When was the last time you worked on your address position?

If it’s been a while, we would suggest taking some time during an upcoming practice session to pay attention to this important piece of the technique puzzle. You’ll want to make sure you are standing properly over the ball on each and every swing, so you can maximize your potential as a player. Trying to swing from a poor stance is a mistake many golfers make, and it is part of the reason so many amateurs struggle to play at a higher level.

In this article, our focus is going to be on one specific piece of the address position puzzle – your spine tilt. As the name would suggest, this part of your stance refers to how much your spine is going to tilt forward at address. It would be nearly impossible to make any kind of golf swing while keeping your spine perfectly straight up and down, so some degree of tilt is necessary. But how much? If you go too far, you’ll run into problems with regard to your shoulder rotation and your balance. We hope the advice contained in this article will help you settle into a stance that can serve you well swing after swing for years to come.

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

Spine Tilt Gone Wrong

With this article, we hope to help you get into a great position over the ball. To get started, we would like to talk a little about what can happen when your spine tilt goes wrong. What kinds of issues will you have in your swing if you tilt too much out over the ball? Or too little? Or what if your spine tilt changes during the swing? There is a lot going on here, so we’ll break it down in this section to give you a clearer picture of the risks you run by getting this point wrong. Hopefully, the points raised in this section will be enough to convince you that spine angle is a serious point worthy of your attention during practice.

• Going too far. When you setup over the ball with too much tilt in your spine, a number of problems are likely to arise. First and foremost, you’ll probably have trouble keeping your balance all the way through your swing. Balance is a critical piece of the golf puzzle, yet many players fail to give it the recognition it deserves during practice. If you can’t stay balanced, you won’t play good golf – it’s just that simple. By tilting out over the ball too far at address, you are going to be placing too much weight toward the fronts of your feet. That will lead to trouble once the swing starts, and you may have to make some kind of compensating move to avoid falling over. Even if you are able to stay on balance to a reasonable degree, you’ll still be likely to struggle with your shoulder turn. It’s going to be hard to make a full turn from such an awkward position, meaning your backswing will be short and your shots will never have as much power as they could have delivered with a better stance. All in all, leaning out too far over the ball at address is going to make it extremely difficult to live up to your potential.
• Not going far enough. All things considered, it is probably better to come up short with your spine tilt as compared to going too far. However, that doesn’t mean this side of the equation is free from problems. There are issues that you’ll be likely to run into when you don’t tilt out far enough over the ball, so it would be best to avoid putting yourself in this category, as well. When you don’t tilt enough at address, you will again find it difficult to make a big enough shoulder turn to deliver a powerful strike. You may not have the balance problems seen with too much tilt, but this type of stance is still likely to lead to a weak swing and disappointing results. Also, some golfers will find that they take the club back too far to the inside with this type of stance, leading to a narrow backswing. Unfortunately, a narrow backswing is closely linked to a slice, so those who deal with a persistent slice should check to make sure it isn’t their stance that is causing the problem. You might be able to get away with hitting decent shots from a stance that doesn’t have enough spine tilt, but there is no reason to settle for ‘decent’ when improving your stance could dramatically improve your performance.
• Changes along the way. It’s easy to think that you are all set once you learn how to build a nice stance that includes the proper amount of spine tilt. Unfortunately, that is far from the case. It’s great to get off to a good start, but that start won’t mean much if you wind up changing your spine tilt at some point during the swing. For instance, as you swing back, you need to make sure you don’t allow yourself to stand up out of your stance. It’s common for golfers to allow their spine angle to straighten up as the backswing develops, losing angle as they get closer and closer to the top of the swing. Another common mistake is for golfers to add spine tilt on the way down, moving their head closer and closer to the ball as impact arrives. As you might imagine, neither of these mistakes is going to mean good things for your golf game. You’ll struggle to strike the ball cleanly when your spine angle is moving up and down during the swing, and you’ll also find it tough to produce much power. Once you manage to start your swing in a good position, work hard to learn how to maintain that position from the takeaway all the way through to the finish.

If you are the kind of golfer who is always striving to get better – is there any other kind? – you owe it to yourself to work on your spine angle. Getting this point right at address, and maintaining it through the swing, is one of the best things you can do to improve your level of play. No, this probably won’t be very exciting as you practice. Yes, it will be worth it in the long run. If you have ever wondered how professional golfers manage to do such a great job of striking the ball cleanly time after time, much of it comes down to how they manage their spine angle during the swing. Learn to get this right and you just might start to hit the ball cleaner than you ever thought possible.

