KPJ’s Game Improvement Program

I was in Boston all weekend, dishing out tips and advice at the annual Boston Golf Expo. I would like to  thank all the participants by providing them with a recap of my presentations.  All the week, I will post tips and drills that I demonstrated at Golf Expo.

Today-Monday-Shape Your Body Trim Your Score

Tuesday-How to Cure Your Slice

Wednesday-Golf-Specific Exercises

Thursday-How to Groove a Consistent Golf Swing

Friday-The New Golf Swing

Shape Your Body Trim Your Score

When you start a golf fitness program, you condition your muscles. When you condition your muscles, including strengthening and especially stretching, you elongate your muscles and long lean muscles work best for golf.  When you elongate your muscles, you are able to make longer movements, so your swing arc gets longer and you can create more clubhead speed and power.  With long muscles you increase your range of motion, so you can turn and swing easier with less effort and more power.   Also long muscles help you smooth out your golf swing and prevent  those short choppy motion which is usually caused by compensations because of weak and tight muscles.

Also, the longer your muscles, the more efficient your swing becomes and the lower your chances of injury are.   So where do you start? How do you get these long, lean golf muscles? Well, you do it with a combination of golf-specific strength and stretching exercises like the ones I have shown you in my Cardiogolf Program.

On-Course Exercise-You should incorporate an active warm up before you stretch specifically for golf. Active warm-ups can be general and or golf specific.  A general warm-up incorporates large muscles of the upper and lower body and require you to move at a brisk pace for 5 to 10 minutes so that elevate your heart rate.  For younger players the ideal is to break a sweat: for older golfers, it’s to become slightly winded. Such activities include walking, jogging or jumping jacks or jump rope. Anything that will get your heart rate up.

If looking silly is your concern, you don’t want people to see you jumping rope or something, then simply walking is a way to get warmed up.  Instead of driving the golf cart to the driving range, send your partner ahead and walk there. A lot of people may have a hard time doing an active warm up because they don’t want to look silly doing jumping jacks or jogging.  My advice is to either do it where no one can see you or get over it.  Who cares what people think if it is going to help your game!!

Off-Course Exercise-Here are a series of stretches that you can do on a daily basis to help your golf swing.

1. Cross Crawl to Warm up Body-Alternate lifting legs for 30 seconds.

2. Shoulder and Tricep Stretch-Interlace fingers and stretch arms in front of body.

3. Chest and Upper Back Stretch-Interlace fingers and stretch arms in back of body.

4. Low Back Stretch-Press hips forward and lean backwards.

5. Modified Low Back Stretch-Bend your knees and you press hips forward and lean backwards.

6. Wrist Flexion-Stretch arms out in front as you flex your wrists.

7. Shoulder Stretch-Raise arms above head.

8. Shoulder Stretch-Swing right arm across chest and repeat with left arm.

9. Balance Exercise-Lift one leg up as you pump arms up and down, repeat on opposite leg.

10. Shoulder and Lat Stretch-Pull right arm across body and repeat with left arm.

Hold each stretch for 10 to 15 seconds.

Email me your questions and comments-kpj@swingbladegolf.com.