The open stance offers the highest return on investment. The investment is commitment, time, and practice. The payoff is compounding interest in the process. The open stance, therefore, accrues until the moment you need to call upon your investment for reward on the golf course.

You are joining the fastest-growing segment of the golfing public – self-improvers. The current knowledge transfer regarding set-up is the greatest of our lifetimes. The Open Stance is leading the conversation with talking points that circumvent old narratives of movement, mechanics, and instructors. As a result, golfers are waking to the new dawn of individual choice in adaptation and experimentation around a proven philosophy. Hence, we are now free to treat our adaptation as a journey rather than a errand.

Need, intention, philosophy, religion, and anthropology are disciplines yet to be tapped in freeing golfers from the yoke of Psychology, Biomechanics, and Mathematics. One path keeps you thinking and helpless. The other path keeps you feeling and empowered. Guess which is which.

On Wall Street, the winners are not the people who rely on tips. The winners go out and do their own research. They commit to a goal and choose the best philosophy to use as their fundamental research framework. Each winner chooses the same basic philosophy. They then learn what to look for and what questions to ask. However, no matter how different each expression of their common philosophy is, the winners get there without altering the starting point.

For decades, the dynamic in our world has been, “Shut off your brain, and just buy what we are selling and hold it until we say buy more.” And, for decades, we believed it worked fairly well. However, what we didn’t realize was that our new and exciting, responsibility-free narrative let the snake in the door.

We now know that inflation and inflated personalities, which maintained our illusion, had compromised our humanity. Fortunately, people are waking up now and questioning past methods. As a result, new, more holistic solutions for old problems are filling in the old knowledge gaps.

The future is in taking back our power to make positive changes. We are relearning how to do simple things that contributed to our sense of self-worth and esteem. However, we still have to actively ignore the old system while our (swing) changes occur, lest we fall back into swing slavery.

Our golf swings are, essentially, a corollary for world events and watershed moments. Golf’s watershed moment occurred five years ago when The Open Stance Academy was founded. I showed golfers innumerable examples of the Open Stance philosophy and it’s prevalence in the greatest ball-strikers of all time.

My only mission is to show golfers what is possible when they entrust themselves to the winning, set-up philosophy. Golfers know there is something substantial about that connection. Consequently, people started listening, adopting, practicing, and reporting back their successes with unanimity. Their success was guaranteed.

Open your stance, and play golf.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

The ball starts where the club shaft points at the top, because your body moves to strike your ball solidly regardless of where you set your club. Therefore, laying the club off creates a pulled start line. Our assumption is that you align your clubface directly at the target at address. Also, we assume you have not changed your general swing motion.

Why do people lay the club off? Maybe we have a forward ball position, a closed stance, physical limitation or requirements, or are adapting to injury. All are general reasons we might lay our club off. However, no matter what our category, we guarantee our start line is a pull.

I don’t want to cover body sequencing for each category, so allow me to cover ‘physical requirement’. There is no special set-up or one-off issue to interfere with a biomechanical solution. That way, people from other categories can pull from a general explanation… so to speak.

I’ve seen kids and adults who are ‘naturally’ layed off at the top. These folks are predominantly arm swingers or, in many cases, handsy. Either due to inflexible hips, torso, neck, or unique mental processes, they compensate athletically. Without regard for how they got there, I’ll explain the downswing.

Our arms are away from our body when the downswing begins. We have to reconnect while we shallow out. Because we must shallow an impact-steepening club set, our chosen subset have to compensate with motion.

We come off the ball (raise up), hang back, chicken wing, de-loft with vertical rotation, or any combination which allows our physical abilities to compensate. When we are most efficient, we deloft with vertical shoulder rotation and leave the body sequence, more or less, intact.

If we don’t compensate with equal extremes, we are very steep at the ball. Depending upon our intended goal, we shape our swing to fix a position that is off plane. In so doing, we lose power.

Players like Brett Wetterich, Jerry Kelly, Corey Conners, and others have played well with a layed off position. However, it’s hell on the hands and wrists. You may also notice they set up a little closed. They’ve developed a causal relationship. Ultimately, our golf swings must obey our intention, no matter how our feet are arranged. That is how swing change happens.

If I can address specific concerns, let me know. Until then, open your stance, and play golf.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

Knowledge makes up for any lack of ambition. However, no amount of ambition can make up for a lack of knowledge. I will now prove my claim using, among other tools, The Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle is about rising, in your workplace, to your highest incompetence level. I read that The Peter Principle is our military model. Having not served, I cannot verify that reference. However, I do know The Peter Principle currently guides corporate America.

Under Peter Principle influence, knowledgeable associates subverted by more ambitious coworkers are not heard, which ruins American productivity. Personally, I think America elected President Trump in defiance of The Peter Principle and decades of ambitious abuses. Anyway…

I think corporate ambition means incompetence, inefficiency, opportunism, and survivalist behavior. I’ve seen, first hand, how The Peter Principle negatively affects team morale. However, I also believe we are (gratefully) headed back to a corporate business structure that is merit-based.

