Symptom
My stance feels too wide or too narrow
You wobble over the ball or lose your balance in the swing, or cannot turn from a base that feels too wide, and the strike wanders between fat and thin with it.
This usually traces to something already true before the club moves: grip, aim, posture, or where the ball sits in your stance. All of those are checkable standing still, which is why the questions ask you to look rather than to guess.
Common ways golfers describe this
Can't turn in my backswing because of my stance?
Stance width for short shots
My stance changes every shot
How far apart should your feet be for irons?
Should my feet be shoulder width apart for every club?
- Feet, in the footprints: square to the line
- Hips, cross ticks: square to the line
- Shoulders, round ends: square to the line
- Target line
Narrow it to one cause
Each question is here because golfers answer it differently, and that difference is what rules a cause out. Nothing is generated while you answer: every question, cause and fix was written and checked in advance.
A few questions · no account needed
What you will be asked
- At address with a mid iron, where are your feet compared with your shoulders?
- Set up to the same spot five times, walking away between each. Do your feet land the same distance apart?
- Stop at the top of a slow backswing. Where is the pressure in your back foot?
- Hold your finish for a count of three. What happens?
- When an iron shot off the turf goes wrong, what does it usually look like?
Where this can come from
These are the causes this symptom resolves to, in the order they turn up most often. That order is not a diagnosis and it is not your answer: two of them can produce a shot that looks identical from behind. Each has a fix you can read now, whether or not you answer anything.
No repeatable setup or routine
Aim, ball position, stance width and grip get rebuilt slightly differently on every shot, so face angle, low point and strike location all vary with them. Address is the reference the whole swing is measured from, and a reference that moves explains misses that seem to have no pattern.
Read the fix
Swaying off the ball
The body slides away from the target in the backswing instead of turning around a stable centre, carrying the middle of the arc with it. Unless exactly that much slide comes back at exactly the right moment, the low point arrives in the wrong place.
Read the fix
Hips sliding instead of turning
The lower body moves laterally toward the target without rotating. The low point travels forward with it while the path stays right of target and the face is left behind, which is the combination that produces a block one swing and a hook the next.
Read the fix
Low point that does not repeat
The bottom of the arc lands in a different place relative to the ball on each swing, so fat and thin alternate instead of one miss repeating. Treating it as two faults and correcting each in turn is what keeps the golfer oscillating between them.
Read the fix
Posture that cannot be held
Bending from the middle of the back, standing too upright, or sinking into too much knee bend produces a position the body has to leave during the swing. Any change in height between address and impact moves the low point, and the strike moves with it.
Read the fix
Related symptoms
These are not here because they sound similar. Each one can come from a cause on the list above, which is why fixing one sometimes quietly fixes another. The closest matches are first.
- Great on the range, lost on the courseYou strike it well ball after ball on the range, then the same swing starts topping and chunking it, or sending it sideways, as soon as the round begins.Shares no repeatable setup or routine
- One bad shot turns into a blow-up holeA single poor shot becomes a triple bogey or worse, and the damage often carries on into the next few holes.Shares no repeatable setup or routine
- I overthink my swing on the courseSeveral swing thoughts compete while you stand over the ball, the swing comes out stiff and unfamiliar, and the harder you try to apply what you have been working on, the worse the shots get.Shares no repeatable setup or routine
- Losing balance and falling out of the finishThe swing ends in a stumble, a step or a fall instead of a finish you can hold, and the strike is unpredictable with it.Shares swaying off the ball
- No distance control on partial swingsAnything less than a full swing finishes well short or well long of the number, so the in-between wedge yardages are the least predictable shots you have.Shares no repeatable setup or routine
- Suddenly can't strike it at allBall striking that was reliable last month has collapsed on the range and on the course alike, with a new miss such as a shank, a top or a chunk that was never part of your game.Shares no repeatable setup or routine
What this rests on
- Search for the Perfect Swing: The Proven Scientific Approach to Fundamentally Improving Your GameAlastair Cochran and John Stobbs, for the Golf Society of Great Britain, 2005 reissue, originally 1968
- The Physics of GolfTheodore P. Jorgensen, University of Nebraska, 1999, second edition; Springer reprint 2013
- 40+ TrackMan Parameters ExplainedTrackMan, accessed 2026
If something here contradicts what a launch monitor tells you, say so. Corrections change the page.
Discussion
Golfers who have had this shot, on what it turned out to be and what sorted it. Read it as experience rather than diagnosis: the questions above are what narrow it to a cause.
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