Strengthening muscles for golf

Golf is a great sport for all ages. It’s relaxing to play on your own, and fun to compete with friends! For maximum force output, your swing should be swift and sturdy, and when close to the hole, accuracy and patience is a necessity. While playing golf, everyone wants to hit the ball further, it takes a lot of skill and practice. Of course, another thing you can do to improve your yardage is lifting weights and training the muscles you use while you swing. Golf is all about using the midsection of your body, not all arms as some people may think. Some of the important areas to train are your back, shoulders, neck, core, and hips to increase your rotation force and improve contact speed on the ball.

Most of these exercises don’t require extreme weights, but added weight can help with more intense and bigger players. Some easy exercises you can do that don’t require weights that you can do at home are push-ups. Push-ups are a great way to strengthen your chest. In golf using your chest allows you to help space out your downswing and give it the position needed to swing through the ball. Increasing the strength for this allows you to keep the club steady to have a nice swift swing. Another great weightless exercise you can do is planking which will build up your core muscles. Building up your core muscles allows you to transfer energy better throughout the rest of your body. Having a strong core lets you twist around the ball further creating more rotational force and speed that spread toward the hips and the feet. These exercises are great and require no weight but can be improved with weights if you feel like it.

Using weights is a great way to bring your game to the next level, as we mentioned earlier twisting is a very important part of golf. Luckily there are plenty of exercises that you can do to improve this speed, one of those being medicine ball twists. For this exercise what you can do is stand on your feet and pivot the ball around your body, make sure to keep the ball at the core level, and keep it still. This exercise is great for stamina and you want to rep this out until failure. According to Luke, a trainer at New Britain’s Revolve Fitness, “Using weights for any sport, not just golf, is a great way to strengthen the key movement needed for success.” Another great exercise to do is cable push and pulls, this targets your upper back, shoulders, and your neck. You can do this exercise with a machine or just simple resistance bands if the equipment is unavailable. The benefit of this is to prevent back injuries which are the most common injuries among golfers. Being able to build up the resistance on your back extends your stamina while playing, and increases how long you can play. Since golf is a game of muscle memory, strains and other injuries are possible and can throw off your game.

In conclusion, utilizing weights can strengthen the core, chest, back, and other muscle groups used when playing golf. Taking the time to train for speed and strength away from your golf swing will only enhance your performance. So throw in some of these cable, weighted, and bodyweight exercises to ensure your improvement on the green!