Secrets to Preventing Lower Back Pain for Golfers

Golf is hard. The challenge of competing against the course, your friends, and yourself drives a deep and almost unnatural love for a game that has to be experienced to understand. Each course, each hole, each opponent presents new challenges for us to face and learn from. But, there is one challenge that most of us never confront until it is too late: How do I keep myself healthy enough to keep playing the rest of my life? 

Ryan Lawless, Titleist Performance Institute Specialist at our Oakridge Wellness Center, shares three tips: Prep for the Course, Take Time to Warmup, and Get to the Gym.

Prep For The Course

A golf swing is hard on your body. The forces experienced on your lumbar spine can be upwards of six times your body weight. If not properly sequenced, these forces dissipate to the joints and soft tissue, increasing the risk of injury. The answer to fixing this is simple — you must prepare your body for the movements you experience on the course.

Take Time To Warm Up

You may be thinking that golf is all the exercise you need, but if you are experiencing pain when you are playing then it is in fact hurting you, not helping. The solution begins with a dynamic warm up, specific to golf, that you should perform before playing or practicing. The purpose of these movements is to recruit neural activation and blood flow to the muscles we use in the golf swing. Following your round and on your off days, it is important to mobilize the areas where we need more range of motion to perform an efficient and powerful golf swing.

Get To The Gym

This is the one most neglected by golfers — strength training. Your muscles need to be strong and your joints need to be stable if you plan on swinging a golf club for the rest of your days. Two to three days a week for 30-60 minutes of strength training is a great place to start building a strong foundation that will not only alleviate your pain when playing, but will also improve your distance and overall performance.

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