While there are many areas of the body prone to injury, few injuries are worse than back injuries. Whether it’s a dislocated disc or nerve damage causing intense pain to shoot up your spine, not treating your back pain (and prevent it from happening in the first place) is never a good solution. Left untreated, you risk even serious injuries and debilitating pain and suffering. So let's think twice and swing once.
Golf injuries are very real and can follow people around for a long time. If you suddenly jump into the game, take a buddy trip, or trade in your daily work commute for a drive around the links, you may find yourself playing a lot of golf in short period of time. If your body is stiff or your muscles have not experienced this level of activity in a while, bad things can happen if you don't pay attention to your body. Sorry. We didn't make up the law of human biomechanics. We just have play by them.
We do a lot of work with junior golfers here in Jupiter, FL and online all over the world. It's amazing to see the natural skills and talents that some young kids have. But just like anything else, natural talent can only take you so far. Golf -- even at the junior level -- is incredibly competitive. We see a lot of time and money spent on lessons, clinics, and new equipment. The juniors we work with have an advantage that a lot of other young players in other junior golf programs don't: they've been specifically working on improving their body for golf.
Tired of doing exercises you don’t like? Hate running? Can’t stand swimming laps? Even those of us who are super dedicated to becoming the best of the best don’t like certain exercises. We’d all like to have at least a little fun -- or at least purpose -- while exercising, right? When you don’t enjoy exercising, it’s easier to come up with excuses to NOT exercise. Your consistency drops and your results drop as well.
We are asked about two of those moving parts fairly frequently. It's understandable. They are a bit mysterious, mostly because they both involve movement patterns we don’t often perform in our daily lives.
We've all heard words and phrases like "flexibility," "mobility," and "range-of-motion" when golfers are discussing ways to improve their golf game. While all three of those concepts are slightly different in strict semantic terms, the gist of what they all mean is pretty much the same: the deeper and more fluidly you can move your body, the better you'll probably be able to play golf.
Some people are still of the opinion that golf isn’t really a "sport" sport. That golfers are not athletes. Aside from the Tour, they see people driving around in golf carts, parking next to their ball and swinging a club a few times. Hardly a lot of work, right?
But golf does offer a great opportunity to combine exercise and a hobby into something fun and transformational at the same time.
