Why Fitness Training Is Essential For Golf: Part 1, Mobility
This week, we are starting a series addressing overall health and physical ability for golf. It is, as the title says, essential to address general fitness if we are to peak our golf skills. At integrated Rehab And Performance Center, we address, in hyper-specificity, certain aspects of fitness. This includes mobility, strength, and power. Further, we work to integrate these components into the golf swing. What we don’t do (surprise at the end of this article…) in our sessions is train overall fitness. Fitness is the long game, and critical to maintaining positive changes while chipping away at performance limiters. Fitness is broadly made up of mobility, strength, power, agility, and aerobic conditioning. Today we are going to address the mobility component of overall fitness.
What Integrated Rehab And Performance does for mobility
As a rehab or performance patient, we address mobility in great detail as one of the first steps of care. Wherever the patient is missing movement critical to the golf swing or effecting pain and injury, we use soft tissue and chiropractic techniques with precise corrective exercise to make change. We then integrate this in with specific strength and power work and eventually into the golf swing itself. Our longevity and performance care plans created after our initial treatment plans do a great job of keeping these changes we made as we continue to look for and address issues that come up over the year. Another great way to help maintain these changes is with golf fitness training and programming.
How can golf fitness programming help maintain my mobility?
Fitness programming is less specific to your joints needs, but it can still help. Here, consistently engaging in movements that ask from the joints what the golf swing (and daily activity for that matter) are demanding, we can encourage the maintenance and improvement in these ranges of motion. A great example of this is the Cossack squat. Watch the video below to learn what a Cossack squat is and how to perform one…
This is a movement you can expect to be programmed in any golf specific fitness programming. It drives frontal plane movement (side-to-side) that is often missed in general fitness programming but is highly relied upon in golf. When doing this movement, we have the opportunity with proper periodization to increase our strength in the hips, quads, and core, but we also require significant mobility in the hips, knees, thoracic spine, and ankles. We have the opportunity to challenge our body’s ability to move into these positions, positively influencing mobility.
What mobility do we need for the golf swing?
Excellent question, see my comprehensive answer to this question with these two articles here…
1. What mobility is needed for the backswing in golf?
2. What mobility is needed for the downswing in golf?
Conclusion:
Mobility is essential to the golf swing. In the absence of pain and injury, it is the first thing we work on in golfers in the clinic. Supplementing a focused treatment plan and annual performance plan with golf fitness programming is the best way to create the long-lasting mobility changes we require for the swing. Creating the requirements from the body to create force in end ranges of motion is the best way to maintain our golf specific range of motion, not to mention other vital health markers (we’ll get into strength, power, and endurance soon).
Now time for the surprise… If you’d like to take your health and fitness seriously and make sure you continue checking the boxes for golf performance, consider signing up on the waitlist for “The Nashville Elite Golf Program”. This is a 12-week program with 2 small group sessions per week. Goals are to address the 5 areas of golf physical performance. These include lower body dissociation, upper body dissociation, core control, maintain posture, and setting and releasing the golf club. Attack low hanging fruit of physical limitations while improving fitness levels with this programming. More details coming soon! Sign up for the waitlist here: Sign up
-Dr. Nick DC, TPI, CSCS
If you would like to learn more about your body, pain, and performance, send Dr. Nick an email at contact@integratedrpc.com or call at (585)478-4379, or schedule a FREE discovery visit at Contact.
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