When people think about their golf swing, they rarely think about the actual foundation of their bodies: the feet. We tend to think on a more macro level–are you taking the right stance, keeping your arm straight, etc.

Just as important, it turns out, is what your feet are doing inside your shoes when you swing. Having curled toes or tight arches can lead to loss of posture, over-rotation, or swaying and sliding.

If you’re curling your toes when you’re taking a swing, you can lose power by not being able to transfer your weight from your back leg to your fron leg. Next time you’re at the driving range, do an experiment and take off your shoes, never mind the crazy looks you might get. Notice what your feet do in your set up and swing; can you absorb the weight into the ground with responsive ankles or are you holding them too tight? Are you rolling the back foot onto the outside in the backswing and your knee becomes unstable?

Try this: stand straight up with your feet together and turn your whole body like you want to see what is behind you. If you feel any discomfort in your knees, back, or hips, you are most likely not turning in the feet. Pay attention to the whole sole of your foot: the weight should be evenly distributed from the heels to the toes. Your ankles should be soft so they can slightly turn as you rotate. If your feet are too stiff, it can result in an overuse of your knees, back, and hips, and over time cause problems in those areas.

Here is an exercise to limber up your feet:

• Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor.
• Put two fists between your knees.
• Roll the feet in and out and see how easy or how hard it is.
• Are there any differences from left to right?

Now perform this sequence of movements, and try to isolate the movement to the ankles, keeping the hips and knees still.

1. Lift all ten toes off the floor and flex your feet several times.
2. Lift the heels high and bend at the ankles several times.
3. Lift the instep of both feet, the knees can open several times.
4. Lift the outside of both feet, the knees can come closer several times.
5. Fan the toes open like a windshield wiper several times.
6. Fan the heels open like a windshield wiper several times.
7. Make circles with both heels, keep the front of your toes on the ground. Keep the knees in place. Move them in both directions.

Repeat all of these with the leat effort possible. If one side is tighter than the other, try to mirror the lightness of movement from the looser side. Walk around and feel how grounded you are to the floor.

If these exercises cause you any pain, stop immediately. By performing these movements, you should be able to improve your posture, and therefore your power, from the bottom up.

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Even though you’re not playing golf in the winter months in the Capital District doesn’t mean you should neglect your body and hope that when you swing a club in the spring, your muscles and posture will be the same. The saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” applies in golf’s offseason. It’s important to fine-tune your golf skills, but in the off months it’s more important to fine-tune your golf body. Here are some simple, functional, golf-specific exercises to perform better at your golf game:

1. Moving your body will lubricate the joints, muscles, nervous system, and brain. Take a nice rhythmic walk outdoors, weather permitting, or on a treadmill (without holding on to the treadmill). Incorporate walking backwards and sideways to create balance in your legs, hips, and back; this can decrease your risk of injury.
2. Mobility work before stability work, meaning rotate your joints in a circular manner, in both directions: ankles, hips , shoulders, upper back. Move them forward and backward, side to side. Your body moves in multiple directions so it’s best to train in multiple directions.
3. Find tight muscles and make sure they get movement. Allowing tight muscles to remain tight will restrict normal joint movement, which can result in injury and poor golf performance. Common areas that are known to be tight are calf muscles, hamstrings, quads, lats, pecs, hands, neck, and shoulder muscles. When stretching, hold for 10 to 30 seconds with proper posture and alignment. An example is a standing hamstring stretch on the stairs. Stand in front of the stairs, toes forward, raise the right leg to the third step, keeping your toe pointed to the ceiling, never reach your fingers to your toes, as that can hurt your back. Lean forward into the stretch with you back straight. Remember, a rounded back hurts your golf swing, so don’t stretch with a rounded back. Repeat on both sides.
4.  Strength training will add power and speed to your golf swing. Get out your exercise tubing, wrap it around a pole. Hold both handles, and while standing, pull your elbows back to the wall. Generally, golfers need pulling exercises more than pushing, especially if you have rounded shoulders and bad posture. Push-ups, for example, can tighten the pecs, making rounded shoulders worse.
5. You should also exercise using the tubing in a rotational, diagonal chop. Since golf is rotation, you should incorporate that motion into your routine.

Keep in mind that we all have limitations and tolerance to load and movement. If you exceed that, something will break. Be gentle with yourself. These winter workouts will make you a better golfer, but they can also make you a safer and better snow-shoveler.

