Playing great golf can be quite exciting.

As you fill your card up with pars and birdies, you start to think ahead to what your final score may be. Golfers tend to clearly remember those rounds where everything came together just right, and they could be proud of their score when all is said and done. Those days don’t necessarily come along often in golf, but they are worth savoring when they do arrive.

But here’s the thing – as exciting as it is to play excellent golf, the work you need to put in to accomplish your goals on the links isn’t always thrilling. In fact, sometimes it’s downright boring. And that’s okay. Anything worth achieving is going to take some hard work, and that is certainly the case here. If you are willing to invest some time and effort into your game, the rewards can be memorable.

We provide this introduction because the topic of this article – your golf posture – can certainly fall into the ‘boring’ category from time to time. Few golfers will retell stories of the time they spent working on building a better posture, because it simply isn’t that exciting. But, what it lacks in excitement, it makes up for in importance. A solid posture is a crucial building block on top of which you can create a reliable swing.

All of the content below is based on a right-handed golfer. If you happen to play golf left handed, please take a moment to reverse the directions as necessary.

Why Does Posture Matter?

To make sure you have the necessary motivation to get out and work on your golf posture, we’d like to take this opportunity to explain why posture is important. What does having a good posture do for your swing, and why is a bad posture harmful? Let’s take a look with a few points below.

• Set the table for success. You can think of using a good posture in the same way you might think of setting the table before dinner. Is setting the table alone going to make for a great meal? Of course not – you’ll still need some good food to actually enjoy. However, without putting out the plates, silverware, glasses, etc., it will be hard to enjoy the food you prepared. In much the same way, you’ll struggle to take advantage of your swinging motion if you don’t have a good posture in place as the foundation. Your swing can only live up to its potential when you have a posture that is going to allow it to thrive. So, much like you set the table before a nice meal, you need to take a proper stance before making a good golf swing. Positioning your body correctly at address is going to make it far more likely that your swing will produce the intended results in the end.
• Enable a full turn. Good rotation is important when making a golf swing, but it’s hard to turn properly if your posture isn’t doing its job. A good posture will make it easier to turn, but just the same, a poor posture is going to make it harder to do so. Many golfers think that their level of flexibility is the biggest issue when trying to turn, but that’s not always the case. Sure, it helps to be flexible, but it’s just as helpful to use a posture that promotes easy rotation.
• Poor posture can create inconsistency. Any golfer will tell you that it is really consistency, above all else, that he or she desires. After all, most players are capable of producing a least a couple of good shots during the average round. The true challenge is repeating those shots, over and over again, with enough frequency to walk away with a good score. If you fight consistency issues in your game, it is worth considering that posture may be the underlying problem. Without a reliable posture, you will have to work quite hard during the swing to deliver the club into the back of the ball properly. You might pull it off on occasion, but those occasions will be few and far between. With an improved posture, you should find that your consistency takes a big step forward, and your scores are reduced as a result.
• Flexibility in your game. If you do manage to produce good shots from a poor posture, you may find that you are only able to hit one or two kinds of shots as a result. It’s best to have as much flexibility as possible in your game, as you never know exactly what kinds of shots you’ll need to produce on the course. If you have variety at your disposal, you can better rise to the challenges that are presented to you during your rounds. Unfortunately, a poor posture can make it hard to hit anything other than your one go-to shot. Your posture problems will restrict what you can do with the club, and as a result, what you can do with the ball. By taking the time to build a good stance, you should be able to gradually learn more and more kinds of shots that can help you out in tough situations on the course.

It should be clear by now that posture is an important part of your game. Sure, you could ignore this piece of the puzzle and just work on the dynamic parts of your swing, but you’d always be missing something. Only when you have a good posture in place will you be able to reach your true potential.

The Common Mistakes

Not to be negative, but one of the best ways to improve your golf game is to take a look specifically at the things you are doing wrong. Some golfers are afraid to take an honest look at their mistakes, and such a fear is a big part of why many players never manage to improve. While we can’t see your stance to tell you what mistakes are being made currently, we can inform you of some of the common errors that players tend to make in this area. If you are having trouble with your posture, there is a good chance that one of the issues below is involved.

• Hunched over at address. This one is extremely common, which is why it leads off our list. When taking your stance to prepare to make a golf swing, you want to do your best to keep your back straight from your waist up into your neck. Many golfers fail to check off this point, instead hunching over the ball with their shoulders slumped. The reason this is a problem is because of what it does to your shoulder rotation during the backswing. It’s going to be hard to make a full turn without using good posture, and you may end up simply lifting the club with your arms rather than turning your shoulders. If you watch someone with slumped shoulders make a swing, you should notice that their backswing goes way up into the air – and they will very likely hit a slice when all is said and done. We’ll talk later in the article about how you can do a good job of keeping your back straight at address, but for now just make note of the fact that this is an important key.
• No knee flex. When you think of posture, you might first think about what your body is doing from the waist up. That is certainly an important piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole story. You need to make sure your legs are doing their job as well, and specifically, you need to make sure you are keeping your knees nicely flexed. The right amount of knee flex will vary from player to player, so feel free to experiment on the range until you find a comfortable position. It’s important to start the swing with at least some degree of knee flex, and it is also important to maintain that knee flex throughout your swing.
• Chin down to the chest. This one is similar to the first point on hunching over at the shoulders, but it needs its own point because it is a slightly different mistake. At address, you should make sure to keep your chin up away from your chest to provide your shoulders with the room they need to turn back and through. Many golfers take the advice of ‘keeping their head down’ and take that to mean that they need to push their chin down at address and keep it there until the swing is finished. That’s not the right idea. Instead, you want to keep your chin up to both promote a good posture and stay out of the way of your shoulder turn. If you were to keep your chin down near your chest, the left shoulder would run right into it as the swing gets started. By picking it up, you will clear the path and make a full shoulder turn a much likelier outcome.
• Standing the wrong distance from the ball. This is a costly mistake, even if it is one that has to do with where your feet are placed on the ground rather than the position of your body. At address, you need to make sure that you are an appropriate distance from the ball, as standing too close or too far away will lead to trouble. When you stand to close, your swing is likely to become rather upright, and you may struggle with a slice (along with a lack of power). On the other hand, it’s difficult to make clean contact when you stand too far from the ball, and you may find it hard to maintain your posture all the way through the swing and into the finish. The ideal place to stand is in a spot that allows you to reach the club down to the ball comfortably, without feeling crowded or feeling like you need to reach awkwardly out in front of you. It will take some time in practice to determine the right spot for your game, but that will be time well spent once the work is finished.

