Improve your golf swing – see a physio!

Improve performance, hit the ball further, more accurately and consistently with less chance of injury by making connecting your core an important focus of training.

This blog post was originally published on Sport Med BC and is an edited excerpt from Fit to Play™ Golf-Improve Fitness & Lower Your Score (Nittinger & Petersen, 2018)

Historically many golfers avoided traditional strength training methods fearing it would slow down their swing and make them too muscular interfering with the suppleness needed to perform on course. The changing nature and demands of the modern game mean that golfer’s need to be more powerful and stronger than past players.

For a beginning player getting an early start on your golf strength and stability training program will help you create a healthy, aligned, balanced base on which to build the fundamentals of a good consistent swing. It will also help you stay pain and injury-free. For players that are more mature, it is never too late to address the potential physical imbalances that have occurred with years of working and playing. Proper golf-specific fitness also helps give you a significant competitive advantage and lowers your handicap.

Swinging the golf club involves movements that pass through many planes of motion and create rotational and torsional forces on numerous joints and muscles at the same time. The sequence of the swing should be pushing from the ground up, firing your dominant side and leading with the legs and lower core. You then transfer and funnel the energy and power through the upper core and arms to the club. If a golfer’s alignment, balance control, connected core stability, deceleration strength and extended hip stability are not optimal, they may be at risk of injury during their swing. When designing strength and stability training programs for golfers one must keep these specific directions of movement and additional needs in mind for the different physical components.

If you’d like to improve your golf swing, book an appointment with our physiotherapists or kinesiologist to get some golf-specific exercise prescriptions.