Getting Golf Fit
Fixing Your Body to Fix Your Golf Swing
Have you ever wondered why, after taking multiple golf lessons, that you still aren’t able attain certain required positions in your golf swing? Or why your swing sequence continues to be off? Or why you are losing your posture and early extending? Or why you just can’t add those extra yards to your drives that you’d like? Try as you might, you just can’t seem to get the golf swing that you and your instructor are working so hard on. Well, perhaps it’s not the instructor or the knowledge the instructor imparts that’s holding your back; perhaps it’s your body that’s not providing the structural support that you need for an efficient, repeatable, and powerful golf swing.
If you feel you are alone here you are not. Touring pros are constantly in search of that “little extra something” that they need to reach their full potential and the top of the money list. And to that end, they are increasingly looking to golf biomechanics for that answer.
What is biomechanics? Biomechanics is the study of how forces exerted both internally (by the muscles) and externally (by gravity) affect the skeletal system. The golf swing is an incredibly complex motion that requires almost every part of the body to work together in sequence and in harmony. If parts of the body aren’t up to the challenge, there’s no harmony. The swing suffers resulting in poorer shots and shorter distances. One should not expect the body to support a club-head speed of 100 mile per hour, if it’s only capable of supporting one of 70 mile per hour. Something has to give, and it’ll either be poor ball flight, shorter distance, or body injury.
In this extensive web page, we’ll focus on physical issues that prevent you from having a good golf swing, along with prescriptions and exercises to help you fix those physical issues if they exist in your golf swing. The prescriptions and exercises in these pages do not require any heavy lifting, nor are they about losing unwanted fat, or dropping weigh, or developing significant strength. To start, you’ll take each assessment to determine your physical problem area. Then when you have identified your problem areas you’ll incorporate the prescriptions recommended for those problem areas into your own workout routine. Lastly, we’ll supplement those prescriptions with the other recommended exercises.
What you’ll need for assessments and prescriptions: A sixty-five-centimeter stability ball, an eight-pound medicine ball (with or without handles), a pair of 5 pound dumbbells, and a golf club.
Assessment section
Let’s first start with your self assessment. There are 6 assessments that you’ll do to determine where your body needs to be fixed (if necessary) to support an efficient and powerful golf swing. Each video in the following section will walk you through how to perform the assessment.
Be very honest when doing our assessments. If you cheat you are only cheating yourself! Make a list of all the assessments that you fail and note how you failed them. You’ll need to come back to those notes in 3 months to see how you’ve progressed.
Assessment Introduction
Check out the video above/left for an introduction to the assessments we’ll be doing. I’m using myself as a guinea pig (so the speak) and as you’ll see I have multiple issues to address.
Shoulder Rotation Assessment
Your ability to get the club head back a few extra degrees will let you generate more power and club head speed through your downswing and through impact. In addition, it’s important to be able to control and stop your club during your follow-through. If you have limited rotation around the shoulder, that limitation will affect both of these abilities. Players of all skill levels have trouble with tightness in the shoulders. This assessment will let you know how well your shoulders rotate. Click on the video above/left to see how to do it.
If you weren’t able to get both of your hands individually—and then together—to rotate back so you could touch the wall without any of the compensations occurring, then you’ll need to add the prescription exercises that will open up your shoulders.
Upper Body Rotation Assessment
If you have limited rotation with your upper body, you’re going to start to swing more and more with your arms. At the top of your back-swing, you may think you’re rotating and turning correctly, but since that rotation is limited, you’re really just using your arms. Now, when you swing, you’ve taken yourself out of true rotation—out of plane. What commonly happens when you’re out of plane is that you can’t square the club at impact. If your ball is finding everywhere but the center of the fairway, it may be because you have limited upper-body rotation.
If you weren’t able to rotate your shoulders to 90 degrees both in the back swing and through swing, without moving the hips much, then you have limited upper-body rotation and you’ll need to add the prescription exercises to also open up your shoulders.
Lower Body Rotation Assessment
Now we’re going to check how much separation you have between your upper and lower body. During the golf swing, a lack of adequate separation will limit how far you can confidently and stably rotate in both your back-swing and follow-through. This will limit your ability to generate power through your downswing and greatly reduce your accuracy at impact.
Could you get your knees to drop to the side? Were you able to keep your shoulders on the floor? If you can’t answer yes to both questions, you’re ready to let the lower body rotation exercises help you add distance and accuracy to your game.
