I get asked all the time ‘what exercises should I be doing to improve my golf?’ and it’s a rather difficult question to answer. It’s a bit like asking ‘what should I eat every day?’ or ‘what time should I go to bed?’ Everyone is different.
My recommendations always start with building a baseline. Develop a basic level of flexibility, a basic level of generic strength and start working on cardiovascular fitness. A bit like in a PE class back at school, start with some static stretches and improve flexibility in all areas. Fitness wise, increasing the amount of time you elevate your heart rate is highly recommended, golf does this but at a low intensity, therefore pushing yourself off the golf course is important. Although golf is traditionally seen as an aerobic exercise requiring good cardiovascular endurance to get us round the golf course, it also requires an element of explosiveness whilst swinging the club, therefore learning to move quickly, with force and agility is also highly recommended.
Once baseline levels have been achieved (gotten to the point where you feel you are fairly flexible and fit) you can then start moving into the golf specific exercises. Sport specific exercises should revolve around the muscles and movements we make playing the sport we love. Breakdown the specific aspects of a golf swing and you’ll soon figure out what areas of your body and movement you should be focusing on. Lower body for example – squatting, pushing, transferring weight, rotating, jumping, balance, stability and more…you can breakdown these movements into the muscles involved and how they work in the swing and start strengthening them. From there you can then look at your areas of strength and weakness and start to build a plan of attack.
To you get started with some easy golf specific exercises, the following website has loads of good info with all the equipment you’ll need plus advice on technique.
Best advice:
- Start by building some kind of generic flexibility, strength and fitness.
- Listen to your body – slowly build up what you do, push yourself too hard to begin with and you’ll cause injuries.
- Don’t start including golf specific exercises until you have spoken to a professional.
- Never be scared to ask for help – no question is too silly.
- Quality over quantity – should be followed in every aspect of golf
- Good technique > heavy weights
- Mobilise then stabilise – make sure you can move well first.
- Moving little and often is better than nothing – every little helps
As always, please get in touch if you want more information or help on any of the above. My blog posts will hopefully help to get the ball rolling with these topics, I can help further privately.
Andy
Andy Thorne - PGA Professional 