Golfer, forget about maximizing your potential if you don ’t want to bother with golf specific fitness. Golf is a sport that requires you to be in good physical shape. Its primary demands on your physique are dynamic strength and flexibility -- the kind that you obtain from a training program that is tailored toward achieving golf specific fitness.
Let’s put modesty aside for a moment and engage in some "arrogant" fantasizing. Picture yourself blowing the socks off your playing partners as you walk off the golf course after winning another round.
Instead of hitting the 19th hole as the other members of your foursome do, you spend the moment doing post-game stretches, getting yourself ready for the next round, and for more swings at speeds higher than 100 mph. Impossible? Not if you train with golf specific fitness in mind.
Your golf specific fitness program will consist of stretching and other exercises meant to condition your body to unleash your swing’s power when it counts, right at the moment when the club hits the golf ball. That is how specific, or tailored, your program should be!
You’d think that gaining such prodigious power will require two hours of heavy workout in the gym daily. Not so! All your golf specific fitness training demands of you is 30 minutes at home (or in the office, if possible), using only the simplest of sports equipment.
Of course, you’ll have to be consistent if you want to see results. Anything that requires long-term commitment doesn’t come easy, even something as simple as your golf specific fitness training.
However, abandoning your regimen would be a pity indeed if you ever come to such a point. You’ll be missing out on the health benefits of golf specific fitness as well. The very large number of baby boomers who have chosen golf as their idea of healthy recreation for quality life can’t all be on the wrong track.
Golf specific fitness training equipment generally used are stability balls and medicine balls, exercise tubings and free weights. Movements and drills relate mostly to your golf swing and are designed to develop coordination, stability, and sense of balance. A great deal of attention is devoted to timing -- the ability to unleash maximum power right at the moment the club hits the ball.
Increasing strength for your swing is a goal, but no heavy weights are required. The approach to developing strength for the golf swing is unique, and is not accomplished using a general fitness program. That’s precisely why the training is dubbed "golf specific."
Emphasis is on rotational strength and flexibility. The golf swing is, after all, a rotational movement. To achieve greater driving distance, torque for more potential force and impeccable timing in the unleashing of that force during the swing should be developed.
Training for core rotational movements is often done with added resistance. Certain positions are assumed when the movements are practiced: seated on a stability ball, standing erect and occasionally on one leg, as well as in the customary posture taken when about to swing a club.
There are certain exercises that fall under the general fitness category, which are, unfortunately, applied by some personal trainers on their golfer clients. I’ve seen trainers make their trainees do bicep curls or chest presses on weight training machines.
Do you grip the club with curled wrists, and would you swing the club lying down rather than on your feet? What needless excursions out of the range of golf specific fitness programs these exercises are!
Enough driving power to last 18 holes. Greater consistency
in your swing. Yards added to your driving distance.
Significantly lowered incidence of injury. These are
some of the happy outcomes you can expect from a golf
specific fitness training program. Golfer, aren’t
these reasons enough for you to take up such a program
for yourself?
For more Golf Fitness information , read the Perform Better Golf Blog, published daily by Mike Pedersen.
About the Author: Mike Pedersen is one of the top golf fitness trainers and golf conditioning experts in the country, author of the Ultimate Golf Fitness Manual, and founder of several online golf fitness and exercise websites.
Check out his golf exercise dvds, training programs, and workout products, and his new and proven Golf Fitness System, specifically designed to improve golf specific strength, flexibility, coordination, and overall golf swing mechanics!
