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Determining Proper Stance Width
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Do you think your stance width is based on the width of your shoulders? Think again...
- Estimate center of hip socket (roughly 1.5" inside hip bones)
- Get in neutral joint alignment: Line up center of hips, knees, and ankles
- Position feet so that center of ankles are about 2" outside neutral
Determining the proper stance width is one of those things in golf instruction there's a lot of conflicting information on.
Some golf instructors want you to stand really wide so you can be really stable and some golfers instructors want you to stand really narrow.
Some instructors tell you to stand shoulder width apart.
All these things are misinformation even though the intentions may be good.
The setup width should be based on fundamentals of your anatomy and fundamentals of what we're trying to achieve in the golf swing, and those are two things.
One, your shoulders have nothing to do with your stance width, unless your legs.
And you may be different than me.
But unless your legs are attached to your shoulders, your shoulders have no bearing on how wide your stance.
Which should be none whatsoever.
Everybody's shoulder width and hip width is completely different.
Everybody's ratio of how wide their hips are versus how wide their shoulders are is completely different.
You need to be looking at your hips the sockets where your legs attach to determine your stance width so there's the anatomical basis for it.
The second thing is what are we trying to achieve in the golf swing?
One, we need stability, so we can't stand super, super narrow because we're not going to have any stability, we won't have a good foundation.
But the second piece is.
The most important part of the golf swing is we need to be perfectly on this left side, at impact so that we can rotate freely.
This is where some of the highest forces in the golf swing occur on your bodies, on this left side, coming in the downswing and into impact.
And so this is where a lot of injuries occur.
You don't see a lot of injuries happening on the backswing there's not as much force and speed happening but in the downswing people who have back problems and hip problems and knee problems we can look at the the way that their body's moving and say well yeah that's part of why it's happening here and there so what we want to do is avoid that and having a proper stance width is imperative for that so first of all let's figure out what the proper stance width is from an anatomical perspective and how do we determine that well it's pretty hard unless you have an x-ray machine so you're going to have to use a little bit of guesstimation here because basically what you need to do is find neutral joint alignment in other words where your center of your ankles center of your knees and center of hips stack up over each other okay obviously you can't see the center of your hips very well the knees are pretty easy but you can kind of figure out where your center of your hips are somewhat based off your hip bones and if you move an inch and a half or so inside that's really rough because some people's hip bones are going to be out further than others and so i'm just trying to give you a rough guide here the more important guide is for you to feel where neutral is for you so if you can find it you this is obviously too narrow this is this is outside of neutral when my legs are basically straight up and down underneath my hips this is neutral okay now what i can do is i can go a couple inches on either side of neutral and this is going to allow me to have a stable enough base that as i rotate back i'm going to have stability as i rotate through i'm going to have stability but it's also going to make it much easier for me to get to my left side in the downswing so and that part if i can get on the downswing and pivot properly on my hip then i've got a stance that's going to allow me to work so if i stand really wide for me to load up my right side on my backswing i'm going to have to move my head off the ball and we obviously don't want any more variables we're trying to rotate around our spine and so that's not going to help us if i stand really wide and don't move my head well i've never shifted my weight so i'm missing the added benefit of the power that comes from the weight transfer and then the second thing is if i do stay here i've got to move a long ways to get my hip back into neutral and the downswing just happens so fast it's really hard for people to do that so what we want to find is a couple inches outside of neutral is going to allow me to stay stable still shift my weight on the backswing shift my weight really easily on the downswing get into neutral and rotate through and still be in balance so that's what we're trying to really achieve is a narrow enough stance that we can easily get back to the left and a wide enough stance that we have stability and power and that is for most golfers a couple inches outside of neutral is going to allow you to do that make a proper weight transfer and get back to the left side on the downswing
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