A Good Golf Setup

The set-up position is one of the most overlooked aspects in the entire game of golf. Without a good set-up, it's almost impossible to play up to your potential as a golfer. A good set-up position will get your body ready to make a solid, efficient swing at the ball and help produce the best golf shots you are capable of. In this hub were going to discuss set-up positions in full shots only. However before you can get into a good golf set-up you need a good golf grip. 

The first aspect of the set-up we're going to get into is the stance. For most shots you want your feet to be approximately shoulder width apart. This will give us a solid foundation from which to make our golf swing. When we take our stance, ideally the toes of our back foot should be pretty close to square, maybe pointing a little bit to our right(assuming a right handed golfer). Our left foot should be angled out maybe 30* towards our target. 

The next important step in getting into a good set-up is the posture. To get into a good golf posture, stand straight up while taking a solid golf stance. Now, just bend from the hips(maintaining a straight back) until you feel that your shoulders are aligned over your shoe laces. From there we just want to add a little bit of knee flex, the goal being to get our knees and shoulders both lined up over our shoe laces. From here we are in an athletic position, much like a short stop in baseball, and we are ready to make a solid golf swing. 

A lot of people have a tendency to arch their back too much when they set-up to the ball. An easy way to fix this is to hold a golf club on your back from your belt buckle to your shirt collar and try to have as much of your back touching the shaft as possible when you bend over to take your posture. 

Another set-up key that is greatly overlooked is how your right shoulder should be lower than your left at address. Since when we grip the club, the right hand is lower than the left hand and our arms are the same length, we have to make up for this somehow in our set-up. To do this we are going to lower the right shoulder by tilting our spine away from the target. The finished product should be such that if we drew a line straight down from the outside of our left shoulder it would come down just inside of our left foot. 

A good drill to achieve the correct amount of shoulder tilt is to get into your stance and posture. Now take a club and with your left hand press the grip against the buttons on your shirt and with your right hand press the shaft against your belt buckle. The club head should be between your legs and on an angle parallel to your spine. Now you are just going to tilt your shoulders away from your target until the club hits your left leg. Once that happens your shoulder tilt is set and ready to go. 

The last step to a good set-up is your alignment. Your whole body should be aligned so that everything is pointing in the same direction. If you drew a line across your toes it should point parallel to your target line. The same is true for your legs, hips, forearms, and shoulders. If we lay an alignment pole across either of those it should also point parallel to our target line. Getting everything lined up properly enables our body to make the most efficient golf swing that it is capable of and will put us on the road to hitting crisp, solid golf shots. 

To keep things simple for now, we are going to go ahead and make the standard ball position under the logo on your left chest. Now I know a lot of you have probably heard that the ball position should move depending on what club you are using and that is true. However the way that we are going to accomplish that is to just move our back foot(right foot for right handed golfers) forward and back. For mid-irons our stance should be approximately shoulder width. For each longer club you can step your right foot back away from the target ever so slightly until you get to the driver where your stance should be slightly wider than shoulder width. For shorter irons narrow your stance a bit.