Trying An Open Golf Stance On The Driving Range (Video) - by Pete Styles
Trying An Open Golf Stance On The Driving Range (Video) - by Pete Styles

As a golfer looking to improve your technique one of the first places you should head when you’re trying to change anything in your technique or your swing or even your setup would be the driving range. Rather than taking any of these changes to the first tee and struggling with a score cut in your hand trying to play around the golf and incorporate changes, the best bet, head to the driving range, nice big buckets of balls, half an hour or an hour to yourself and it doesn’t really matter how these changes initially go.

It doesn’t matter if you get worse, before you get better because on the driving range you just pull another ball forwards and have another go. So, when you're looking it to change your alignment and incorporate the open Freddy Couples type of stance and that would be best, just to head to the range couple of spare clubs in your bag as well, you're going to use these clubs as your alignment aids. So the first one will probably go down pointing at target and the second one we’re going to put down in the direction where your feet are going to stand in a open position. So we've got one pointing down, here I just need to line this up correctly. That’s my target and then that is going to be my foot alignment. So, you can see here that I have got, one is my ball to target line and one is my feet and body alignment. It’s quite important that I get everything set on this line, so it's not like feet are here and I'm going to close my shoulders back down and point it along my target line. I'm actually going to set everything up down the left hand side. So it's like go ahead and take my stance now, everything is going to point left, so I've got my knees, my hips, my shoulders and actually even my eyes are looking down the left hand side. Everything feels left apart from the club face, I'm going to point the club face back to the target more on this line. Now if I have the club face pointing exactly at target, my body aiming left the ball will start up pretty much at target. Just a tiny bit left of target my club face remains pointing at target. The ball will start off the tiny bit left and then cut back. Then I can play around with these angles a little bit. I can try the club face slightly more open, slightly more closed, try my feet slightly more open, slightly more closed. I've got 100 balls in a bucket, so I can experiment with different angles and work how my ball flights. Now initially when you setup like this, I would like you to make, try and make the same swing. So, you're not going to try and manipulate, you swing it all and try and lift it all, swing it flat or do whatever. You're just going to use your setup to change the ball flight. So we have club face pointing at target, feet point left of target, go ahead and make your normal swing and we can see how the ball sets off kind of to the right of my stance definitely. Slightly to the left of target and that moves away from the left to right. It's going to fade in the air when you're making that type of swing and like I say don’t be afraid of experimenting. There is no perfect right or wrong hit. Try and manipulate the club face a little bit. Try and alter your stance more and let more or less open and close and just see how that ball flight changes and see if you can start fading the ball just like Freddy Couples. 2016-08-17

As a golfer looking to improve your technique one of the first places you should head when you’re trying to change anything in your technique or your swing or even your setup would be the driving range. Rather than taking any of these changes to the first tee and struggling with a score cut in your hand trying to play around the golf and incorporate changes, the best bet, head to the driving range, nice big buckets of balls, half an hour or an hour to yourself and it doesn’t really matter how these changes initially go.

It doesn’t matter if you get worse, before you get better because on the driving range you just pull another ball forwards and have another go. So, when you're looking it to change your alignment and incorporate the open Freddy Couples type of stance and that would be best, just to head to the range couple of spare clubs in your bag as well, you're going to use these clubs as your alignment aids. So the first one will probably go down pointing at target and the second one we’re going to put down in the direction where your feet are going to stand in a open position.

So we've got one pointing down, here I just need to line this up correctly. That’s my target and then that is going to be my foot alignment. So, you can see here that I have got, one is my ball to target line and one is my feet and body alignment. It’s quite important that I get everything set on this line, so it's not like feet are here and I'm going to close my shoulders back down and point it along my target line. I'm actually going to set everything up down the left hand side.

So it's like go ahead and take my stance now, everything is going to point left, so I've got my knees, my hips, my shoulders and actually even my eyes are looking down the left hand side. Everything feels left apart from the club face, I'm going to point the club face back to the target more on this line. Now if I have the club face pointing exactly at target, my body aiming left the ball will start up pretty much at target. Just a tiny bit left of target my club face remains pointing at target. The ball will start off the tiny bit left and then cut back. Then I can play around with these angles a little bit.

I can try the club face slightly more open, slightly more closed, try my feet slightly more open, slightly more closed. I've got 100 balls in a bucket, so I can experiment with different angles and work how my ball flights. Now initially when you setup like this, I would like you to make, try and make the same swing. So, you're not going to try and manipulate, you swing it all and try and lift it all, swing it flat or do whatever. You're just going to use your setup to change the ball flight.

So we have club face pointing at target, feet point left of target, go ahead and make your normal swing and we can see how the ball sets off kind of to the right of my stance definitely. Slightly to the left of target and that moves away from the left to right. It's going to fade in the air when you're making that type of swing and like I say don’t be afraid of experimenting. There is no perfect right or wrong hit. Try and manipulate the club face a little bit. Try and alter your stance more and let more or less open and close and just see how that ball flight changes and see if you can start fading the ball just like Freddy Couples.