By now it’s obvious to you that a golf swing requires a lot of motion from the whole body, but especially the upper body. Your stance has to keep all that movement balanced – all that movement swinging together for perfect contact, for powerful contact. At the same time, if you’re too focused on stability, you may develop a stance that is very stable, but that hinders the proper motion a good swing is supposed to generate.

For points of reference, use the instep of both feed and your shoulders, both where your shoulders join with the torso and the outside point of your shoulders. First, line up the insteps of your feet with your shoulders’ torso connection and take a practice swing. There’s a good possibility that somewhere near the top of the backswing, or near the swing’s low point, or on the follow-through (or maybe all three) you had to struggle to maintain balance. Your feet were probably going through countless tiny corrections to keep you in balance.

A good stance will not only maintain your balance, but also help your basic swing motion. With a stance too narrow or too wide, your body’s contribution to the swing is limited. With a good, comfortable stance, your body is allowed the room it needs to rotate around the fixed axis and generate power, while supporting the proper weight shifts.

Now place your feet wider, with the insteps aligned with the points of your shoulders. This is actually the correct position, so just for fun, add the width of each foot to the width of that stance. Now take a practice golf swing. You might find that your weight stays somewhere between both feed throughout your swing, but you still feel something isn’t just right. If so, you probably strained and failed to rotate your hips and shoulders as far as you could with the very narrow stance.

This time align your insteps with your shoulder cups and swing. This is the position of harmony between flexibility and stability.