Pelvic Tilt and Posture Assessment
The key to a consistent and repeatable swing is being able to maintain a proper spine angle on your first shot, your twenty-second shot, your fifty-third shot, etc. And the key to a consistent spine angle is strength and stability in the pelvis. If you can’t control your pelvis— get it to tilt forward and back when you want it to—you end up with a false spine angle. Your shoulders may be where they need to be at address, but they’re only there because you’ve rounded your back—not because you flexed strongly and confidently at the hips. With a C-shaped posture, you can’t stay in plane through impact, and that affects your accuracy. You’ll have no idea where your ball is heading. Heck, you might just as well close your eyes and throw a dart at a picture of a golf course. Let’s check your command of your pelvis!
If you weren’t able to tilt your pelvis forward and back comfortably—and without the rest of your body moving—you need to check out the exercises in this section. These will help you understand what it takes to control the pelvis and allow you to swing with a truer spine angle and with better accuracy.
Balance Assessment
Most people don’t think that balance plays much of a role in golf, but if you don’t have a strong sense of balance and body awareness, it’s going to greatly affect your swing. As you head through your downswing and into impact at full speed, you have to be 100 percent sure where you stand in the universe. If you’re not sure whether your weight is moving forward or backward or to the side, an internal survival mechanism kicks in. You begin to decelerate far sooner than you want to because your body is more concerned with not falling over than it is with finding the fairway with your ball. When you decelerate early, you lose club head speed and power. You lose distance. Balance equals distance. Let’s check your balance.
Golfers are great compensators. While going through these assessments, you may have noticed the many ways your body compensates for certain weaknesses. What’s nice about this balance assessment is that there’s no real way for your body to compensate. You can either stand on one foot—or you can’t. Falling down isn’t really a form of compensation. If you found yourself staggering around, don’t worry. Remember, just like strength, and endurance, you improve your balance by working on it.
Full-Body Strength & Coordination Assessment
Parts of your body may be strong and stable individually, and parts may be loose and flexible. For the golf swing to happen as it should, all of your parts have to work together. If you can’t coordinate the many parts of your body and have them do the things that you want them to do, you can’t get the club to do what you want it to do. This assessment is the most challenging. It’s also the most telling. You will learn a lot about your body from this one.
While your body had virtually no way to compensate for lack of balance in assessment five—other than to just fall over—you may find no shortage of ways to compensate to try to look like the pictures in assessment six. If you were unable to drop into a squat so that your knees were bent at ninety-degree angles, that tells you that you have strength and flexibility issues in your lower body. If you were unable to raise the club directly over your head—or couldn’t do it without your elbows bending or your upper body pitching forward—that tells you that you have tightness in your upper body.
Prescription section
Now it’s time to go to the prescriptions. Here you’ll find specific exercises that you need to do to correct whatever problems or limitations were revealed in the assessments. Each assessment has only three or four corrective exercises. You will not be spending all day in the gym or at home working out. These few simple exercises will let you fix your body without forcing you to give up much of your time.
Each video will provide you with on how to perform the the corrective exercises properly. In addition, the narrative accompanying each video will provide you with the science behind what you’re doing. You’ll understand some of the biology and physics behind what the exercises accomplish, what muscles are involved in the various movements, and their roles are in your golf game. This is all to provide you with some serious appreciation of the smaller muscles in the hips, core, and shoulders—muscles you’ve probably never even heard of before.
In each prescription I’ll reference a YouTube video that describes and demonstrate the issue you might have in more detail, and then show you the swing fix to correct that issue. But as discussed previously, showing you the swing fix, doesn’t mean that you can fix your issue without first fixing your body as necessary.
Shoulder Rotation Prescriptions
What happens if you can’t rotate your shoulder to the extent that the assessment asked you to do? The accompanying video by Chris Ryan on the left explains and shows all that. If you have shoulder rotation issues, the faults that Chris demonstrates might look a lot like your swing. If you like this video, consider subscribing to his channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisRyanGolf.
Personally I have an external shoulder rotator issue that I’m working on, and it adds to the reasons why I tend to hit the ball to my left (I’m right handed) and have to make inefficient downswing adjustments to compensate.
Loose and strong rotators will let you take advantage of a long, full, and coordinated back-swing for that extra distance, and keep you in balance and your club-face square at impact. They will also help you to complete your follow-through so you won’t have to decelerate early and sacrifice club head speed at impact.