Merit is our reward for competence, which is the space where knowledgeable people work. To me, knowledge means competence and efficiency, personal responsibility, and team-building skill. Knowledge, therefore, requires a virtuous goal. Corporate ambition’s only requirement is selfishness.

We were taught to believe ambition, “desire and determination to achieve success”, is a good quality. However, from my experience, I find that definition does not apply to corporate workers. My expanded ambition definition for them is (a/the) “desire and determination to achieve success by sticking your nose up your bosses’ shaded recess to distract them from noticing you’re a useless idiot who promises more than you can ever possibly deliver.”

I made myself laugh, but only because I’m not in the rat-race. I never felt the need to climb over or step on anyone else to get a dollar or a fleeting feeling of security. Hence, I chose to teach the game of golf.

You see, ambitious corporate people have no use for knowledge-based enterprises, because there is no short-cut. Acquiring knowledge takes time and a different kind of ambition. Knowledge rules where corporate ambition starves, because resources ultimately flow to secure knowledge. Why? Because correct answers have no good alternatives.

Likewise, I have no competition for answering golf’s most important questions. Consequently, YOU have no alternative for truth, which is both a happy and sad. But, take heart. My mission is educating your golf swing. Open Stance research completed my golf swing education. I’ll help complete yours’.

My goal here is to guide you to a better golf game. Therefore, I resolve to assist your self-directed golf improvement by providing analogies, corollaries, and every correct answer. Here is your first step….

Open your stance, and play golf.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

Ever go a week without playing and wonder where you are when you tee it up again? The club in your hands feels like it’s trying to wrest itself free. Right brain kicks in and, with it, survival mode. Then, while playing nine with Dad, you remember how to set up.

We hopped out of the car, and head to number one tee. That’s the way we do it in our family. Trial by fire commences. The fairway looks like a fettuccine noodle with Broccoli Rabe down both sides. Scraping and slashing it around the first four, some positive images leak in. Fortunately, I found birdies do exist without comfort. However, the driver was naughty until the last.

Clear of the eighth hole and walking to nine tee, Dad reminds me to set my clubface, hands, and shoulders first. “Then get your ball position”. Gosh, that was simple. Then, a foreign feeling of confidence accompanied my best drive of the day, which led to an inevitable bird-dogger to finish -2. It is that simple.

The moral of the story is that we have to get metaphorically clear of the eighth hole before we tee it up, right? It’s no mistake that the best players warm up before they play. I’m sure my nine would have been sharper with a warm-up session… maybe. However, if my brain was in golf mode when I arrived, I wouldn’t have needed the reminder. But, no harm was done.

If we know contact is a given, we can warm up without hitting a ball. If we have a checklist, mental or physical, we can play well. For example, my buddy Tim keeps a piece of paper in his bag to aid his rounds. In 2014, he used it to beat the South Florida Player of the Year by two. Remember – logic rules.

Therefore, and still again… open your stance, and play golf.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

Movies have framed some profound truths over the decades. I think commonalities or universal themes are what makes movies great. Consider movies like The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, Forrest Gump, and The Matrix. Each is a classic, and each subsequent film edges closer to one fundamental theme, or truth. However, movies never give us control of the narrative. Why do you suppose that is? For a moment, consider the possibility that “There is no spoon”.

Our minds chew on situations, conventions, legends, myths, and fables all day long. Then, we provide our point of view as if it is original material. I don’t know what that is… arrogance, maybe. However, self-protection or something more akin to survival instinct may be more fair reasoning. In any case, we choose our narrative based on our ability to communicate it.

Articulating an idea requires, in my opinion, connection to truth. Hear me out. Truth does not come looking for us. We have to go find it. We have to search, read, and discuss, which is why books and blogs are always better than movies. Additionally, reading requires that we use our imagination to color the story. And, fortunately, color doesn’t keep the pony on the page from being a pony.

Reading also gives us time to gradually work out our feelings. Moreover, the brain seeking truth through print is impartial, which means truth cannot hide behind motive. There is no “Side” to obey, and no line to toe. The spoon may represent fear. However, fear doesn’t exist in truth-seeking. Therefore, truth is freedom. Now for the golf-spoon connection….

My own process followed this roadmap. There was no material self-interest involved in my research which, in retrospect, is great. I never had anything to sell. “It’s Science”, as Ron Burgundy would say. Connecting the swing to the set-up led to research that expanded my ability to articulate my findings. And, in the process, I became adept at word-punching the instruction industry right in the baby-maker.

You should, too. Read instructional books. Be skeptical. Question everything. Work out your own feelings about the Open Stance. Then, talk to someone about what you discover, because golfers need this message in different words. Provide it. Open your stance, and play golf.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy