The Importance of a Warm-Up in Golf

Many people (normally non-golfers!) don’t regard golf as a sport. This couldn’t be further from the truth!

This common misconception leads to many injuries and/or reduced performance.

During a golf swing, amateur golfers can achieve 80-90% of their maximum muscle activity. This is the equivalent to walking into the gym and picking up a weight that you can only lift two or three times – that’s a lot of exertion. Now consider that the golfer will perform this movement anywhere from 30 to 60 times per round… That’s a lot more than anyone training for strength in the gym would do!

Also, the golf swing will use nearly every muscle in your body, taking joints through flexion, extension, internal and external rotation.

Put simply: Golf is an extremely athletic sport!

With this in mind, it is clear that a pre-game warm-up IS necessary, more so even than for say, a 3-mile run. This would also suggest that training for golf in the gym would produce more results than spending the last month’s income on the newest driver to hit the shelves!

To get maximum distance from your drives, your club head will be travelling at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour when it makes contact with the ball – this type of force generation is equivalent to other explosive, athletic events such as martial arts – so golfers should dedicate as much time to training for their sport as these other top level athletes do for theirs.

In order to maximise club head speed, it is necessary for the joints being used to be in optimal alignment to ensure a smooth, consistent, unimpaired swing plane. This also means that they need to be mobile (able to move freely through their entire range of movement), and that the surrounding muscles should be warm and relaxed so as to allow them this range.

For this to happen, it is necessary to go through a thorough warm-up, the same as any other athlete would. This would involve some range of motion drills, taking the joints (particularly the shoulder complex and spine) through their full active range of movement.

Taking the joints through their full range will help to lubricate the joint surfaces allowing for a smoother movement. It will also help to relax the surrounding musculature which will again mean a smoother, more relaxed movement – the key to a consistent game.

Inhibited range of motion caused by going into the game without an adequate warm-up means that the swing will be a lot less fluid, and that your (cold) muscles will have to work extra hard in order to attain maximum distance. This leads to a less reproducible swing, and therefore less consistency.

This will also cause the muscles to tighten up even more, further limiting the allowed range of the joints involved. This means that the muscles will be forcing the joints into ranges that they aren’t prepared for leading to pain and injury.

As well as potentially causing joint injury, this “over working” of the muscles, which are still cold remember, can easily lead to muscle strains and tears because it’s a fact that cold muscles are less flexible and hold less tone; so forcing them to work harder than necessary, through extreme ranges can cause many muscular problems.

These problems occur most commonly in golf in the back, shoulders and knees. This is due to the rotational forces involved in the golf swing – movements that are rarely called for in the modern day lifestyle with this sort of force. The less a joint goes through these movements, the stiffer it will become, so forcing them through these ranges from cold with no prior preparation will not only cause pain, but may also be causing permanent damage.

A good golf warm-up can be completed in 10 minutes – this will be adequate to prepare your body for the stresses that lay ahead of it, and may also help to eliminate those first few “bad holes”.

Even if you’re running late for a tee-time, it is crucial to perform some kind of preparatory exercise before playing. For this reason, I have devised a separate, quick warm-up for golf, for those pushed for time. Though this is only to be used as a last resort in the event that you don’t have time for the full warm-up. This will never substitute a complete and thorough warm-up and the results will be lessened.

If you would like to get hold of a copy of these warm-up routines, send an e-mail to mail@ markonefitness. co. uk asking for the pre-golf warm-up routines.

To your golfing success,

Mark Broadbent
Dip. PT, Dip. IIST, KCA

markonefitness. co. uk