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| Marvin Lerman |
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Stance and Ball Position
What’s the ideal width of stance? This is an often-asked, important question. Clearly there is a balance to be struck here between stability and mobility. If you stand with your feet spread too far apart, you inhibit your ability to turn correctly. On the other hand, if your stance is too narrow you run the risk of losing your balance during the swing.
The ideal stance is one that allows you to rotate your body correctly and shift your weight back and forth with a pure swinging motion. It will vary according to the club you are using. With a driver, the longest of clubs, set up with your feet spread to the full width of your shoulders. The ball should be lined up somewhere between the big toe and the heel of your left foot. That’s about a two-inch leeway, depending on the player. Turn your right foot out by about ten degrees, the left by approximately twice that amount. That’s all you need to encourage good footwork and achieve a full, powerful body turn.
With the driver, such a stance gives you a firm, anchored base to work with, while the ball position promotes the upward sweeping motion that you look for in the flight of your tee shots; a low penetrating trajectory.
But the driver is a special case. For the majority of your full shots with long irons, fairway woods, mid-irons, and short irons, set up with the same ball position, approximately two inches inside your left heel. Your stance should be no wider than your shoulders with long clubs. Moving through the shorter irons, from the 6 iron through the wedge, work on a sliding scale for your stance, and draw your right foot inward a hair toward the left with every step down.
Let me stress that these are merely guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Once you have the makings of a good set-up position, you must experiment with the width of your stance until you find the flat spot at the bottom of your swing. A simple way to do this is to make a number of practice swings on a nicely cut piece of fairway until you can identify the point at which the club-head first strikes the ground. Use that information to determine your stance so that the ball position for each club corresponds with the flat sop at the bottom of your swing. This practice swing can reward you with crisp shots without taking too much of a divot and with a consistent flight pattern for every club in the bag.
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