Your set-up can feed your brain or starve your brain. Your brain is fed when its asked to cooperate, and starved when asked to fight. Cooperation is harmonious. Fighting is dissonant. Therefore, choosing to set-up any way we like can unconsciously determine our success or failure of efficiency and consistency.

One precept of my research has been that an Open Stance creates swing efficiency. Swing efficiency comes from eliminating extra motion. The degree to which a person wastes motion decreases with practice from any set up. However, an Open Stance set-up saves motion while diminishing athletic dissonance. In short, you don’t have to compensate for unconscious errors, because your Open Stance is a deliberate choice.

Deliberation is planning. Planning is repeatable. Repetition is conscious. Repeated, conscious action becomes subconscious with practice. Practice implies pursuit. Pursuit reveals purpose, or Intention. And, intention is the truest expression of Need. Hence, only when we make a CHOICE about our set-up, do we improve our golf swing. Furthermore, only when we set up open do we generate cooperation with our athletic selves.

Early on in my teaching career, I heard older instructors reference set up. However, while conducting Open Stance research, I remembered zero discussion of foot orientation to target line. All I ever heard was, “Set-up is all that matters.” Set-up had become a discussion of posture, grip, and alignment – without describing cause and effect. All I did was fill gaps in the discussion. In the process, the Open Stance emerged as something more than a fad or an option for efficient ball-striking.

This is our Red Pill moment…. The Golfing Machine and Fifty Years of Bad Advice have drugged the golfing world. Under the auspices of ‘freedom of movement’, we were taught motion is all that matters. And, in the wake of that advice, the instruction industry has grown by leaps and bounds. However, our national handicap has not improved over that time. I can only conclude that the truth must have been omitted from the narrative we came to know and recite. Therefore, golfer health must have been sacrificed for industry health.

I promote the cooperative set-up philosophy which, at the same time, is improving ball-striking and handicap ‘health’ around the world. People don’t need to think about how to put food into their mouths. Brains are wired to cooperate with intention which, nutritionally, involves the cooperative link between health and longevity. Therefore, I’ve made it my mission to provide the most healthy and satisfying “food” for aspiring golfers. All you have to do is sit down, and eat.

You don’t have to see my face to hear my voice. Therefore, open your stance, and play golf. To golfers predisposed toward self-guidance, with a golf-swing diet consisting of jelly doughnut and potato chip fixes, I say, “Pride go’eth before the fall.”

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy