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 By: Craig Ballantyne Bill Hartman is your Golf Fitness Coach! He's also a guy that trains hard and knows a lot about training athletes, with a true specialization in golfers. Bill is also writing an upcoming article for grrlAthlete.com on training issues for the female golfer. Let's hear some of Bill's secrets...
So if you were introduced to golf at a relatively young age, played a variety of different sports growing up to develop your overall athleticism, and maintained or improved your physical conditioning throughout your lifetime, you: Now we certainly cannot go back to your past and change the first two factors, but we can certainly change a golfer's level of physical conditioning.
Most of these compensations are what we call swing faults. So right away, you can see how powerful a properly designed conditioning program can be for a golfer. Instead of performing endless "drills" to correct a fault with limited success, we can actually go to the cause of the fault and literally fix it because it is more often than not an issue of golf-specific flexibility rather than skill.
Flexibility training is directed toward increasing joint range of motion which may or may not include stretching exercises, but also includes exercises that alter the nervous system control of the muscles to allow greater motion to take place in the joints. So to get back to your question, some of my golfers do stretching exercise and some don't, but all of my golfers do some form of flexibility training. There are three types of flexibility you want to address with golfers:
For instance, it's not uncommon for me to test a golfer's flexibility with standardized testing and find no significant limitations in range of motion. However, when you look at his or her swing you may see any number of ranges of motion limitations that relate to swing faults or performance issues. A lot of things change when a golfer is exposed to the speed and forces involved in the golf swing. This is where the altering of the nervous system comes into play. It may be an issue of developing strength or accommodating a muscle to a higher rate of contraction at the end range of a movement to allow the body to go there. This is where general fitness programs tend to fail golfers. They just don't address their specific needs based on the demands of the sport.
I have them stand up. How's that for a training secret? Seriously, about 85-90% of the exercises I prescribe for golfers are done on their feet. Every time they squat, bend, pull on a cable, lift a dumbbell, press a weight overhead, stretch a band, or throw a ball we're getting a training effect on the trunk musculature from a variety of angles just by doing the activities in a standing position. This approach also forces golfers to forcefully resist rotation which is just as important as generating forceful rotation. Nothing I've ever done works better to increase performance and create injury resistant golfers. Coming from a physical therapy background, I kind of followed the crowd with the stability balls, foam rollers, and some other gadgets which was okay, but it certainly didn't get my golfers to the level of performance they were looking for. I think those things have a place in rehab; but when it comes to performance training, they have very little use.
 The Green Beckons... Okay, free secret! While the abdominals are certainly important and should be emphasized to some extent in training, golfers need to emphasize the posterior chain musculature even more. If you want to increase your driving distance, strengthen your lats, lower back, glutes, and hamstrings. Preferably in combination as much as possible. This actually goes for just about any rotational sport. I've also made some minor modifications to some popular strength exercises like dumbbell rows, I call them Golfer's Rows (catchy, huh?), and cable PNF patterns to make them more of a whole body exercise and really emphasize the diagonal relationships of the posterior chain musculature. We can also do these at a variety of speeds to emphasize power-related issues. All my golfers also spend some time during the year doing some foundational strength work using standard barbell exercises like standing presses, squats, rows, etc. By broadening their foundational strength, they are able to tolerate some pretty intense exercise which really drives their performance to new levels.
I know what you're thinking. How can this be? A round of golf can last 4 hours, surely that requires endurance. Well, yes it does, but if you read the research, golf requires a very average level of aerobic capacity.
In most studies, the participants didn't achieve an aerobic training effect even if they had an underlying cardiac condition. There is some great info dating back to 1974 that shows the energy system usage for golf is comparative to that of weightlifting, volleyball, and short-term track and field events. So why would I recommend any significant aerobic energy system training? I don't... usually. The exception to the rule is with a client who is so sedentary in his or her lifestyle that they cannot walk 4 miles at a 1 mile per hour pace. That's how taxing golf is to your aerobic capacities. Very few clients that I have encountered in my career are that sedentary.
Remember when you took the SAT's to get ready for college? Four straight hours of challenging testing with maybe one "potty break" in the whole thing. Were you tired when you got finished? You bet you were. Why? Was it because you lacked "cardiovascular endurance"? No, your brain was tired. From a mental aspect, golf is very much like taking a four hour test with the benefit of some nice scenery. Ever go to Disneyland? What do you do there? You stand in line... all day. Are you tired at the end of the day? Of course! Why? If you read the research about how we maintain standing posture, you'll find that most of the fatigue we experience is due to loading of inert (non-contractile) tissues while maintaining an upright posture. Not muscular fatigue. I used to tend bar when I was in college. Working a full shift would wipe me out faster than a hard, two-hour workout in the gym. Hey, just ask anyone who works the checkout at Wal-Mart if they get tired. Do they tax their energy systems? Nope. They stand all day in one place and load their non-contractile structures... just like golfers! Do baseball pitchers get tired? Yep. Why? Because they repetitively perform maximum and near maximum efforts to throw a baseball. Now swinging a golf club produces about 90% of peak muscle activity for each full swing. Depending on how well you play you may make as many as 40-50 full swings and 100 total swings in a round. That accumulates fatigue. Put all these things together, and you could have yourself one tired golfer.
Practice efficiently. By making golf practice sessions similar in timing and loads by keeping track of effort and number of swings, you can develop some very specific golf endurance. Each round that you play also contributes to your golf-specific endurance.
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Let's make a quick distinction between stretching and flexibility training. Stretching is directed toward changing the structural extensibility of the muscle complex (muscle and associated connective tissue). In other words, we're trying to make the tissues stretch farther than they already do.
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