Other times, I’m trapping it and trying to hit a lower shot.

I struggled with the oversized grip. I just couldn’t get any feel, and it actually felt like the self-squaring trick of the XControl was kind of fighting me.

To be fair, I think this is mostly a comment on the grip size more than on the specific XControl design. I’ve come to realize that, while I thought I wanted to take my hands out of my short-game shots, I actually realize that I need the exact opposite feeling.

But I will say that the design has at least something to do with it. On a 5-iron or my longer clubs where a square face is all I want and can never find, the XControl self-correcting is a gift. But on a wedge, where the entire game is manipulating the face for the shot at hand, I found that it worked against me.

You Have to Nail the Install

The flat top has to line up perfectly with the face. If it’s off, even just a little bit, all of the feedback the grip gives you is wrong.

I followed the alignment video on XControl’s website, which has you use a carpenter’s square to line the clubface up with the flat top of the grip. I used a bench vise to lock everything perfectly in place. From there, it’s the same procedure as you’re used to, with solvent and double-sided tape.

It’s definitely not difficult, but again, a perfect install is critical, so it can be a little finicky. I probably spent somewhere between 7 and 10 minutes on each grip, just making sure I had everything aligned perfectly.

If you’d rather let your pro shop handle it, I would just make sure whoever does it actually understands what they’re putting on and how much the alignment matters.

Now the Part That’s a Bummer

So, as you might have realized, there’s a catch. And it’s a big one.

These grips aren’t legal.

Under the Rules of Golf, the grip on any club that isn’t a putter has to be round in cross-section.

So those flat sides that make this whole thing work are the exact reason you can’t use XControl grips in a tournament, aren’t supposed to post the roung for your handicap, and can’t really call the score you shoot with them legit.

I definitely respect that. And I’m all-in on the integrity of the game and how the rules of golf and self-policing is one of the fundamental things that makes our sport special.

But I’ll also point out that amateur golfers are a weird breed, myself included. We’ll take a mulligan off the first tee without a second thought. We’ll give each other three- and four- and five-footers, even in stroke play. And we’ll still post the scores from all of those rounds.

And yet that same golfer who’s accepting free strokes all day wouldn’t dream of playing a non-conforming ball. Or of anchoring their putter now that that’s banned.

So the line for recreational golfers, at least as I can see it, is pretty blurry.

Should You Buy XControl Grips?

XControl grips are a product that could actually make golf more fun by making it a little easier to have some success. It doesn’t feel like cheating. You’re swinging the same clubs with the same strength and speed as you’ve always had.

But, by the letter of the rules, it is cheating. That kind of sucks, honestly. Golf is hard enough. Throw a brother a bone.

Now to be fair, XControl isn’t trying to encourage you to cheat. They fully acknowledge that these grips are non-conforming. They designed this grip as a training aid.

If the non-conforming part is an issue, or you’re looking for other tools for practice, check out our full list of the best golf training aids.

As for these, I think they’re perfect for someone learning the game.

Or maybe you’ve got an extra couple of clubs that you can take to the range that don’t go in your regular bag. That would be another potential use case.

Or maybe you put these on a few clubs for a stretch of time. Maybe you’ve got a sim, and winter becomes the perfect time to grind with them indoors when nobody’s keeping score anyway. Then take them back off before the season, go back to your round grips, and see if the feel carries over.

That last part is the thing I can’t promise you. I haven’t used these long enough to know if that clubface awareness is going to transfer back over to a normal grip.

It’s reasonable to think that it will. Better feedback should mean you learn faster, and things you learn well tend to stick.

We’ll see…

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They fixed the worst club in my bag. I'm just not allowed to play them. But maybe that doesn't matter to you?

9.3 Great

The XControl golf grips really surprised me. I didn't think they'd make that noticeable of a difference in my golf swing, and my contact. Yet somehow? They did. They took my worst club in the bag and had me flushing balls in a way that had never happened before. Will you have the same revelatory experience? Maybe, maybe not. But after using them, I almost wished I hadn't seen how good they are since they're non-conforming.

The Good

1. These grips helped me square up my clubface in a way I wasn't expecting.
2. Quality and comfort are great.

The Bad

1. Install leaves little room for margin
2. The grips are non-conforming

• Presentation 9
• Performance 10
• Price 9
• Personal Affinity 9