Why general fitness can be detrimental to your golf game!!
Many golfers hit the gym regularly in a bid to potentially help their golf game, whether it is to gain more muscle to add yards to that driver or to improve their cardiovascular system to allow for more energy throughout a 4 hour round.
The questions I ask are..... How will running on a treadmill for 30 minutes help your golf game? Or how will 30kg bicep curls help your golf game? The answer to these questions is that it is more likely to hinder your performance on the golf course, rather than improve it.
You now ask me why?
A common misconception amongst golfers and fitness professionals is that golf is an endurance sport. Yes you do walk on average 5 to 6 miles per round, yet the 70-90 shots that you hit during that 5 mile walk are explosive and powerful movements. We should therefore be training for this, as it is the swing mechanics and how well your body can control this explosive action that will determine how you perform on the golf course.
Of course there needs to be an element of endurance and fitness to be able to walk 5 miles but this can be easily achieved by walking the course each time you play golf. Your time in the gym can be better spent improving your swing efficiency.
Running for endurance purposes (in excess of 20 minutes) can have a negative impact on joints, due to the repetitive impact placed on our knees, hips and ankles. Many people engage in running programmes without being aware of whether they are correctly engaging their core and gluteal muscles. Due to postural imbalances this can lead to excessive strain on the lower back, as well as the hip, knees and ankle joints; which can then lead to injuries, pain and a negative impact on sports performance.
If you want to include running in your fitness programme then ideally you should engage in high intensity interval training (HIIT). This means sprinting for short bursts (20 secs) followed by short periods of rest. This is more beneficial as the emphasis is on building fast twitch muscle fibres that increase strength and power In relation to cardiovascular training it is also more effective than endurance training as you work to a higher VO2 max and consume more oxygen post exercise (EPOC theory). The stress that your body is placed under with each HIIT workout means that your body has to adapt more quickly, which means greater gains.
Many of you would rather lift weights than run or jog, hoping to improve your strength and build larger muscles to hit that golf ball just 10 yards further. Don’t get me wrong weights are great for building strength and power; however they need to be used in a manner that is going to improve your swing and not hinder it.
Before you engage in a strength programme you need to ensure that you have no mobility limitations and that you have sufficient core and glute engagement to ensure that the correct muscles are recruited for stabilisation. Again if this is not the case it can lead to injury, muscle damage and stiffness in your golf swing.
If you are fully mobile and have sufficient core stability then great, but the question to ask now is if your strength training has the correct functional carryover to golf. If you are using static machines, working in linear planes and are isolating muscles then I would guess not. The bicep curl will not transfer to improving your golf swing. Strength should be gained through all planes of motion; primarily rotation, and be built on compound dynamic patterns which test your ability to stabilise while you mobilise.
By training incorrectly in the gym you could be weakening muscles that need to be strong, tightening muscles that need to be mobile and causing injury that see you out of action on the golf course for many weeks.
If your main objective to hitting the gym this week is to help improve your golf game then you need to be asking yourself the following. Am I functionally mobile? Am I engaging the correct muscles? Am I strengthening movements that resemble those in the golf swing?
If the answer to any of these questions is no then you need to re-assess your gym programme. For more information on golf fitness or if you would like a golf-specific fitness programme, please contact me on rachael@dynamic-golf.co.uk.
Alternatively you can visit our website www.dynamic-golf.co.uk, and you can also find us on Twitter @dynamic_golf and facebook dynamicgolfuk.
