Fit for Golf

December 1, 2013 7:23 pm

TIP-fit-for-golfIf we look at all the ways to improve your golf and lower your score, an area that is often overlooked for many reasons is the fitness and flexibility element.

At World of Golf Glasgow we have First Tee Fitness who are based at the far end of the golf range and have been offering fitness and resistance training programmes for our customers for several months now and they can boast some amazing results.

Golf is often thought of as a very slow sport, not as athletic as many others, but here are a few facts for you. A top golfer will generate around 120 mph of clubhead speed in 0.2 seconds, causing 900kg of force to be applied to the golf ball. This takes its toll on the body. A compression force of over 8 times body weight is transferred through the spine just before the point of impact with many more sheer and compression forces being exerted all over the rest of the body. It is no surprise then that coupled with poor swing mechanics, many golfers suffer injuries, the most common being the lower back, in fact 31% are here. The left wrist accounts for 27% of injuries and the elbow 23% with knees, ankles and shoulders making up a further 19%.

So fitness training for golf can both improve your performance and reduce dramatically your susceptibility to injury. Using this training you will be able to improve your flexibility, stability and strength. It will make it much easier for you to be able to get into the positions that your golf coach may well have been trying to get you into to improve your swing but you may have found difficult to achieve.

Fitness and resistance training in golf is a fairly new concept as it was generally assumed that it didn’t have a place within the sport and that the application of this type of training may hinder performance and reduce the range of motion of a player. In the last 10 years it has become a vital component in the modern game with the impact of Tiger Woods and many of the other top tour professionals taking advantage of the developments and improvements in sports science, so golf is at last catching up with many other high impact sports where the benefits of this training have been known and acknowledged for a long time. Surely if this is good enough for the tour professionals it is good enough for you.

If you are near the World of Golf Glasgow site, come along and speak to either Kenny or Ali at First Tee Fitness or e mail them on info@firstteefitness.co.uk or if you are a customer of our London sites then contact your World of Golf teaching professional team as they will have links with local sports science practioners who will be able to help.

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