Golf is often considered a passive sport, not requiring much physical fitness. However, the truth is that playing golf involves cardiovascular, strength, balance, and coordination exercises, among others.
Even factors such as posture and how your body moves can impact your golf game. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Kiran Mistry, the founder of The Golf Athlete brand and the fitness coach for the Vietnamese golf team at the 2022 SEA Games. With his industry experience, we, along with Kiran, aim to provide golfers with insights into the importance and benefits of golf fitness.
So, what is Golf Fitness?
Golf Fitness is physical preparation for your body to play golf. Just like preparing for a race or training for a sport, your body needs preparation before playing golf.
For professional golf athletes, golf fitness can also be seen as maintaining physical condition for peak performance not only in a single round but throughout the entire season. For amateur golfers, golf fitness allows you to have the necessary range of motion for consistent club swings and minimizes the risk of injury. Therefore, regardless of your skill level, every golfer can benefit from golf fitness.
What are the benefits of golf fitness?
Flexibility
Flexibility refers to the suppleness of an individual muscle or a group of muscles. When a joint contains a muscle or muscle group, it performs movements. Flexibility plays a crucial role in ensuring joint movement range, enabling efficient joint mobility, preventing stiffness, and promoting safety. Flexibility is essential in daily activities as well as in sports.
In the game of golf, how your body moves greatly affects your golf swing. Flexibility plays a key role in achieving the optimal posture and performing golf swings with efficiency and stability. It’s not just about the range of motion but also about how you move within that range.
You need to be in control of your body’s position to be aware of your posture at any given moment. This helps you swing with better precision. When considering the key movements in a golf swing, there are three main areas of influence:
- Spine: The upper back region of the spine is where the rotational movement is crucial to generate momentum when swinging the club backward. Without sufficient range of motion, golfers may find it challenging to fully rotate the club backward, leading to unnecessary movements, loss of posture, or a misplaced center of gravity.
- Shoulders: Shoulders are the most flexible joints in the body, but stability in these joints is what allows for comfortable movement. The external rotation force is crucial as it enables the club to be swung back properly while allowing for a coordinated downswing using the arms.
- Hips: Hips are where power is generated in the golf swing. If the hips lack the required range, flexibility, and mobility, golfers will struggle to maintain proper posture, execute a complete swing, and utilize the ground for generating power.
Inefficient movement in any of these areas can lead to compensatory factors in the swing, making it difficult to achieve consistent club swings. Furthermore, this can increase the risk of upper-body injuries.
Total Body Strength
Every golfer wants to hit the ball farther, and the debate between sacrificing accuracy for distance has been ongoing for a long time. However, few golfers realize that there’s a way to improve both aspects.
Better movement can enhance technique and allow for more fluid body control, but what helps increase clubhead speed is improving core and lower-body strength. Research has shown that by enhancing lower body strength, you can boost clubhead speed because it enables the transfer of more force from the ground to the clubhead.
With appropriate exercises, you can develop core stability, enabling you to control force and speed when swinging the club faster.
Increased clubhead speed = more distance = fewer clubs needed = increased accuracy on the green = shorter putts = fewer putts = better overall score.
Movement Efficiency
Movement efficiency is the optimal execution of movements or exercises to minimize energy expenditure. In the context of golf, movement efficiency plays a critical role but is often overlooked by golfers.
Whether in practice or playing on the course, a golfer’s energy is limited and tends to wane towards the latter holes, leading to less effective shots in the final stretch, loss of concentration, and even injuries.
Efficient movement helps conserve energy and allows golfers to maintain their performance and focus throughout the entire round.
So, we always aim to optimize our strength and focus on each shot, ensuring that shots requiring extra effort on the later holes still maintain the same level of power and accuracy as those on the early holes. Additionally, effective muscle training helps golfers achieve a balanced physique, improve posture, enhance physical fitness, combat aging, and extend their golf-playing years.
Minimizing and Preventing Injuries
We hope you’ll agree that this is perhaps the most significant reason and benefit for golfers participating in a training program.
Nothing is worse than leaving the golf course with a sore back or having to take one or two pain relievers after each round just to make it through comfortably. Pain not only affects your performance but also impacts other aspects of your health and quality of life.
If your body is weak or compensating for inefficient movements, playing golf can exacerbate these issues. This can affect your performance or, worse yet, lead to injuries that sideline you until you fully recover.
Strengthening and mobilizing the necessary body parts and regions can help prevent injuries and enhance your long-term endurance in the game and your overall performance. If you are truly committed to the sport of golf and want to enjoy it more, or if you seek the benefits of improving the areas mentioned above, consider reaching out to golf fitness experts. They can provide guidance on a training program and make the most of the upcoming winter season to get your body in better shape.
