How To Prevent The Most Common Golf Injuries
The most common golf injuries involve the back, shoulders and wrist. However, the sudden twinge in your lower back or tightness in the shoulder have probably been a long time in the making. Is your technique contributing to your injuries? Is what you do off the course effecting what to do on it?
Our bodies are very good at adapting to the demands we put upon them, but unfortunately they’re also susceptible to poor conditioning. If your golfing techniques contain inefficient movements, you’ll be placing undue stress on parts of your body and eventually something will give. The maverick Australian running coach Percy Cerutty would tell his athletes that if “you can hear the whispers you never have to hear the screams.”
You can do a lot to prevent complications if you get help as soon as you hear a ‘whisper’. Don’t be tempted to ignore aches and pains and play through them, because they’ll only come back big time later. Firstly, visit a physiotherapist, chiropractor, osteopath or sports masseur for an assessment. Manipulation can help to free up movement of joints that may be inflamed by poor technique or overuse. If your range of movement in just one joint in your body is limited, other joints will have to compensate, and as your movement becomes compromised the situation can only get worse.
Manual treatment is however only half the solution. What have you been doing to cause the problem in the first place? If you drive your car badly for long enough, something will go wrong with it. The garage may be able to fix the mechanical fault but it won’t change your driving habits. As soon as you drive away, the process starts all over again. To prevent injury or a recurrence of an old one you need to improve both your golfing techniques and how you use your body on a daily basis. Sitting and moving correctly when you’re away from the golf course will help you when you’re on it. Maintaining focus as we sit at our computers, drive our cars in heavy traffic or slump on the couch can be a challenge. Once we get engrossed in our daily activities, we lose sense of the how we’re doing and we cruise along at the mercy of our bad habits. We use the wrong muscles for the wrong actions, and coordination goes out of the window along with the natural poise we had in our youth. It should therefore be no surprise our body starts to complain when we take it out for a round of golf. |
So how can you regain lost poise?
If you can apply the same awareness to your daily activities as you do for your golf, your body will benefit. Learning a method such as The Alexander Technique will help to increase the efficiency of your movement and place less stress on your muscles and joints. It will also improve your ability to focus and get into the moment – a vital skill for a game like golf where the margin between success and failure is tiny! You can find out more about improving your golf technique by developing awareness and coordination in my new book, Golf Sense. To read more about my approach to training see my other golf articles. |
