Today’s performance enhancing advantage

by PGA Teaching Professional Marc L. White

Make no mistake, golf is a physical activity and demands a respectable level of fitness to be played at peak performance levels. As an athletic activity golf requires strength, flexibility, muscular endurance and cardiovascular endurance. Golfers who suffer from weak muscular strength and a limited range of motion will be at a severe disadvantage in their ability to swing the club efficiently, thus affecting their potential to play their best.

We all understand that strength is essential to hitting the ball far. Strength allows us to control movement. When your muscles have the necessary strength to control the swinging motion of the golf club, this relaxed power takes on a quality of effortlessness, improving reflexes and coordination. Flexibility works in conjunction with strength in that it allows the body to achieve positions that can maximize that developed muscular strength. Muscular endurance relates directly to fatigue. To play good golf we must be as strong walking down the 18 th fairway as we were down the first fairway. Through repetition of light workloads over an extended period of time, our muscular endurance can improve, enabling us to finish our round strong. Cardiovascular endurance may seem the least important of the four elements. However, if the heart is not pumping sufficient amounts of blood to the muscles, fatigue sets in. Poor cardiovascular conditioning can also affect our thinking process, leading to bad decisions in the later part of our round.

So, if the body is underpowered, has poor flexibility or simply has parts that just don’t function well because of fatigue, the results will be neither consistent nor efficient. Golfers have finally come to understand the importance of being physically fit and are being rewarded for their efforts. That’s what golf fitness training is about.

The activity universally considered by the world’s leading medical authorities to be the safest, simplest and most beneficial exercise is walking.