Instruction

Avoiding injury and improving mobility: A Pilates approach

Published

10 years ago

Dec 13, 2013

All golfers want to improve their golf swing, safely and with ease. Swing mechanics mixed with tight and weak muscles can create an imbalance that leaves golfers vulnerable to injury. The open secret of those practicing Pilates in professional golf are Tiger Woods, Rocco Mediate, Phil Mickelson, Carin Coch, Annika Sorenstan, Camilo Villegas, Rich Beem, Butch Harmon, Betsy King, David Duval and Kelli Kuehne. There are many reasons why they train, and why they choose to train in Pilates.

A guy I know well, we’ll call him Larry, is a softball pitcher, winter weekend football player, and “every opportunity” golfer. Larry often complained of tight hip flexors, hamstrings and low back pain (no surprise given the tightness in his hamstrings). Pilates introduced him to a neutral spine position in his golf address, and there he found a safe and mobile place for him to tap into the mechanics for a healthy and supported golf swing. By increasing the flexibility in his hip flexor, back extensor and lateral flexor muscles, as well as strengthening abdominal, oblique muscles and gluteals, his golf swing has improved as has his post-play discomfort.

Golf injuries occur from the game’s primary activity: swinging the club. It is a game of asymmetry and stress arises from multiple and simultaneous directions: Imagine performing an oblique curl to the left 100-to-130 times with compressive force — pressure that acts to compact or squeeze together parts of the body — eight times one’s body weight. About 60 percent of all part-time golfers are hurt from playing the game, with the most common injuries occurring in the low back. Spinal alignment is essential to proper swing mechanics as the body coils and uncoils dozens of times over the course of a four-hour game. Most golfers don’t fully understand what muscles they need to train and which ones would benefit from flexibility exercises. In case you were curious, the muscles used primarily to execute a golf swing are the external abdominal obliques, the rotators and the multifidus. With that knowledge in hand, what would you head off to the gym and do now? Which muscles need more power, flexibility, improved rotation and stability? Still guessing?

After watching Larry in his golf ball address– the way he stands when he approaches the ball with the club to swing and hit it– I noticed he had a pronounced lordotic curve in the lower back: he did not address the ball with his back in a neutral position. This visual information confirmed his own observations regarding the tightness he felt in his back.

Larry weight trains roughly three days a week. He has also been training his big muscles for much of his life, and performing no stabilizing exercises to further challenge and strengthen the muscles he isn’t training at the gym. With Pilates, he discovered that there were many other muscles he had neglected over the years, not for lack of intention as much as lack of awareness. Once he discovered how Pilates recruits muscles in a coordinated, collaborative way that also requires stabilization, his understanding of his musculature and how it works gave him new insight into his golf game.

For those unfamiliar with Pilates, here is a brief history and primer: Joseph Pilates, the man who created the method in the early 20th century, was plagued by illness as a child and through dedicated research, developed his own exercise routine. During his journey to developing the Pilates Method, Pilates studied the relationship between anatomy and exercise, improved his health, and became a body builder, a wrestler, gymnast, boxer, skier and diver. After WWI, he worked with injured veterans and rehabilitated them, and later opened his studio in New York City in the 1930s. Pilates is a fitness program that uses both apparatus and body weight resistance training (for mat exercises). While most people are familiar with the mat program, the apparatus in Pilates serves a client’s particular needs, customizing a program that is tailored to a client’s goals as well as his or her physical challenges.

Golf is widely considered a recreational pursuit — one where injury isn’t common and you don’t need fitness training to enjoy and excel at the game. This assumption is fundamentally wrong, and injury prevention, and strength and flexibility training is the first line of defense during the winter months. Come April, or maybe one amazing day in March, that Pilates training will pay off, and while your golf buddies will be slowly making their way to the nearest bench, you’ll be strolling off the course, heading to the club house for a well deserved lunch.

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Instruction

Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?

Published

5 days ago

Apr 24, 2024

Shawn Clement

Some call the image on the left laid off, but if you are hitting a fade, this could be a perfect backswing for it! Same for across the line for a draw! Stop racking your brain with perceived mistakes and simply match backswing to shot shape!

