Lowering your handicap

Every golfer would love to lower their handicap and play injury free. This is best achieved by working with your golf pro on technical improvements, while a Lifestyle Fitness trainer can provide you with functional exercise program specific to your game and to your physical needs.

Flexibility – a balancing act

Stretching allows the development and maintenance of optimal joint range of motion in the golfer’s body. Tissue that affects a golfer’s swing are muscles, tendons, ligaments and joint capsules surrounding the joints involved. When there is a limited range of motion in one tissue (e.g. scapulothoracic joint) another tissue will compensate (e.g. glenohumeral joint) and this will affect your swing – usually in a negative way.

Stretching

A generic stretching program is not useful for a golfer. If a muscle is tight it should be stretched, but if it is of normal length there is not need to stretch it. How can we determine what muscles should be stretched? Only a complete golf assessment will identify the muscles that need to be lengthened.

Functional Exercise

Functional exercise are designed to restore, balance, lengthen, strengthen and co-ordinate movement patterns specific to golf. It will integrate the whole body. It will strengthen the important areas that will decrease the risk of injury and remove some of the poor movement patterns that effect golf – such as postural sway. Here the focus is on static and dynamic stability.

Strength Training

Increasing our strength to hit the ball further is desirable, but being ‘big’ or ‘strong’ doesn’t necessarily mean we will hit the ball further and with more control. We need to be strong in the right places and, more importantly, strong in the movements that will determine how well we hit the ball. Strength training exercises, together with functional exercises, are designed to get you moving with similar movement patterns found in golf to be strong in the right way – hitting the ball further, with more control and less chance of injury. The focus is upon golf strength.

Power Training

Once the building blocks have been put in place, we can develop power to hit the ball further. Here adaptations specific to golfing movements will be developed. Exercises that continue to develop movement skill, balance, co-ordination and speed will be used. Here we will develop power in our hips, trunk and rotator cuff muscles.

Warming up for golf

Make time before your round for a proper warm up. After all, the All Blacks do along with any other of today’s leading sports stars! A well structured and performed warm up prepares the body for the dynamic movements ahead by lubricating the joints, warming the muscles and other connective tissue, activating our nervous system and sharpening our senses.

So in a nutshell … a proper warm up will improve your game!

Contact Theo now about how he can help