Stance width is the Goldilocks problem of surfing, and most surfers are living at one of the extremes without knowing it.

Too narrow — feet closer than your shoulders — and you're a pencil balanced on its tip. Every ripple in the wave becomes a balance event, because a narrow base gives you almost no margin before your center of mass slips outside your feet. Narrow-stance surfers do a lot of arm-waving and can't say why.

Too wide, and you've traded that tippiness for a different tax: you're planted like a road cone, stable but stuck. A very wide stance locks your hips, and locked hips can't do the two things riding requires — shifting weight along the board for trim, and compressing-extending for speed. Wide-stance surfers feel solid and go nowhere.

The target sits in the middle: shoulder-width or a touch wider, back foot over the fins, front foot near center. Wide enough to give your balance real margin, narrow enough that your hips stay free to move. From that base, knees bent around 45 degrees, you can absorb chop, shift your weight, and pump — the stance is a platform for movement, not just a way of not falling.

Here's the part that changes how you fix it: your stance width isn't chosen, it's landed. Wherever your feet touch down at the end of the pop-up is where they stay — almost nobody repositions mid-ride, because mid-ride there's no spare attention to reposition with. So a narrow or wide stance is really a pop-up landing pattern, printed onto every wave you catch. The width you land is the width you ride, which is also why it's so measurable: stance width is one of the first things CoachVision measures from a clip, and it tends to be remarkably consistent wave to wave — the same landing, faithfully reproduced.

Trainable, then, in the same place all landing patterns are trained: on your floor.

The drill is Land Pop-up Reps, 20 to 30 a day. Tape a board outline on the floor, and mark your two foot targets on it — back foot over the imaginary fins, front foot near center, the gap between them at shoulder-width or a touch more. Measure it once against your actual shoulders so the tape is honest.

Chest down, palms under your shoulders, then pop to your stance in ONE motion — no knees touching — and land on the marks. Freeze for a beat and check: did the feet hit the targets, or did they land in the old width? A miss isn't a lost rep; it's the drill working. Reset, pop again, let the tape do the coaching.

Twenty to thirty reps a day, and within a couple of weeks the marks become unnecessary — your feet will find that width in the dark, which is effectively what they're doing out on a wave anyway.

Small adjustment, big ceiling. Get the platform right and everything you build on top of it gets easier.