Golf Fitness Training

What does this mean to you?

The chances are that you agree wholeheartedly with everything that I have just said, and yet still may be thinking to yourself that you have done perfectly well so far when playing golf, so why bother with a Golf Fitness Training regime?
However, it might be a good idea to take a step back and ask yourself whether your Golf has improved all that much lately. On top of that it might be an idea to then ask yourself whether you are satisfied with your current standard. And to finish off this little exercise in self analysis why not have a think about whether you really can play regularly, year in year out, without the aches and pains that plague the vast majority of active golfers.

If you are the same as 99% of all golfers who never manage to shift their handicap appreciably downwards and find themselves having to work around back, neck and shoulder problems then it would seem very logical for you to eschew spending any more money on fancy equipment until you have sorted out the most vital piece in your golfing arsenal – your own muscles, sinews and bones!

"As one of life's natural skeptics I was very uncertain that weight training and a new eating regime could improve my golfing game, but when your wife buys you a course of exercise sessions as a present you have to give it a go. Well what can I say - four months later not only have I lost over a stone and a half of weight and feel fifteen years younger, but I have finally got my handicap below 5 after ten years of trying! Foolishly I have put all my golfing partners onto Nick too, so my new found golfing preeminence was very short lived.  The buggers all caught back up with me within 6 weeks!"

Clive Riley, retired businessman

Specific Training Protocols for Golfers

In recognition of the unique stresses that golf puts on the body we have devised a specific Golf Fitness Training programme aimed solely at improving your game and preventing injury caused by muscular imbalances or lack of flexibility or mobility (the two are NOT the same!).

The programme consists of:

Initial Assessment & Consultation

The human body can be likened to the classic chain analogy where you are only as strong as your weakest link. If one thing is off, the entire movement can be off and this doesn’t merely disrupt and inhibit your golf swing, but also sets you up for niggling, and increasingly acute if left to accumulate, aches and pains as muscles and joints are forced to overcompensate for a weakness somewhere else.

We start off our initial assessment with a health and fitness questionnaire where we learn both the hard facts of your previous exercise experience and medical history, and also seek to really understand what motivates you and how we can best empower you with our advice, coaching and guidance.

Your Golf Fitness will then be assessed across a number of parameters:

Structural, postural, flexibility and muscular balance testing 

Where are your weaknesses / strengths and how can they be addressed for a healthy, functional and injury free body. The typical golfing posture of a rounded back, head thrust forward and arms internally rotated (think caveman!) places great stress upon the joints of the hips, knees, wrists, shoulders and lower back. The implications for an improvement in your swing if all these joints are functioning healthily and the muscles are balanced is tremendous.

Developed by the one of the world’s best known physical therapists, Gray Cook, this consists of a functional movement screen with the following tests:

Deep Overhead Squat
Hurdle Step
In-Line Lunge
Active Straight Leg Raise
Seated Rotation

Our Golf Fitness Instructor will test your muscular balance and strength on several key major resistance exercises such as Bench Press, Chin up, Step up, and Scott Curl calculating your 1 repetition maximum load and then applying specific formulae to assist in calculating muscle fibre type and the structural balance of key supporting musculature such as the rotator cuff. This is to ensure the long term integrity of your body’s muscles and soft tissue, keeping you healthy and on the golf course, and not on the physio’s table!

How much weight you can lift isn’t remotely important to us, but what is vital is to ensure that strength comes from all the correct places (starting with the hips). Without the knowledge of where your own power derives from you will have a limited idea of where your drive comes from making it very challenging to consistently reproduce strokes. Control of muscles and the ability to “fire” at will the ones you want to bring into play will give any golfer massive control over their game and is one of the keys to success of all the top Golf professionals. 

The information gained from these assessments is crucial to successful golfing performance as they create a unique profile of the individual, allowing us to construct a Golf Fitness Training programme exactly tailored to your own specifications.

Exercise Programmes for Golf

The following factors are foremost in our mind when constructing the right Golf Fitness Training programme for improving golfing performance:
Alignment of the club face - inflexibility and muscular imbalance can cause postural distortions that will directly restrict the ability of the golfer to properly line up on the ball. This should be a natural, free flowing position but it is often forced creating tension and negatively altering the strike pattern.

Swing Path - any tension held in the muscles at the outset of the swing will detrimentally affect the range and direction available. This will cause a very erratic reproduction of the golfing swing.

Angle of attacking the ball – the angle of attack is likewise affected by posture and flexibility.

The sweet spot - if you can't move freely through your entire available range without tension in the muscles then sweet spot strikes will be few and far between.

Speed of club head - to create maximum power for your drive requires postural control, strength and flexibility all drawn together in a fraction of a second. We all know that this is challenging for the very best, but if your body isn’t functioning optimally it is nigh on impossible to generate the full potential of your driving range.

What these factors mean is that we have to design a well rounded Golf Fitness programme that imparts a combination of strength, flexibility, coordination and mobility. A general stretching and strengthening workout just won’t cut it as all the myriad of factors unique to each individual golfer (and assessed in the initial testing procedures) must be taken into account and dealt with on an individual basis. In fact, a general “one size fits all” Golf Fitness Training plan could even be detrimental to your golfing as it may exacerbate existing imbalances by failing to prioritise on the weaker areas. 

Our Golf Fitness Training Instructor designs a Golf Fitness programme based around improving the following qualities imperative for golfing success and longevity:

Flexibility: Specific stretches for specific muscle groups that unwind the postural distortion patterns caused by modern society (if you are deskbound behind your computer then beware!) and ageing. This will increase neuromuscular co-ordination thereby allowing for a more synchronised golf swing.

Stability: Once you regain your available range you need to learn to control and harness it effectively. Simply gaining range by itself will create an unstable joint leading to a potential loss of power, reduced hitting accuracy, and increase the likelihood of injury.

Strength: Only once satisfactory flexibility and stability are achieved do we start to add a strength component.

Power: The production of maximum strength in minimum time (for this definition we can call it “power”) is the aim of the golfing game but usually features too often and too early in the golfer’s training. With our programme it is prioritised last as improvements in the other three qualities will always result in increased power, and without their prior development there is no way to properly harness power in the first place.

Golf Fitness Training Sessions

Each Golf Fitness training session will be conducted with the Ultimate Performance personal trainer of your choice, and entails 1- 1.5 hours of one to one work. We stay with you every step of the way, from dynamic stretching in the warm up, through to the challenge of pushing yourself with the weights or on the running track, up to the cool down and partner assisted PNF (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation) stretching to end your Golf Fitness Training workout.

We pay extremely close attention to everything that you do during your Golf Fitness Training Workouts with us, always monitoring your form, your fitness and your progress, and view the “in the gym” part of our service as being a combination of motivator, educator, statistician and task master! 

If you are interested in discussing our unique golf fitness and improvement programme with us, please call 020 82690766 or email us and we can organise a free consultation at your convenience.