Stance Width/ Wide or Narrow?

John discusses the pros and cons of wide vs narrow stances at
Advanced Ball Striking

Okay, another day on the deck here. And uh I got an email from one of my students who wasn’t clear on whether or not he should have a wide stance or a narrow stance. And um in the Hogan modules, we would promote a wide stance because Hogan had a wide stance as did most of the other great ball strikers, the ones that I always refer to. Lee Trevino, Ben Hogan, Mo Norman, George Nudson. Um you can stick those guys up there. They should make anybody’s top 10 list, if not the top four list. wide stances historically have been the preference of great ball strikers. And I’ll throw Walter Hagen in there, too. Super wide stance. Um, now the argument for the narrow stance, well, let me set this club down here so I can demonstrate better. With a narrow stance, the idea is to keep these centers very stable, head very still. So, a narrow stance would allow me to to turn on my axis and keep everything very much moving around uh kind of like turning in a barrel and where you’d have a a very consistent uh center axis. Set the wrist turn and this you would see promoted by Mac Grady Morad. That’d be typical of someone that would take that position. Now, what would be the Now, as logical as that is, of course, it sounds like it makes good sense, having everything very stationary and still not a lot of weight transfer, just rotation and turning. Okay. On the contrary, however, the wider stance, why would that be an advantage? Well, I would say clearly it would be an advantage if you’re interested in accelerating the club through the strike, holding shaft flex through the strike. Let me just demonstrate this here. With a wider stance, if I’m transferring my weight over to my right foot, then I can I have a lot of range of motion to transfer my weight over to the left foot. Now, why would I want to do that? because I would want to save my rotation so that I can use it through the strike. So, with a wider stance, assuming that I’m transferring my weight, of course, we’re not just take a wide stance and turn in a barrel. I mean, you you know, in theory, you could do that, but that’s that’s not the reason that you would want the wider stance. Wider stance, move the weight to the right. Now, you can see that if I transfer my weight to my left foot, I’m starting, my hands are moving towards the ball. I’m starting my down swing with the lateral move. Hogan talked about this in his video where he said the uh the start of the down swing is initiated with the lower part of the body or something like that, which is is correct, but he doesn’t really get into the specifics of how to do that. Right? It’s it’s really with the the lateral move, transfer of weight from the right foot to the left. I’m not even moving my arms or my shoulders, keeping everything preserved in my rotation. And I can move laterally. I can start my down swing, get my hands pretty far down into the down swing here by just a lateral move. And then with Hogan’s method, we’d be dealing with tripping the shaft and and other things that we would teach in the Hogan modules. But the basic concept of the wider stance would be weight transfer the right foot. And we as we would move left, we’re able to start our down swing, save the rotation so that we can then use this rotation through the strike. Okay? As compared with a narrow stance, we’ve got to start the down swing with the opening up of the of the shoulders. I mean, how else are you how else are you going to do it? You would take it back and you’ve got to start turning. Would you start opening up and spending the rotation too soon? Yes, you can create a lot of acceleration from the top halfway down into your down swing, but then what happens is you run out of acceleration and you lose shaft flex. And when you lose shaft flex, you lose the sensation and the feel of where the leading edge is. If you’re holding shaft flex, let me pin this thing here. You can see we’re holding shaft flex. I have a tremendous amount of pressure in my hands here. Okay, that allows me to feel the leading edge of the club through the strike. So, the modern teaching is all about acceleration from the top, gaining as much velocity as possible. Let’s get as much club head speed and velocity. And the Trackman machines are going to tell you how much speed you have at the bottom. It’s not going to tell you about acceleration. Okay, that’s the missing thing. It doesn’t tell you whether the club is accelerating through the strike. It’s looking at ball speed, all these things, all these distractions. Look at the ball speed, you know. Oh, look at the club head speed. But the ball control stuff has to do with acceleration. And I’m not talking about speed. I’m talking about feel. Because when you’re accelerating the club, you’re holding shaft flex and it puts stress on the shaft and you feel that in your hands. So when I’m feeling this through the strike, when I’m feeling, you know, I have this leaning forward. I wouldn’t have this leaning forward. I’m just gripping into the deck here to make a make an example here. But if I’m holding shaft flex here, now I have a tremendous feel and pressure in my hands. This is the lifeblood right here of the golf swing. Feeling the pressure in the hands through the strike tells me where the leading edge is. I feel that all the way down through the strike and beyond. I know exactly where that leading edge is. And that’s how you master the ball control. Then when you get into drawing and fading and we we teach the students how to do that. Once you have this pressure in your hands, then we can manipulate these pressures in our hands to fade the ball and draw the ball. We want to put a little five yard fade on it. Five yard draw on it. We have protocols for that. You can do that when you can feel these pressures. If not, it’s just a guess. You come down and you just no matter how much speed, if you have 130 miles an hour club head speed, you can’t feel this leading edge, you’re not going to be a ball control person. You’ll hit it far, but you’re never going to get control of the golf ball. We’ll see you next time.