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Instruction

The Wedge Guy: The easiest-to-learn golf basic

Published

1 month ago

Mar 29, 2024

Terry Koehler

My golf learning began with this simple fact – if you don’t have a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, it is practically impossible for your body to execute a fundamentally sound golf swing. I’m still a big believer that the golf swing is much easier to execute if you begin with the proper hold on the club.

As you might imagine, I come into contact with hundreds of golfers of all skill levels. And it is very rare to see a good player with a bad hold on the golf club. There are some exceptions, for sure, but they are very few and very far between, and they typically have beat so many balls with their poor grip that they’ve found a way to work around it.

The reality of biophysics is that the body moves only in certain ways – and the particulars of the way you hold the golf club can totally prevent a sound swing motion that allows the club to release properly through the impact zone. The wonderful thing is that anyone can learn how to put a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, and you can practice it anywhere your hands are not otherwise engaged, like watching TV or just sitting and relaxing.

Whether you prefer an overlap, interlock or full-finger (not baseball!) grip on the club, the same fundamentals apply. Here are the major grip faults I see most often, in the order of the frequency:

Mis-aligned hands

By this I mean that the palms of the two hands are not parallel to each other. Too many golfers have a weak left hand and strong right, or vice versa. The easiest way to learn how to hold the club with your palms aligned properly is to grip a plain wooden ruler or yardstick. It forces the hands to align properly and shows you how that feels. If you grip and re-grip a yardstick several times, then grip a club, you’ll see that the learning curve is almost immediate.

The position of the grip in the upper/left hand

I also observe many golfers who have the butt of the grip too far into the heel pad of the upper hand (the left hand for right-handed players). It’s amazing how much easier it is to release the club through the ball if even 1/4-1/2″ of the butt is beyond the left heel pad. Try this yourself to see what I mean. Swing the club freely with just your left hand and notice the difference in its release from when you hold it at the end of the grip, versus gripping down even a half inch.

To help you really understand how this works, go to the range and hit shots with your five-iron gripped down a full inch to make the club the same length as your seven-iron. You will probably see an amazing shot shape difference, and likely not see as much distance loss as you would expect.

Too much lower (right) hand on the club

It seems like almost all golfers of 8-10 handicap or higher have the club too far into the palm of the lower hand, because that feels “good” if you are trying to control the path of the clubhead to the ball. But the golf swing is not an effort to hit at the ball – it is a swing of the club. The proper hold on the club has the grip underneath the pad at the base of the fingers. This will likely feel “weak” to you — like you cannot control the club like that. EXACTLY. You should not be trying to control the club with your lower/master hand.

Gripping too tightly

Nearly all golfers hold the club too tightly, which tenses up the forearms and prevents a proper release of the club through impact. In order for the club to move back and through properly, you must feel that the club is controlled by the last three fingers of the upper hand, and the middle two fingers of the lower hand. If you engage your thumbs and forefingers in “holding” the club, the result will almost always be a grip that is too tight. Try this for yourself. Hold the club in your upper hand only, and squeeze firmly with just the last three fingers, with the forefinger and thumb off the club entirely. You have good control, but your forearms are not tense. Then begin to squeeze down with your thumb and forefinger and observe the tensing of the entire forearm. This is the way we are made, so the key to preventing tenseness in the arms is to hold the club very lightly with the “pinchers” — the thumbs and forefingers.

So, those are what I believe are the four fundamentals of a good grip. Anyone can learn them in their home or office very quickly. There is no easier way to improve your ball striking consistency and add distance than giving more attention to the way you hold the golf club.

Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!

Published

2 months ago

Mar 4, 2024

Shawn Clement

Not the dreaded headcover under the armpit drill! As if your body is defective and can’t function by itself! Have you seen how incredible the human machine is with all the incredible feats of agility all kinds of athletes are accomplishing? You think your body is so defective (the good Lord is laughing his head off at you) that it needs a headcover tucked under the armpit so you can swing like T-Rex?

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