Warming Up
Before getting started with the shoulder and upper body rotation prescriptions, it’s highly recommended that you perform a dynamic warmup to get those areas of the body adequately prepared to perform those prescriptions provided below effectively and efficiently. See video on the left to understand why the dynamic warmup provided is better than a static stretch warmup to get ready for performing exercise more specific to the golf swing.
Horizontal Shoulder Abduction
This exercise is an assisted version of the shoulder-rotation movement from the assessment section. Here, we’re using the floor the stabilize and isolate my shoulder position so that I am able to perform the exercise correctly. This completely isolates the rotational motion without having to worry about the arm having to stabilize itself. You’ll be able to concentrate on the movement that you need to do and not have to concentrate on keeping your upper arm parallel to the floor or keeping your elbow from moving during the motion. It’ll let you really understand what it feels like to use your external rotators.
External Shoulder Rotation
This is another great exercise for strengthening your external rotators. You’ll be able to get a slightly greater range of motion around the shoulder than in the first exercise. There, you were limited to 90 degrees of movement. Here, you’ll be able to get things into the 110-to-125-degree area. What we’re looking for is not only to strengthen your rotators, but to get them to move comfortably through a greater range of motion.
That said; don’t try to take them through a larger movement at the expense of proper technique. Ultimately, the goal is to get you to reduce the number of compensations that your body is forced to make on the golf course. You’re not going to get there if you begin making compensations in the weight room. If you stick with the program, you will develop greater range of motion around the shoulders.
Internal Shoulder Rotation
Fitness is about balance, that is, how most muscles and muscle groups have opposing muscles and muscle groups. One muscle will move the body one way, and the opposing muscle will move it the other way. It creates balance and stability for your body’s infrastructure and helps you to stay healthy and injury-free.
So, while we’ve primarily been concerned with your body’s ability to externally rotate the arms at the shoulder, we also need to make sure that your body is just as adept at internally rotating the arms at the shoulder as well. An easy and simple exercise will make sure that you’re taking care of your internal rotators.
Because your internal rotators are stronger than your external rotators, you’ll be able to use more tension when working them. You can either use a heavier cable weight or bigger band than you did for the standing external-rotation exercise.
Shoulder Stabilization on a Stability Ball
Not only are you strengthening your internal rotators by forcing them to hold a position against resistance, you’re loosening your external rotators by using the dumbbells as stretching aids. You may not have been able to get your arm to externally rotate ninety degrees on your own, but with the weight of the dumbbells helping out, you may find your shoulders opening up a little more.
Use a set of light dumbbells—five pounds each. If you decide you want to try this one with a pair of fifteen or twenty-pound dumbbells, you will hurt yourself. You’re doing these exercises because the assessment showed that your rotators are weak. If you attempt this exercise with anything heavier than five-pound dumbbells you will—at best—end up recruiting other muscles in and around the shoulder and not get the results you want or—at worst—have to schedule surgery. This is a fantastic exercise if you stick with the rules.
Upper Body Rotation Prescriptions
Your ability to rotate your upper and lower body during the golf course is very important. Your inability to rotate sufficiently will negatively impact your game in a number of ways. If you have a limited ability to rotate your upper body, you will compensate.
If you can’t rotate back very far you will raise your arms up. Instead of using your entire body to swing, you’re looking at a swing that’s going to be primarily driven by the arms. Once that happens, you’ve taken yourself out of plane, you can’t get a true rotation of the body through your downswing and into impact, and it’s going to be hard for you to square the club at ball strike.
On the downswing side, if your body can’t rotate properly post impact, you’re going to have to decelerate early to try to maintain your balance. Unfortunately, if it’s an arms-y swing, you’re going to be out of balance already. To try to regain balance from this front-foot-heavy position, you’ll try to shift weight to your back foot, leaning back and away from your target, creating trajectory problem where you are now more likely to pop the ball up instead of hitting it straight.
In the video by Chris Ryan on the left Chris will discuss the 3 movements of the upper body, what they look like and what they do. He’ll also demonstrate some of the issues that you might see in your golf swing. Again, if you like this video, consider subscribing to his channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisRyanGolf.
Generally, two things prevent you from being able to enjoy the required amount of upper body rotation around the spine: weakness in the muscles that actually rotate your body around the spine—the obliques, the semispinalis, the multifidus, and the rotatores, and tightness in the large muscles that make up the upper body—primarily the latissimus dorsi and the pectoralis major. These issues are addressed in this prescription.
