Basics, set the width of your stance

The basic idea of the stance is that it should be wide enough to provide stability at high speed but also narrow enough that you can rotate correctly and transfer your weight.  A fare judgment of this is to have your heels at shoulder width with a 6 iron, a little narrower for the shorter clubs, and a little wider for the longer clubs.

Here’s a simple exercise for you to follow to insure you know how wide to stand and maintain this in your practice.

• Place a club (an old one if you like) across your shoulders.  Have the end of the grip touch the corner of one of your shoulders and make a small mark with a pen on the shaft in line with the other shoulder.   Now, when you place this club on the ground during practice, you can match the insides of your heels to the end of the club and the mark on the shaft, guaranteeing  the correct width of stance.  This can also double up as a alignment aid.  It is simple, but you would be amazed at the amount of swing faults that start with too wide or too narrow a stance.

Transcript

This is Robin Symes. I’d like to talk to you about the correct width of stance. As you’re probably aware, your width of stance for your different clubs, sand wedge, six iron driver, should vary. But by how much? To me the easiest way to learn this is to learn how wide the stand to your mid-iron first, let’s say a six iron. With this six iron, your width of stance is the same width as your shoulders. A simple way to make sure that you’re doing this is take an old club or a stick, place it across your shoulders, put two marks, and put the stick on the ground. Retake your stance, matching the middle of your heels to the two marks. From here if you’re using a longer club, you can widen your stance out slightly. If you’re using a shorter club, you can narrow your stance down. A simple way to make sure that you’ve got the correct width of stance at address.