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I was recently asked by a reporter at The Active Times what workouts I always avoid.  All of you know by now that I advocate functional training over the typical grinding away at the gym, so my answers shouldn’t come as a surprise.  That said, I’d like to share them with you.

Bench Presses and Lay-down Pec Flies
The reason I avoid bench presses is that you do the exercise while you’re lying on your back on a bench.  Unlike pushups, for example, bench presses don’t engage your core at all.  Both bench presses and lay-down pec flies can also create a muscle imbalance that leads to rounded shoulders.  The motion and resistance supplied don’t mimic anything a person would do in real life, and I can’t think of any sports that you play lying down, except maybe luge, and those guys aren’t known for their huge pecs.

Overhead Presses
Many, many people have less-than-optimal range of motion in their shoulders.  If you have a shoulder issue and you can’t have full range of motion without any weights, it doesn’t make sense to put resistance on already poor posture.  That will just exacerbate dysfunction.  If you happen not to have a shoulder issue (although most people do, even if they don’t know it) overhead presses won’t hurt, but athletes who make a living raising their hands over their head like pitchers, golfers, and tennis players, don’t do this exercise because it doesn’t resemble their actual motion in play, and it carries with it a substantial risk of injury.

Machine training
Machines only work muscles in one plane, while our body works in three planes.  Building muscle the way that machines do, it’s very easy to get a muscle imbalance.  In functional training, we emphasize stability and balance.  You can’t build stability and balance if you don’t exercise the companion muscles that your body requires to stabilize itself.  I also avoid the treadmill and the ellipticals as they do not mimic the movements that you actually perform while running and jogging.  Again, functional training emphasizes the body’s own ability to stabilize itself and maintain good posture, and machines do nothing to help you develop that.

Crunches on the floor
I avoid crunches on the floor, because they only exercise your core in one direction: flexion.  Most people already spend too much time with their abs under flexion from sitting and standing with bad posture.  The body needs to extend as well as flex the core muscles to remain in balance.

There you have it.  It’s not an exhaustive list, and only your fitness professional can tell you what it’s okay for you to do, but it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no use in taking one step forward only to take two steps back.

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Today’s team approach to player development has changed from what it was in the past. In the early 1990’s, most instructors believed there were three components to address in building the ultimate golfer.
1. Instruction – teaching all aspects of the game: short game, basic fundamentals, specialty shots, etc
2. Mental – Dealing with how to handle the mental stress placed on great players.
3. Equipment – Making sure the golfer is fit properly and has the appropriate set make up.

Later on, as amateur golfers deepened their understanding of how great pro golfers train, golf instructors broke these three ideas down further, making instruction into four parts: course management, shot making skills, basic instruction, and physical conditioning. As the field was refined, in became clear that training was the result of multiple interdependent factors, each relying upon the other to create success.

Similarly, the body itself is composed of multiple interdependent parts, each of which relies upon the others for success. In fact, the golf swing relies on eleven separate body zones, alternating between stable segments and mobile joints. Here they are:

That’s a lot to keep track of. No surprise, then, that TPI found, in a survey of amateur golfers, that 64.3% lose their posture during a swing, 64% early extend, 56% cast or early release, 45% of players have a flat shoulder plane, and many other swing defects are prevalent as well.

If you want to keep improving, you have to keep finding new ways to break your problem down. Maybe there’s just one link in your chain holding you back. You won’t know until you have an understanding of all the interconnected parts of your golf swing.

Now, I’m a fitness professional, and I know from experience that anyone can exercise, but the people who are successful at achieving their goals are those who maintain consistency in their healthy habits.

In fact, the people who succeed at just about anything have one quality in common: commitment to consistency and hard work.

Another difference between successful and unsuccessful people? How they respond to failure. Buried is that insight, of course, is that the way they respond to failure is with–you guessed it–consistency: trying again. Trying harder, trying differently, trying every day.

Okay, you might ask, how do they do that? What makes them different that they can pick themselves up and go again every time? They hold themselves accountable. They don’t just say, “I’ll try again later.” They say, “I’m going to try again for three hours, tomorrow, starting at one o’clock.” Procrastination is a temptation we all contend with, but successful people set deadlines for themselves, and build their lives around their priorities, rather than trying to squeeze them in on the side in between checking Facebook and catching up on Mad Men.