Address to Backswing with Medicine Ball
We’ll start with a movement that will get your spinal rotators moving in a dynamic way that mimics the movements of the golf swing. This exercise will also help to get the large muscles of your back loose. The key is to keep your butt against the wall the entire time. This will secure one end of your axis line in place and give you a sense of what true rotation at the spine feels like. If you did this away from the wall, it would be too easy to compensate and give yourself a false sense of rotation. By keeping your butt against the wall and your spine angle strong throughout the motion, any movement you do will be pure rotation—with no compensations.
Impact to Follow Through with Medicine Ball
This is a similar move to the first exercise, but with an important difference. Here you’ll be taking your swing through impact and into a modified follow- through. Because your hip pivot will result in your butt coming away from the wall, it’s important that you stay aware of your spine angle; the wall won’t be serving as your training wheels throughout the entire motion, as it did in the first exercise.
Because adding the pivot is going to give you a greater overall rotation, you’ll feel a nice stretch through your middle and upper back. That’s a good thing. Remember, in addition to strengthening the muscles responsible for rotating the spine, we also want to make sure that the bigger, more superficial muscles of the upper body—such as your lats—get used to being taken through a greater range of motion. The ball will help. While initially it’ll require strength from your spinal rotators to get the ball in motion, once it’s moving, you’ll be able to use its momentum to assist you in getting a deep stretch for your back.
One Armed Address to Backswing with Bands
On the surface, this may seem a lot like the first prescription exercise in this section—just another simulated takeaway and backswing with something that’s clearly not a golf club. On further inspection, though, a lot more is going on.
Because you’re not against a wall, you’re responsible for creating and maintaining the proper angle of your spine throughout the entire motion. That kicks up the difficulty factor. More important, because you’re doing the movement with only one arm and away from a wall, you’ll be able to get a deeper rotation. Before, the wall and your left arm’s being of a fixed length prevented you from rotating beyond where your hands were at shoulder height. In this exercise, since you’ll be doing your takeaway with only your back hand, you’ll be able to go deeper. This will work your spinal rotators a little bit more, and you will feel a strong stretch across your pecs and the entire front side of your body.
One Armed Address to Follow Through with Bands
Because you’ll be simulating your swing though impact and continuing into your follow-through, you’ll be able to get a little bit more rotation thanks to the turning of the hips and the pivoting on the ball of your foot. This will allow you to get an even greater stretch across the front of your body. You should feel this stretch through your abs and chest and up into your armpits and shoulders. This is great for opening up the entire front of your body while strengthening spinal rotators.
The video on the left will be replaced with the one being developed for this prescription.
Lower Body Rotation Prescriptions
If you can’t get your lower body involved properly in your takeaway into your backswing, you end up becoming an upper-body-dominant player. When your lower body won’t rotate, you naturally compensate by forcing your upper body to do all of the work. The arms-y swing that results is going to lack power. It makes sense when you realize you’re only using half of your body to perform a full-body movement.
If you can’t get your lower body to shift and turn simultaneously, your timing is also going to be off. Your upper body and your lower body are going to be out of phase, and it will affect your balance. Once your balance and timing are thrown off, it becomes hard to sync everything up at impact. Usually your club-face won’t be squared or you won’t know if your club-face will be open or closed when you strike the ball. The everywhere-but-straight-ahead path of your ball will tell you if you were open or closed at impact.
The key to avoiding these problems is to get the muscles that make up the hips to be strong and loose. The more we can take things in that direction, the less of an upper-body player you’ll be. You’ll be able to strike the ball with more power. You’ll also be confident that the added distance that you’ll be getting from that power boost is distance in the correct direction.
On the left, Johnathon Kim-Moss provides a great video on lower body rotation and what it means to separate the lower body from the upper body throughout the golf swing. If you like this content, consider subscribing to Johnathon’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@JKMGolf. The inability to separate the lower and upper body is a very common problem with senior golfer.
Quad Stretch
Another stretching exercise that promotes opening of the hip flexors. Because we site a lot in front of the TV and the computer, our hip flexors shorten. By stretching the quad muscle, the hip flexors will start to lengthen and you’ll be able to turn better and clear those hips during the through swing.
