Warm-up golf exercises
It.s time for golf!
With the end of lockdown in sight and the summer months just around the corner, golf season is in full swing. It’s time to hit the greens but you don’t want to take it too fast and be unprepared for tee time.
Pre-season exercises play a vital role in helping to prevent injury and help you perform to your full potential on the golf course. These should involve stability and mobility exercises and general cardiovascular conditioning. Mobility exercises should focus on the hips and thoracic spine or mid-back. Stability exercises should include the glutes, lumbar spine, and shoulder/scapular muscles. It is also important to have a base of cardiovascular fitness, especially if you normally walk as opposed to using a golf cart.
Exercises prior to playing golf or hitting the driving range involve dynamic movements that focus on those particular areas of the body which play a vital role in your performance. First you should do full body movements to increase your heart rate/blood flow (eg., jumping jacks, jogging on the spot).
That should be followed by exercises such as:
- trunk rotations in golf posture
- leg swings forward/back and side to side
- hip openers
- lunges with rotations of torso
- arm circles
Warming-up is important to increase circulation and therefore heart rate to prepare your body physically and mentally for playing and training. The golf swing is an explosive movement requiring the coordination of many different muscles and if you are not adequately warmed up you are more susceptible to injury.
Just as important as the warm-up, is properly stretching after your round of golf. Static stretching is most effective afterwards and should include the following muscle groups: hamstrings, hip flexor/quads, glutes, lats dorsi, lumbar spine muscles and upper back muscles
Once the season has started some of the same exercises that you were doing in pre-season could be done during the season. However, because you are now in the maintenance stage of your exercise program, you could decrease the number of reps or frequency of days that you are exercising. Areas to continuously focus on are the hips and thoracic spine for mobility and the glutes, lumbar spine and shoulder/scapular muscles for stability.