Is your director position too broad? Here’s how to determine your foot position

It happens to weekend warriors and tour pros alike: You cross a few through the middle and your driver starts to feel automatic – until it doesn’t.

In one recent video from Titleist, GOLF Top 100 teacher Joe Hallett explains that when players get that sudden boost of confidence, it often takes their attention away from the basics. The most common mistake? A position that crawls too wide.

“When you start hitting the ball well, especially off the tee, there’s something that creeps up on you and it’s this feeling of power, this feeling of being invincible. And that starts to show in the breadth of your stance,” he says.

“Little by little you will notice that as players reach the tee they start to get more and more of this set and the stance becomes wide,” he continues. “That’s when you have to start worrying.”

Find your perfect driving position

To find your optimal driving position, Hallett explains that you need to determine which width will give you the most accuracy and power. The best way to do that is to use Hallett’s Goldilocks method:

This will help you understand how each stance width affects your contact quality, 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 stand gets wider, it adds a little extra punch.”

Once you’ve shot a few times with each stance, Hallett says you should notice a slight decline in performance when playing with that wider stance.

“Where you go, you’ll encounter a phenomenon that wasn’t so solid,” he says, “if you take that one step further, and then you’ve found the breadth of your attitude.”

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Avoid the ‘wide right’ miss

While your perfect driver position is optimal for most tee shots, sometimes you really want to step on it. Hallett says you then need to know how to make a broader stance work for you. In his experience, a wider stance that doesn’t work has one commonality: the foot drop is too far outside the trail shoulder.

“I call this attitude wide right,” says Hallett.

The reason the ‘wide-right’ stance causes problems is because it forces you to make a huge movement to load into your trail side, which, as Hallett previously explained, can significantly reduce your accuracy and power. Hallett says that if your trail foot is too far back, it can also cause you to keep your weight on the lead side during the swing, causing a reverse twist and, as a result, decreasing the power of your swing.

“When I go to hit this, my weight moves back. And I can tell you, moving back isn’t going to help the ball move forward,” he says.

Instead, Hallett recommends adopting an attitude he calls “the right right one.” The key: move your trailing shoulder and trailing foot toward each other as you take your stance.

This trick allows you to stack your shoulders over your hips and knees, while positioning your feet slightly wider. This allows you to load well at the top of your backswing and generate maximum power without sacrificing control.

“Now I’m behind the ball and I can add some extra pop to that tee shot,” Hallett says.

To enter your rides on the trail, all you have to do is focus on your feet. Stick to your optimal driving position for most shots, and when you’re ready to really crush one, put your foot and shoulder together. This “right right” stance will help you load properly and deliver a powerful, controlled attack.