Hip Turn with Medicine Ball
This is similar to the assessment test you did for checking lower-body rotation, but with one major difference that’s going to impact things in a couple of different ways. You’re going to do this exercise while holding a medicine ball between your knees. This means your hips will go through a slightly reduced range of motion. During the assessment, for example, you may have found that you were able to turn and drop your right leg to the side without your left shoulder coming up off the floor. When you tried to get your left leg to stack on top of your right leg, perhaps your shoulder got pulled off the floor. Here, because the ball is preventing your left leg from being able to stack directly on top of the right leg, you may find your body able to perform the move properly. Over time, it will lead to the loosening and lengthening of the muscles that were preventing you from passing the assessment.
The medicine ball will also strengthen your hips, spinal rotators, and core. You’re not simply just raising your legs from the side-turned position back to the knees-straight-up starting position—as you did in the assessment. Now, you’re dealing with eight pounds of resistance while you’re doing it. You also have to keep a firm squeeze on the medicine ball to hold it in place.
10:00 - 2:00 Roll Over with Stability Ball
This is a great movement that will really let you feel what it’s like to rotate your lower body. You’ll feel this deep into your glutes and into your lower back. If you get into this one, you’re going to want to start driving around with a stability ball wedged into your car. After a few hours behind the wheel, no stretch feels better for the body than this one.
On the strength and coordination side, having to control the ball will force you to recruit your hip abductors on the inside part of your upper thigh, as well as your hamstrings and even your calves. Any movement that gets all of these body parts to work together for a common good is a step in the right direction. That said you want to pay strict attention to form. Your body can compensate in a lot of ways when you perform this movement.
Continuous Hip Turn Over with Stability Ball
This is a similar motion to the hip turn with the medicine ball, but with an important difference. Instead of breaking the movement down into segmented ninety-degree hip turns, here you don’t have to start and stop from a neutral knees-up position between rotations. This continuous side- to-side motion will let your body understand and feel what it has to do to integrate your lower body with your upper body during your golf swing.
Lying Hip Flexor Stretch
This is a stretching exercise that promotes opening of the hip flexors. In the golf swing it’s important to move the lead hip out of the way both to make room for the golf club to swing, and also to create a stretched “shooting a rubber band” effect that helps propel the club head down the target path.
Hamstring Wall Stretch
Again, another stretching exercise that promotes opening of the hip flexors. Likewise because we site a lot in front of the TV and the computer, our hamstrings begin to shorten. This also promotes a shortening of hip flexors shorten. Stretching the hamstring muscle also helps if your experienced with lower back pain. Shorter hamstring muscles “pull” on the spinal column causing misalignment. If you’re having lower back pain, try this exercise to reduce the “pull” tension. It’s a dual benefit exercise.
Planks, Wheelbarrow, and Bird Dog
A powerful golf swing requires the coordinated effort of multiple muscle groups working together. Two key muscle groups that contribute to generating power and help stabilize the body in the golf swing include:
Core Muscles: The muscles of the core, including the abdominals, obliques, and lower back muscles, play a crucial role in stabilizing the body and transferring energy from the lower body to the upper body during the swing.
Hip Muscles: The muscles of the hips, including the hip flexors and gluteus medius, are important for generating power by providing stability and transferring energy from the lower body to the upper body.
The Plank, Wheelbarrow, and Bird Dog round out this section and are excellent exercises that target these muscle groups.
Pelvic-Tilt and Posture Prescriptions
The pelvis is a symmetrical bony ring interposed between the vertebrae of the sacral spine and the lower limbs, which are articulated through complex joints, the hips. It supports the spinal column and connects the upper body to the lower extremities.
The ability to tilt your pelvis is the first in a chain of events that must occur if you are to stand at address with good golf posture and then swing a club with true rotation. A strong pelvis and core are the foundations that your golf posture is built upon. To get you to tilt your pelvis you need to focus on some muscles that you’ve been using all of your life—your latissimus dorsi in the back of the body, and your obliques and rectus abdominus in the front of your body. A strong pelvis and core are the foundations that your golf posture is built upon.
The first video by Chris Ryan on the left discusses how the hips and pelvis are supposed to move, and why pelvic tilt and posture are so important in the golf swing. Again if you like this video, consider subscribing to his channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisRyanGolf.
