Solid Foundation Golf Stance (Video) - by Pete Styles
Solid Foundation Golf Stance (Video) - by Pete Styles

Now, when you are building your golf stance, it is quite important that you build a nice solid foundations. So, your feet need to be a good width apart to enable you to make a nice shoulder rotation above a solid platform. Anything that is too narrow would really affect how you can rotate your shoulders. Conversely, anything that is too wide would mean that you end up swaying with your body weight.

Now, for me, the best width for stance you can take, unless you are pretty much throughout the bag, would be just a normal shoulder width. Some people mistake what shoulder width means. The easiest way to do it is to measure it. Take the golf club, place it across your shoulders and just meet the golf club at one end. So, there to there, that is my shoulder width apart. Now, this should be the instep of my feet. So, as I set up to the golf ball, I can take that measurement that I’ve just got there, drop that down and that sits as the instep measurement of my feet.

Because if I do that for outside of my feet, I find it much very narrow, and as soon as I move my shoulder across, I'm now outside the line of my knee and my foot and I'm off balanced. So, a nice sort of pyramid base, where the base is wider than the top, that gives me lots of stability. I can move the top and my base is still going to hold me in good position.

If I'm taking a driver, I might move my feet an extra little bit across just for extra power, but it would really only be the width of one foot. So, my driver stance would be an extra foot wider, loading me a bit more behind the ball, generating a bit more power and then the normal stance again. My pitching or chipping stance could be just one foot width narrower and that would give me a little bit more control for my shorter shots.

If I'm going down to the really short shots around the green where I'm not really using my body weight to generate any power that could come in narrower still and that would be fine. For general-purpose golf shots, measure your shoulders, measure how wide far apart the inside of your feet should be and that should give you a nice solid platform from which to swing from.

 2012-06-06

Now, when you are building your golf stance, it is quite important that you build a nice solid foundations. So, your feet need to be a good width apart to enable you to make a nice shoulder rotation above a solid platform. Anything that is too narrow would really affect how you can rotate your shoulders. Conversely, anything that is too wide would mean that you end up swaying with your body weight.

Now, for me, the best width for stance you can take, unless you are pretty much throughout the bag, would be just a normal shoulder width. Some people mistake what shoulder width means. The easiest way to do it is to measure it. Take the golf club, place it across your shoulders and just meet the golf club at one end. So, there to there, that is my shoulder width apart. Now, this should be the instep of my feet. So, as I set up to the golf ball, I can take that measurement that I’ve just got there, drop that down and that sits as the instep measurement of my feet.

Because if I do that for outside of my feet, I find it much very narrow, and as soon as I move my shoulder across, I'm now outside the line of my knee and my foot and I'm off balanced. So, a nice sort of pyramid base, where the base is wider than the top, that gives me lots of stability. I can move the top and my base is still going to hold me in good position.

If I'm taking a driver, I might move my feet an extra little bit across just for extra power, but it would really only be the width of one foot. So, my driver stance would be an extra foot wider, loading me a bit more behind the ball, generating a bit more power and then the normal stance again. My pitching or chipping stance could be just one foot width narrower and that would give me a little bit more control for my shorter shots.

If I'm going down to the really short shots around the green where I'm not really using my body weight to generate any power that could come in narrower still and that would be fine. For general-purpose golf shots, measure your shoulders, measure how wide far apart the inside of your feet should be and that should give you a nice solid platform from which to swing from.