Golf Swing Stance: Is Your Width Too Wide? | Long Drives | Tips
If you struggle with swinging over the top, struggling with your weight shift, struggling to get the ball to come down on line and struggle to produce power in your golf swing, listen up ’cause it could be something as simple as just understanding how to set up to the ball correctly just with your stance width, that could make a huge improvement in all four of those things.
Novice golfers should be focusing exclusively on the fundamentals of the golf swing and that’s exactly what RST is all about. But, how do you handle all the conflicting golf tips out there on how wide your stance should be?
Most golfers that I see these days stand with a pretty wide stance. Now part of the problem is that nobody has been able to give you a really concrete answer of how wide your golf stance should be. Until RotarySwing came and and said, “Listen we have a definitive answer, you should stand two inches outside of neutral joint alignment.” Now why do we say that? Well I’ve talked about that in the videos in detail. You can click the link in the description to see the whole thing, but the short … the gist of it is, your legs, in case you weren’t aware of this, are attached to your pelvis.
Now most golfers are taught that they should stand shoulder width apart, but I always ask them, “Where are your legs attached?” Well, they’re not attached to your shoulders. Your shoulders have nothing to do with stance width. The reason being is that some people have very broad shoulders and narrow hips. Some people have broad hips and narrow shoulders and everything in between.
Your stance width is predicated on your pelvis width and it has more to do with sequencing your golf swing and understanding how to shift your weight than anything else. See the trick to the golf swing is the whole thing that fires the down swing sequence is weight shift. You’ve heard millions of times golfers say, “You swing from the ground up.” But what does that really mean?
Well the trick is every tour pro on the planet shifts his weight back to the left in the down swing to initiate the transition. If you don’t shift your weight, you have nothing else to move the golf club other than your arms, hands and shoulders. Now if you’re one of these golfers who swings over the top like this, your hips typically don’t move much at all. You’re just hacking at the ball with no power whatsoever, ’cause you’re just relying on your little muscles to try and swing the golf club.
Pros, we work on using our body, our trunk, our legs to produce power and that all starts with weight shift. Now the problem with a really wide stance is that sure, I can shift my weight, but what’s gonna tend to happen? Well my head’s gotta move all over the place. Golf’s hard enough without a moving target. So we want to keep that head fixed. It can move a little bit. We give you about an inch and a half, two inches max of movement. But we really like for that head to stay quite centered and by shifting my weight with my head not moving, I can’t load up on the right side. I’m just gonna tend to kinda sit here and spin in the middle.
Weight shift is critical in the down swing because this lateral movement of your pelvis which all pros do, your lateral movement of your pelvis tilts your spine away from the target. We call this secondary axis tilt. So if I have a proper stance width and I shift my weight, my hands and the club drop straight down on plane. Now if you’re the guy doing this, this is a huge difference of where your hands look like they just moved vertically because I’m not trying to move my hands at this point, I’m just shifting laterally to get my weight back to the left and then I can bring the club down from there.
If my golf stance is too wide, I either won’t shift my weight or I’ll shift and have so much secondary axis tilt, that the club’s gonna come in way from the inside. Stance width is critical for understanding how to start the down swing. If you don’t set up to the golf ball with the right stance width, you’re never ever going to be able to have a proper transition. So, today’ video, bonus video is all about understanding exactly how wide your stance should be for every club in the bag, and how to find your stance width based on the width of your pelvis.
So click the link you see in the image you see here on the right and I promise, I’m gonna take you to this bonus video. It’s gonna show you how to set up to the ball correctly with the proper stance width every single time and you’ll be shocked at how easy it is to get the club to come down on plane during the down swing when you have a proper stance width.
Don’t neglect your putting stance either! Putting strokes roughly count for half of all strokes taken. Learning the fundamentals of how to position yourself during putting can add a huge boost to your green game.