The second video by Johnathon Kim-Moss describes something in an improper pelvic move in the golf swing known as early extension. This is a common problem with golfers, and Johnathon explains why many golfer often exhibit this swing fault. If you like this content, consider subscribing to Johnathon’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@JKMGolf.
To get you to tilt your pelvis we’re going to be focusing on some muscles to strengthen pelvis , keep your spine straight, to fix your posture issues and make your golf swing mirror both Chris’s and Johnathon’s.
Pelvic Tilt in Lying Position
This is a great way to really understand what it means to tilt your pelvis. Instead of just guessing and wondering if you can move your body correctly, you’ll have easy-to-see and easy-to-feel proof. If you’re able to create a space between your lower back and the floor, you now know you have the ability to move your pelvis. Eventually you’ll need to master the movement so it transfers to the golf course.
Pelvic Tilt on Stability Ball
This big motion will, in addition to getting you to continue to move your pelvis, also work some other things in and around the hips.
At the top of the motion, you may feel your glutes tightening. Strong glutes will help you maintain a solid base at setup and address and give you more control over your lower body throughout your entire swing. You might also feel a stretch in your hip flexors. These are the muscles at the very top of each leg. Their job is to raise your leg up in front of you.
Because of the way we live our lives—we sit down most of the time and don’t stretch enough—most of us have hip flexors that are too tight. Off the golf course, tight hip flexors can lead to poor posture and lower-back pain. On the golf course, tight hip flexors will affect your ability to get your hips and lower body involved in your swing. Once you take your lower body out of the equation, you become an upper-body-dominant player, and both your power and accuracy will suffer.
Pelvic Tilt in Address Position
The standing version of the pelvic tilt exercise is a little more difficult in that you don’t have the floor or a stability ball to assist you in the movement. In order to perform this exercise correctly, you really need to engage your abdominal and core muscles.
Hip Drop on Stability Ball
This big motion will, in addition to getting you to continue to move your pelvis, also work some other things in and around the hips.
At the top of the motion, you may feel your glutes tightening. Strong glutes will help you maintain a solid base at setup and address and give you more control over your lower body throughout your entire swing. You might also feel a stretch in your hip flexors. These are the muscles at the very top of each leg. Their job is to raise your leg up in front of you. Because of the way we live our lives.
We sit down most of the time and don’t stretch enough—most of us have hip flexors that are too tight. Off the golf course, tight hip flexors can lead to poor posture and lower-back pain. On the golf course, tight hip flexors will affect your ability to get your hips and lower body involved in your swing. Once you take your lower body out of the equation, you become an upper-body-dominant player, and both your power and accuracy will suffer.
Pelvic Dip on Stability Ball
This may look a lot like the hip drop, but it’s a lot finer movement and may be a little more challenging. Here, you’re not dropping and raising your entire hip area, you’re just tilting your pelvis forward and back. This one may take some getting used to, and you may feel that you’re just lying on a stability ball doing “something” with your hips until you become more comfortable with the movement. If you can confidently move your pelvis in this position, you will be more than ready to transfer that ability out onto the golf course. You will now be standing up straighter, swinging with more confidence, and finding the fairway more.
Balance Prescriptions
Balance is one of the least understood and least appreciated elements of the golf game. Just because a person can stand on two feet, doesn’t mean thta they have the balance that it takes to swing a club the same way as a player who has trained their sense of balance and who knows what their body is doing at every stage of the golf swing. If you don’t have good balance on the golf course, if you’re off-balance and leaning back, off-balance and leaning forward, or off-balance and leaning to either side, you’re going to create deceleration.
When you’re out of balance and have to control a club head that’s traveling 100-plus mph, you no longer have the luxury of being able to concentrate on the things you’d like to be concentrating on—maintaining good spine angle or making sure your clubface is square at impact.
It’s now time to improve your balance. On the golf course, better balance will let you be more stable and secure throughout your entire swing and keep you from having to decelerate early due to your loss of equilibrium. This will lead to more distance on every shot.
One Legged Golf Posture
One reason that people lose their command of balance during their swing is that the whole movement begins from a forward-leaning position. You may have great balance when you’re standing up straight on two feet, but once you assume golf posture; your center of gravity is pitched forward. This is a great drill for helping you get used to maintaining balance in golf posture. If you can do it on one foot, doing it on two feet when you’re out on the course will be much easier.