The Proper Way to Tilt

Now that you know how important it is to tilt your spine forward when taking a stance, you may be encouraged to get out to the range and simply lean out over the ball. Unfortunately, that’s not the right idea. You’ll need to know exactly how to tilt forward if you are going to wind up in a good position from which to swing. This isn’t the most complicated part of building a golf stance, but there are a few things to know.

Without further delay, let’s get into the points which make up the proper way to tilt your spine forward toward the ball.

• Start by sitting. As you get ready to finalize your stance, one of the first things you should do is ‘sit’ down into your stance by flexing your knees and pushing your backside out behind you. This will engage your lower body and make it possible to tilt forward with your spine without falling off balance. Too many golfers wind up keeping their legs straight in the stance, and it becomes nearly possible to achieve proper spine tilt as a result. This is something that you can practice at home in front of a mirror without even having a golf club anywhere nearby. When you have a minute or two free, stand in front of a mirror and practice sitting down into your stance. You should see that your backside is moving out behind you, and you should feel the big muscles of your legs become involved in the process. Work on finding a good position with your lower body and your upper body will become easier to manage.
• Keep it straight. This is where so many golfers go wrong. Knowing they are supposed to get their upper body out over the ball to some degree, the average player hunches his or her shoulders while leaning out over the shot. That’s simply the wrong way to go about this process. The idea here is to keep your back straight while you tilt forward from the hips. This straight back position is important because it is going to help you make a great turn back and through the shot. Players who hunch over the ball tend to make steep swings which lack any kind of meaningful power. Don’t put yourself in that category. Again here, we see something you can work on in front of the mirror at home. Build your stance (without a club) and take a peek in the mirror to see if you have kept your back straight. If the answer is a yes, you’ll be in a good spot to move forward. If not, keep working on using your hips to tilt your upper body forward while your lower body supports the stance.
• Let your arms hang. In addition to making sure you sit into your stance and keep your back straight, another key is to let your arms hang freely from your shoulders when your stance is finished. If you feel like you are having to reach way out to place the club behind the ball, something has gone wrong. By the same token, you shouldn’t feel like you are crammed in close to the ball with nowhere to go. When your arms are able to hang down nicely from your shoulders in a comfortable position, you can feel good about everything you have done to put together a stance. Should you not be happy with your stance position with regard to how your arms feel, there are a couple of adjustments to consider. First, you may simply need to stand either closer to the ball or further from it. By adjusting the position of your feet, you might be able to work your way into a good position. Also, you can tweak how much tilt you are using to get yourself in the right spot. You don’t want to stand straight up or bend all the way over but going up or down by a few degrees to make yourself feel comfortable should be just fine.

There is a right and a wrong way to get your upper body out over the ball at address. If you do it the right way, you’ll be well positioned to make a quality golf swing. You still need to do a bunch of other things right, of course, but you will be off to a good start. Tilting yourself out over the ball incorrectly, on the other hand, is only going to take a hard game and make it even harder. Invest the time it takes to get yourself positioned properly before the swing begins and your golf game will have taken a big step forward.

Seeking Help

As golfers, we tend to take pride in being able to do things ourselves. Many players are able to improve their own games without help from a pro, instead turning to things like online instructional articles to work through any troubles they may be having. That is a great plan, and you can take a tremendous amount of pride in building your game this way. But what if you get stuck? Rather than continuing to bang your head against a wall, consider seeking help from your local teaching pro to get on track.

This is a particularly good idea when it comes to something like spine tilt, and your address position as a whole. It can be difficult to assess your performance in this area without getting some help, and you don’t want to waste months – or even years – fiddling with your stance until you finally settle on something that works. By getting the help of a pro, you should be able to compress the timeline and speed up your progress. Could you have eventually found the right stance for your game? Sure – you probably would have gotten there at some point. But there is no need to wait when golf lessons are affordable and readily available.

If you have never before taken a golf lesson, you might be a little intimidated by the idea of working with a pro on your swing. It’s important to note that there is nothing to be intimidated out here, as golf pros make a living out of working with players just like you. You don’t need to feel embarrassed by your game, and you don’t need to make excuses for your level of play. The pro isn’t interested in judging your play or criticizing you – he or she will simply want to help you play better golf.

Should you decide to take a lesson, explain right from the start that you want to work on improving your address position. Talk about your spine angle and request that the pro take a specific look at that element of your stance during the lesson. There are nearly endless things you can work on during a golf lesson, so pointing the session in this direction right from the start is a good step. Of course, the pro will almost certainly have other tips to add beyond just talking about your stance, and that’s actually a good thing. Don’t be offended by the tips your pro offers for improvement – welcome them all with an open mind and be ready to get down to work on taking the next step with your play.

