Off Season Golf Fitness - up here in the Ohio Valley area (Western Pennsylvania) the weather has changed over to fall time. Although yesterday the temperature was in the mid-70's the golf season has pretty much wound down to the few die hards that will play in just about any weather.
The golf clubs usually go into the storage shed, garage or basement at this time of year and the season is over for most recreational golfers. Most golfers will not touch a golf club until early spring.
As a golfer you are missing out on a 3-4 month period where you can improve your golf performance tremendously. Invest the time each week you would have played or practiced golf and devote it to a simple but effective golf fitness plan. If you played one round of golf per week that would be 4 hours of time, invest half that to a golf fitness routine and your game performance will improve once next golf season comes back around.
So what do you concentrate on in a golf fitness routine? The full golf swing is one of the most explosive movements in all of sports. You are moving a very light object (the golf club) very quickly from, 0 miles per hour to 80+ miles per hour back to 0 miles per hour, in one fourth of a second. This take a very coordinated effort that puts the body under a tremendous amount of stress. The golf swing is a very complex full body motion that demands all elements of fitness be present.
The Five Elements of Golf Fitness are: Mobility, Stability, Balance/Body Awareness, Strength and Power. The elements are sequential and go in the order from M-S-B-St-P. We must work train in the proper sequence. It does a golfer no good if we get stronger in our upper body but lack the mobility to make a proper shoulder turn. Like wise, we can be as flexible as Gumby, but lack the stability to transfer forces efficiently from our lower body through our torso to generate club head speed and power. Until we can control our balance our strength does us little good in the golf swing. A graceful yet powerful golf swing is the blending of all five of the elements of golf fitness.
We work mobility first, then stability, then balance, then strength and then power......
Before we even start a golf fitness routine it makes sense to set a base line. We use a functional movement system (FMS) to screen movement patterns then prescribe the proper corrective exercise movements to build a very functional golfer. The FMS will give us a starting point, it is a simple 7 step movement screen that assess the golfers ability to move in fundamental patterns. We can determine if any dysfunction or asymmetries exist in the golfer from this screen. Then we can prescribe the proper correctives. The beauty is we can re-screen to see if the correctives are accomplishing the goal of removing the dysfunction or asymmetry. This is not unlike taking golf lessons, the teacher first assesses your swing and then suggests drills, you work on the drills and re-assess the results, changing where necessary to accomplish the goal.
A lot of times golf instructors tell me they can't fix a persons golf swing because the golfer lacks the physical attributes, such as mobility, to perform the movements necessary. This were a proper movement screen and a proper golf fitness plan will pay huge dividends for a golfer.