One Legged Address to Takeaway
It was one thing to come into golf posture on one leg and then hold a static position; it’s another thing to come into a forward-leaning position on one leg and then further mess with your equilibrium by having you rotate your body. What this does is force you to deal with a constantly shifting center of gravity as you take your position from address to takeaway. This one may take a few attempts before you start nailing it with consistency and confidence. What’s nice, though, is that once you do get the hang of it, you’ll have concrete proof that your sense of balance is getting better.
One Legged Impact to Follow-Through
In the one-legged address to takeaway, you were doing your best to simulate your regular swing, which means that you should have kept your eye on your ball the whole time. Remember, balancing is easier when you can fix your visual focus on a nonmoving point. Without that visual cue to help fix you in your place in the world, staying upright is much harder. That’s why you closed your eyes during the assessment. Here, since you are simulating impact through follow-through, your focal point has to change. You have to go from looking at your ball to watching it travel—dead center—down the fairway.
This one may be trickier than you expect. Again, though, when you do get a feel for this movement, you’ll have more evidence that your balance is improving.
One Legged Chest Opener
There’s a significant amount of value that you can obtain with this prescription. Since just about everyone can use help with their balance, and since just about everyone can also benefit from a chest-opening stretch, there’s not much downside to this drill.
Full Body Strength and Coordination Prescriptions
On the golf course, you must combine strength with flexibility. The assessment for full-body strength and coordination checked to see how well your upper body and lower body work together. Sometimes you can be strong with your lower body and loose with your upper body, but when you try to integrate your feet, legs, hips, core, chest, shoulders, arms, and every other little thing in your golf swing, you’re unable to muster all the lower-body strength that you had or take advantage of all the upper-body range of motion you had.
If you had trouble with the overhead-raise assessment, it means that your shoulders are protracted forward and that you’re unable to create or maintain a proper posture throughout your swing. You’ll have a C-shaped instead of a straight spine, and that will prevent you from ever setting up with a proper spine angle. That takes you out of plane almost as soon as you start your takeaway.
If you’re not swinging the club with true rotation, that will show up on the course as accuracy problems. If you’re not sure exactly how your body is going to rotate, you can’t know exactly how you’re going to strike the ball.
If you had trouble with the lower-body assessment and weren’t able to drop your hips down so your knees were bent at ninety-degree angles and your thighs were parallel to the ground, you have strength and stability issues in the legs and hips. Your glutes and your quadriceps—the large groups of muscles in the fronts of your thighs—are weak. You’ll have problems setting up, you won’t be able to get in the position you need to be in, and you’ll be too stiff-legged and straight up.
When initial posture is wrong, you won’t be able to find the correct plane line. This will lead to accuracy problems. You’ll also have trouble getting into the proper position at the top of your backswing. You’ll have a false sense of range of motion—you’re not getting the club to where you think you are—and end up with a three-quarters swing. You want to maintain strength through a full range of motion and working as a unit.
By integrating your upper-body movements with your lower-body movements, you’ll be more prepared to handle what your entire body needs to do on the golf course. You’ll be able to correct postural issues and will hit the ball straighter and with more confidence and power. More important, this full-body coordination will allow you to do things on the golf course that you previously just weren’t able to do.
Air Bench
The air bench is a great way to strengthen your entire lower body while forcing you to be aware of your core and of your posture. It’s the only exercise in this program that doesn’t involve any movement. Here you’ll just perform one rep. Initially, try to hold the position for twenty seconds, from then on, every time you do this exercise, try to add ten seconds.
Seated Overhead Extensions
This is a great way to open up the chest and shoulders. If you had trouble with that aspect of the assessment, this simple movement will, eventually, let you get your arms where you need them to be out on the golf course.
You’ll notice that while you’re doing this, your core has to stay strong—otherwise you’re going to lose your posture. As your core gets stronger, not only will it be easier to maintain your posture while doing movements such as this overhead extension, it’ll be easier to maintain your posture and spine angle when you’re out on the golf course.
Forward Lunge with Overhead Extension and Rotation
This might just be the best exercise in the series. This is just a superb way to strengthen and stretch the lower body while you also open up the chest and shoulders and work on your ability to rotate. You’ll also be working on your core and balance as well. Most parts of your body have a role to play in this one.
Reverse Lunge with Overhead Extension
You may want to practice stepping back a few times before you try stepping back into a full lunge. When you do get comfortable with the motion, it’ll become a great way to develop leg and core strength and help you open up your chest and shoulders. It’ll also be a real boost for your balance.
