I should’ve paid closer attention in high school art class, because it could’ve helped me aim better. Here’s why:
Look at the set of train tracks below. They run parallel to each other, but as they extend into the distance, they converge into one point—a vanishing point.
In reality the train tracks don’t converge. It just looks like they do when you place the scene on a 2D image.
What does this have to do with golf? Well, because you can fall into the same trap looking at your golf swing.
First, no, you don’t need to align your feet parallel to the target line. Chris Gotterup famously stands open, and so did Lee Trevino.
Lots of older golfers prefer to stand slightly closed, because it can promote more rotation.
But generally speaking, a standard neutral setup position means setting up the clubface so it’s pointing to the target, then aligning your feet, hips and shoulders parallel to that.
It’s why you see so many players putting an alignment stick down on their foot line. It’s a good thing to work on.
The problem comes when you try to check this on video, because this vanishing point effect can give you the illusion that your feet and body are aiming more to the right. Aligning what looks parallel on video is actually aimed to the right. As this image from Golf Digest Best in State teacher Adam Young shows:
It’s also why in the image below of Justin Thomas, it looks like his feet are aiming slightly to the right even though he’s literally got an alignment stick on the ground.
I fell into this trap recently until Golf Digest Best in State teacher Adam Young explained it to me. If you’re interested and want to go deeper, he wrote about it on his site also built a really cool tool to illustrate this concept, which you can check out here.