It happens to weekend warriors and tour pros alike: You stripe a few down the middle and your driver starts to feel automatic — until it isn’t.
In a recent video from Titleist, GOLF Top 100 Teacher Joe Hallett explains that when players get that sudden boost of confidence, it often pulls their focus from the fundamentals. The most common error? A stance that creeps too wide.
“When you start hitting the ball good, especially on the tee, there’s something that starts to sneak into you and it’s this feeling of power, the feeling that you’re invincible. And that begins to show in the width of your stance,” he says.
“Little by little, you will notice as players get up to the tee, they start to get more and more of this set and the stance becomes wide,” he continues, “That is when you need to start worrying.”
Find your perfect driver stance
To find your optimal driver stance, Hallett explains that you need to determine what width gives you the most accuracy and power. The best way to do that is to use Hallett’s Goldilocks method:
- Hit a few drives with your feet just inside shoulder width
- Then at shoulder width
- Then slightly outside than shoulder width
This will help you understand how each stance width impacts your quality of contact, ball flight, accuracy and even power.
“If we keep our feet together, it kind of controls the swing, the length of the swing. That probably lends itself to more accuracy,” he says, “As the stance gets wider, it provides a little extra punch.”
Once you’ve hit a few shots with each stance, Hallett says you should start to notice a slight decline in performance as you play around with that wider stance.
“You are going to have a phenomenon where you go, that wasn’t quite as solid,” he says, “Back that up a notch, and then you have found your stance width.”
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Avoid the ‘wide right’ miss
While your perfect driver stance is optimal for most tee shots, sometimes you really want to step on one. Hallett says that’s when you need to know how to make a wider stance work for you. In his experience, a wider stance that does not work has one commonality: The trail foot is too far outside the trail shoulder.
“This stance, I call wide right,” Hallett says.
The reason the “wide right” stance causes issues is because it forces you to make a massive move to load into your trail side, which, as Hallett explained earlier, can reduce your accuracy and power in a big way. Hallett says having your trail foot too far back can also cause you to keep your weight on your lead side through the swing, creating a reverse pivot and as a result, draining your swing of power.
“When I go to hit this, my weight’s going to move backwards. And I can tell you that moving backwards is not going to help the ball go forwards,” he says.
Instead, Hallett recommends setting up in what he calls the “correct right” stance. The key: move your trail shoulder and trail foot together as you take your stance.
This trick helps you stack your shoulders over your hips and knees, while positioning your feet slightly wider. Which allows you to load properly at the top of your backswing and generate maximum power without sacrificing control.
“Now, I’m loaded up behind the ball and I can add some extra pop into that tee shot,” Hallett says.
To dial in your drives on the course, just remember to focus on your feet. Stick with your optimal driving stance for most shots, and when you’re ready to really crush one, set your trail foot and shoulder together. This “correct right” stance will help you load properly and unleash your a powerful, controlled strike.