Simply by avoiding these common mistakes, you can put yourself significant ahead of many of your fellow golfers. It is often the simple things in golf that make the biggest difference, and such is the case here. Focus on the basic fundamentals of your stance and put yourself in a good position to move forward and improve your play.

Setting Up with Your Back Flat

So much of building a good address position comes down to keeping your back flat at address. It doesn’t need to be perfectly flat, of course, but you should do your best to form a relatively straight line from your waist on up into your neck (as viewed from the ‘down the line’ angle). Fortunately, getting into this kind of position isn’t as hard as you might think. Review the points below and keep them in mind as you practice.

• Stick your backside out behind you. This tip might sound a little bit odd at first but sticking your backside out when you take your stance is one of the best ways to get your back into the right position. Basically, you want to feel like you are sitting down into an imaginary chair. How far down you go is a matter of personal preference, but you at least want to feel that sensation of starting to sit down. This is going to accomplish a few things. First, it is going to put the lower part of your back into a flat position, which is a great start. You’ll also notice that the big muscles in your legs become engaged in the stance when you get into this position, and that will help you moving forward. Getting your legs involved right from the start will help them do their job properly throughout the swing.
• Stick your chest out. Just as you want to do with your backside, it’s also a good idea to feel like you are sticking your chest out a bit at address. This will work to flatten the top half of your back, placing you into a good posture (assuming you are sticking your backside out as well). You don’t want to overdo it on this point, as you might build too much tension in your upper body if you really force your chest to stick way out. Instead, just make it a point to hold your chest out a bit and try to feel your back moving into that flat position that we are striving to achieve.
• Tilt forward from the hips. The part of the stance that seems to trip up many golfers is the fact that you need to be out over the ball to some degree if you are going to make a swing. You can’t stand perfectly straight up and down, of course, as you’d never be able to get your club down to the ball. Unfortunately, many golfers solve this problem by hunching over, which is the wrong approach. The idea is to tilt forward from the hips while keeping your back straight. To work on this, try taking your stance in front of a mirror at home without even holding a club in your hands. If you stand sideways in front of the mirror, you should be able to watch as you tilt forward, working to keep your back straight as you go. Spend a bit of time perfecting this technique and it will get much easier to settle into a good stance when actually getting ready to hit a shot.

If you are used to making swings from a poor posture, setting up with your back in a flat position is sure to feel awkward at first. That’s okay – don’t let that stop you from making this important change. Sometimes, in golf, you need to get a little worse before you can get a lot better. Be patient with yourself and gradually you will get more and more comfortable swinging from this new and improved position.

Making It Count

It’s great to put in the work on your posture so you can get to a point where you are in a position to produce quality swings time after time. With that said, those great swings aren’t going to make themselves. You still have to do things right once the club goes in motion if you are going to wind up with the kind of results you desire. In this last section of our article, we’d like to highlight a few key points to keep in mind as you work on improving your swing now that you have a solid posture.

• Don’t give up on it. It would be a shame to waste your new posture as soon as you start your swing. In other words, you don’t want to come up out of the position that you just worked so hard to build. It’s extremely common for golfers to lift up out of their stance only shortly after moving the club back away from the ball. If you make that error, everything you did to prepare yourself for the swing will be for naught. To help avoid this mistake, think about moving your left shoulder down toward the ball as your first move in the backswing. If your left shoulder goes down, you can feel confident that you are not going to be lifting up out of your stance. Of course, you don’t want to dive down toward the ball either, so don’t go too far with this idea. Do your best to turn around the position of your spine while keeping it relatively stable. If you can get up to the top of the backswing while still in a good posture, all that will be left to do is accelerate the club down through the ball with confidence.
• Avoid overanalyzing your technique. One of the risks that comes along with working on something technical like your address position and posture is that you might begin to overanalyze everything in your game. Thinking too much is never a good thing in golf, as there just isn’t enough time during the swing to break down what you are doing and make corrections. Sure, you want to have solid technique in place, but you also need to allow room for yourself to just use natural ability to strike the ball. It’s always a challenge in this game to walk the line between making sure the technical side is in order and keeping yourself free enough to make fluid, natural swings. Be careful not to go too far down the road toward the technical side while working on your posture.
• On to the finish. If you are going to consistently strike good shots, you need to make sure to respect the value of your finish position. It might not seem like the finish is all that important, since the ball is already gone once you are swinging up to your finish, but this position says a lot about your swing. If you can find a balanced finish with your right heel up off the ground, you can be sure that plenty of things were done right leading up to that point.

It might not be terribly exciting to work on your posture during an upcoming visit to the range, but that work should pay off down the line in the form of improved ball striking – and hopefully lower scores. A good posture at address will make it easier to hit the ball cleanly and being able to achieve clean strikes can go a long way toward bringing your scores down and helping you achieve your goals in this game. We hope the advice in this article has pointed you in the right direction – good luck!