Will moving the ball back stop me hitting it fat?

It changes where the club reaches the ground relative to the ball, and steepens the attack angle by a degree and a half per inch with a 6-iron. It does not move the low point itself, which travels with your chest and has its own guide. If the chest hangs back, the fat shot comes with it.

Should ball position change with every club, or stay in one place?

Both schools have serious names behind them. Golf Distillery records Hogan, Nicklaus and Norman keeping the ball forward for everything, widening the stance instead. PGA Play teaches the progressive version, driver forward, wedge central. No published measurement settles the increments, so pick one, film it, and judge it on where the club meets the ground.

Can I check ball position on a down-the-line video?

Not reliably. Filmed along the target line, the ball sits almost behind your hands and the distance you want runs straight away from the lens, where a flat picture reports least. Face-on is the frame that shows it, and the choice of camera angle has its own guide.

Does ball position change the clubface?

No. Where the face points is set by your grip and by how you aim the club behind the ball, and sliding the ball along the target line does not rotate it. The path moves instead: behind the low point it runs rightward, forward of it leftward. The face-to-path gap changes, so the curve does.

Why does one position feel right with a 7-iron and wrong with a wedge?

Two things stack. The wedge runs on a steeper plane, so each inch of ball position buys more attack angle than with a longer club. The stance also narrows, which shifts the centre of your stance underneath you while the ball stays put. Measuring against your sternum removes the second problem.

The swing, position by position

Golf ball position: an inch is a degree

Ball position is the one setup number you can measure off a single still frame. This is what an inch of it is worth in degrees, which half of the shot it moves, and which ruler to measure it against.

A golfer standing over a ball on a fairway, photographed face-on from a distance with mountains behind. David Wise, CC BY 2.0

An inch in the stance, a degree in the arc

1.5 degreesAttack angle change per inch of ball position, 6-iron

The clubhead travels on an arc. Where the ball sits along it decides whether the club is still descending when it arrives or has already started back up. Coach Adam Young puts a number on that: move the low point forward by an inch with a driver and the attack angle steepens by about a degree, a one-to-one ratio.

The iron is more sensitive. Young gives the 6-iron a ratio of one to one and a half, because the vertical swing plane is steeper. The steeper the plane, the more of the arc's turning goes into up and down and the less into side to side. A wedge is steeper again, though no published figure pins that one down.

Young measures the low point against a fixed ball. Slide the ball instead and the geometry is the same, so it reads as a ball position ratio: an inch back is a degree of extra descent with a driver, a degree and a half with a 6-iron. None of your swing has to change for that; you set it before you started.

It moves the line as well, in a known direction

Direction is not untouched. Young's page on club path sets out the pairing. A ball struck before the low point meets a club moving more down and more to the right. A ball struck after it meets a club moving more up and more to the left. Ball back therefore sends the path right along with the steeper strike; ball forward sends it left.

Ball position never turns the clubface. Face aim comes from the grip and from how you set the club behind the ball, and TrackMan's definition puts face angle first for where the shot sets off. The path therefore moves under an unchanged aim, which shows up as curve rather than a new start line. The strike has no aim to compensate for it, so that is where you notice it.

Your feet are a ruler that moves

Almost every ball position chart measures from the feet, and the feet do not hold still. Amy Taylor, a PGA professional writing for PGA Play, pairs each position with a stance width: driver at the lead heel off a wide stance, 7-iron central off a narrower one, wedge central or just behind off a narrow one. Change the width and the centre of your stance has moved, with the ball untouched.

The rulers also disagree. Brad Myers, a PGA professional at Ball Flight Academy, lines the wedge up with the trail big toe, the irons with the line through both heels and the woods with the lead big toe, forward of the usual chart throughout. Golf Distillery records the older school: Hogan, Nicklaus and Norman kept the ball forward for every club, lengthening the stance by moving the trail foot away.

None of the three publishes a measurement behind its increments, and none appears elsewhere. A chart with a ball width between each iron is a convention, not a finding. What the sources agree on is the direction of travel: forward as the club lengthens, with a wider stance to match.

Hear it

Three clicks: takeaway, top, impact. Start at the tour beat and move to whichever one you can actually swing to.

A landmark that stays put on a face-on frame

Pause the address frame of a face-on video and drop a vertical line from your torso rather than from the ground. The lead shoulder joint and the notch at the top of the sternum are anatomy, and sit where they sit whatever the stance does. The logo on your shirt is easier to see and slightly worse, because fabric slides.

Note where the ball sits against that line, in ball widths, for every club you film. Two frames only compare if the camera stood in the same spot, which the filming guide covers. Pebble Swing reads joint angles out of the frames and the backswing to downswing tempo ratio out of the motion, not the ball, so this one is yours to take. It is worth taking: ball position is a decision, not a movement.

How far it can drift

3.7 degreesGap between PGA Tour and LPGA Tour average driver attack angle

Put the two sets of numbers together for scale. TrackMan's tour averages put the PGA Tour 6-iron at 3.7 degrees down and the LPGA Tour at 2.3 degrees down, a gap of 1.4 degrees. At Young's iron ratio that whole gap is worth under an inch of ball position. The driver averages sit further apart, 0.9 degrees down against 2.8 up, and 3.7 degrees comes out near four inches at the driver's one-to-one.

The tours do not differ because of where they place the ball; TrackMan lists the swing centre and the hands at impact alongside ball position as things that produce an attack angle. Read the ratio as a conversion, not a cause. Half an inch of drift with a 6-iron is three quarters of a degree, half that tour gap, and it arrives without anything feeling different.

Questions

Will moving the ball back stop me hitting it fat?: It changes where the club reaches the ground relative to the ball, and steepens the attack angle by a degree and a half per inch with a 6-iron. It does not move the low point itself, which travels with your chest and has its own guide. If the chest hangs back, the fat shot comes with it.
Should ball position change with every club, or stay in one place?: Both schools have serious names behind them. Golf Distillery records Hogan, Nicklaus and Norman keeping the ball forward for everything, widening the stance instead. PGA Play teaches the progressive version, driver forward, wedge central. No published measurement settles the increments, so pick one, film it, and judge it on where the club meets the ground.
Can I check ball position on a down-the-line video?: Not reliably. Filmed along the target line, the ball sits almost behind your hands and the distance you want runs straight away from the lens, where a flat picture reports least. Face-on is the frame that shows it, and the choice of camera angle has its own guide.
Does ball position change the clubface?: No. Where the face points is set by your grip and by how you aim the club behind the ball, and sliding the ball along the target line does not rotate it. The path moves instead: behind the low point it runs rightward, forward of it leftward. The face-to-path gap changes, so the curve does.
Why does one position feel right with a 7-iron and wrong with a wedge?: Two things stack. The wedge runs on a steeper plane, so each inch of ball position buys more attack angle than with a longer club. The stance also narrows, which shifts the centre of your stance underneath you while the ball stays put. Measuring against your sternum removes the second problem.

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these.