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Written by Joe Stewart
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Monday, 12 April 2004 |
Five Benefits Of Adding A Few Simple Exercises To Your Golf Game
Fitness is a major priority for professional golfers on tour these days. Golf, like any other physical activity, takes a good amount of stamina because you're constantly pushing yourself to excel and you're doing a lot of walking while you're out on the course.
Although it's important to focus on improving your golf game, you'll also need to keep in shape in order to increase your stamina and prevent injury that could keep you out of commission. Here are a few tips that will help to keep you on track:
#1. Participate regularly in some form of strenuous cardio activity. This can be running, swimming, sprinting (hill sprints are excellent cardio builders and a good fat burner), stair stepping, treadmill, ect. This will also improve the strength in your hips and your lower body.
Always remember to stretch before and after any type of strenuous exercise. This is not only important to decrease soreness after your workout, but most importantly to help prevent injury.
#2. Improving Abdominal strength is helpful in preventing injuries to your lower back. This is an injury common to golfers. You can improve your abdominal strength by doing sets of sit ups, crunches, swimming, ect.
Another injury common to beginning golfers is shin splints. You may also have these if you've taken an extended lay off from the game and are just returning. The best recommendation that I can make for shin splints is to take a slower pace when starting out or returning to the game. I've personally suffered with shin splints ever since my days in the military and it just takes time to build or rebuild the strength in the muscles in that area of your legs.
Try riding a stationary bike regularly to increase your leg strength, hill sprinting (in short sets) will help a lot, but don't overdo it at first, swimming is also excellent because it takes the body weight off your legs. Hold on to the side of the pool and do plenty of kicking exercises, both on your stomach and on your back.
Once again, remember to take it slowly and you'll be back in the game before you know it.
#3. Upper body exercises will not only help your stamina, but also help you to improve your swing. Exercises like push-ups (arms and chest), sit-ups (lower back and abdominal muscles), mountain climbers (brutal, but effective) and even jumping jacks will help you to increase the strength in your torso and hips, which will result in you being able to have more "push off" power in your down swing, hit the ball straighter and farther than before and also improve your consistancy.
#4. It's also a proven fact that exercising regularly will help to reduce stress, therefore helping you to "keep your cool" on the back 9 while the other guy sweats and stresses out. You'll also feel better off of the course too. You can realistically count on a "whole life" benefit from working out. Oh, you'll also lose weight and lower your cholesterol.
Let's recap what we've learned here.
#5. Doing the correct exercises on a regular basis will help you to improve your golf game, reduce your risk of injury, increase your strength and stamina and also have great health benefits, such as weight loss, lowering bad cholesterol and looking and feeling emotionally better.
One last question....What are you waiting for?
Start incorporating fitness into your golf game today!
About The Author
Joe Stewart is a sports fanatic that writes articles on different topics that interest him. You can read several more articles on golf by going to http://www.GolfTeachingAid.com . |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 22 December 2006 )
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