Is a single golf lesson going to suddenly unlock the hidden scratch golfer within you? No – probably not. It can, however, help you make big strides with something like your stance and your spine tilt. Having the outside perspective of someone who makes a living in this game is tremendously helpful. Not only can you benefit from working with a pro on this issue, you can also build a relationship with this individual and you’ll have somewhere to turn when something else comes up in your game that needs to be fixed.

Tilt in the Short Game

You can’t really use the same stance from your full swing to hit your short game shots. You don’t need the same wide base in the short game (most of the time) that you need in the long game, and you need to get your body in a position that will allow you to comfortably make delicate swings. So, with that all said, are you going to tilt your spine the same way in the short game as the long game? In a word, no.

When putting, you really don’t need to think much about spine tilt. For the most part, putting is about comfort first and foremost. You need to be comfortable, because you’ll be trying to hold your body very still as the putter swings back and through. Some golfers do like to keep their back straight while putting, yet others find success by letting their shoulders slump a bit. It’s hard to say that any one stance is right or wrong, since there are so many different ways to wind up knocking the ball into the cup. Experimentation is the name of the game when it comes to putting, and putting stances, so feel free to test out options on the practice green until you develop your own style.

Off the greens, the story is a little different. You basically are going to blend what you do with the full swing with the approach you take while putting. You don’t want to slump your shoulders too much when chipping, since you do need to worry about making clean contact with the ball. Try to still sit down into your stance while pushing your backside out behind you somewhat. However, you don’t need to force yourself into a specific static position on each and every chip, since the conditions you will face on chip shots are going to vary from hole to hole. You have to be flexible in the short game, which means you can’t tie yourself too closely to one technique. Basically, the idea is going to be to have one standard stance for a basic chip shot from a good lie, knowing you’ll need to adjust that stance at least somewhat in many instances. It is usually the golfers who are the most flexible in the short game that wind up coming away with the best results.

Tilting your spine out over the ball correctly is one of the most important things you can do on your way to creating a reliable stance. The stance is easily the most-overlooked part of the golf swing, since it takes place before the club actually goes in motion. Don’t let that fact trick you into thinking that you don’t need to pay careful attention to how you stand. Golf is already a hard game – you shouldn’t make it harder by building a poor stance. With some hard work – and perhaps some help from a pro – you can put yourself in position to strike solid shots moving forward. Good luck!

One part of the setup is that it's often presumed that a golfer would do naturally is actually tilting the spine angle. Not tilting the spine angle forwards that's part of your posture but tilting your spine angle from left to right this way.

Now, it's presumed that that would happen naturally because your hands aren't evenly set on the club, so, if I set up naturally here, my hands will level, my shoulders should be leveled. But, as I put my right hand lower than my left to make my grip, it's presumed the right shoulder dips down lower than the left and that's a good thing for that left shoulder to rise up. That would also just tilt the spine angle just five degrees to the right side.

But sometimes golfers, they don't like the feeling of that or they might even watch themselves on camera and think the shoulder should be leveled, so they try and neutralize that and take the shoulders the opposite direction and they don't like that unbalanced feeling. And that's the wrong thing to do.

So, if you're setting up to the golf ball and you're getting into this addressed position, you should see a nice little tilt through the spine angle. If you look at yourself in the mirror and you're straight up and your shoulders are level and your spine angles up straight, there's a risk that you're actually starting to lean into your left side. Now, that's big problem. That's a classic cause of a reversed pivot in a golf swing which we don't really want.

So, you have to allow that right shoulder to dip down because the left hand is higher than the right, left shoulder up. It's five degrees spine angle tilt in the body and then as you turn back, you maintain that five-degree spine tilt. It's not like I'm leaning over this way or swaying, but I maintain my five degrees turn back, turn through and only at the end do I actually stand up really nice and tall, really nice and straight.

Just one word of cautionary is that you're tilting your spine angle purely because your arms are different not because your legs are different, so don't be tempted to drop your right knee or drop your right hip because of your spine angle. We don't want that. So, legs are perfectly leveled, right hand lower than the left tilt to spine angle, you have a nice little set up. Very slightly behind the golf ball with the spine angle position, allow yourself to turn into your right side and then drive back through to your left side as you generate power through the golf ball.

Get your spine angle right by practicing in front of a mirror and that should make you more consistent as well.