I want to share a video with you about consistency nd commitment. It’s from Marie Forleo, who is a business coach who has inspired me to be better. The video is called, “How To Be Consistent: 5 Steps to Get Things Done, All The Time”

I especially like her point about “catching the wagon.” Too many of us view our progress as an all-or-nothing proposition, where the consequences of one big decision, for example, “I’ll never eat refined sugar again” are the life-changing event we’ve been waiting for, and if it doesn’t work out, all is lost. But truly, those big decisions are enacted as a long series of small, every day decisions.

If you make the wrong decision one day, you CAN make the right one the next, and the day after that, and the day after that–as long as you keep your mind on your goal, and hold yourself accountable for commitments you make to yourself.

To help me keep my goal in mind, I often turn to inspirational quotes. I’d like to share them with you, so I’ll link to them at my blog, here.

Thanks again for subscribing. Be sure to check out Marie Forleo, and if you know anyone who could benefit from this information, please share it using the buttons on the left!

“Busy people are not procrastinators. They set deadlines and force themselves to establish priorities.”

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

“There are three ingredients to success: work hard, stick to it, and use common sense.” -Thomas Edison

“Always be one step ahead of your competition.”

“To be better than others, you must outwork them.”

“Notice what you’re getting from your actions. Review your progress regularly. Change your approach as needed.”

“The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is how they respond to failure.”

“When you have a big enough dream, you don’t need a crisis.”

“What are your core values, and what do they mean to you?”

“Three ingredients for success in physical rehab are, commitment, consistency, and convenience of exercise.”

“Demand more from yourself.”

“Anything worth achieving is worth working for.”

“Do you view exercise as a lifetime goal, or rather as a short term goal?”

“You can always better your personal best.”

“Visualize your fitness program.”

“We all have the same 24 hours per day. Why does one person get stuff done, while the other person procrastinates?  You can carve out five minutes to fifteen minutes, and you can cut back on five to fifteen minutes of activities that are not pointing you in the direction of your goals.”

The goal of a golf swing is to strike the ball with power and a high degree of accuracy.

A typical 18 hole practice round of golf will take six hours. The pro golfer will arrive one to two hours before tee time. They’ll spend the first hour with the fitness trainer, the second with the swing coach, then play 18 holes. If they are a right handed golfer, they will carry a left handed 7 iron in their bag. At some point they will play golf with the off club to create balance in the body.

Pro golfers don’t merely work harder than they once did; now they are working smarter, using science and technology to enhance the way they train and perform. It isn’t enough to eat right and put in the hours; you need to have the best PhDs, athletic trainers, stretch coaches, swing coaches, acupuncturists, massage therapists, holistic nutritionists, movement specialists, and psychologists on board as well.

Today’s athletes emphasize sport-specific training over generalized conditioning. There is an increasing use of biometric sensors. Equipped with heart-rate monitors, GPS, and gyroscopes to measure not just performance, but also fatigue level.

Golfers can bee hooked up to sensors to determine the efficiency of the golf swing, making sure that they are using the correct sequence to swing a golf club.

Today’s athletes spend the off-season working on their game in different training environments and sports, making sacrifices, and trying to do what their competition won’t.

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The leading cause of back pain is poor posture. Being mindful of your posture is always a good thing for your back. One good thing to do to make sure that your posture is engaged is to eliminate bad exercise and movement patterns that you perform in the gym.

If your job requires sitting or bending forward, then the exercise program at the gym should counterbalance that by providing more extension exercises. As you know, Golf is a flexion sport. More flexion at the gym is not good.

If you’re doing chest flies or chest presses or crunches on the floor, you could be shortening your pectoralis minor muscle in such a way that it causes a rounding of your shoulders and a muscle imbalance in your back.

The use of exercise machines does not help back pain either. Some machines, like the leg press, can cause you to hold your body in an unnatural position under load. Leg presses in particular can lead to herniated disks because of the way your hips are positioned while lifting heavy weight.

Something women in particular should be aware of is that during menstruation, your joints are actually looser. During this time, you need to be extra careful to maintain good posture and stability during exercise and during your golf swing. If you can’t decelerate the club slowly, you will hurt your body. Your looser joints can actually lead to what’s called “shearing” in your joints, and consequently to injury.

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As you know, I’m always trying to maintain my edge. This week, I took two steps to further that goal, to make sure that you, the client, get the best possible value for the trust you place in me as your personal trainer.

Obviously it’s important to exercise our bodies, but it’s also helpful to challenge our minds and be open to new ideas. To that end, I attended the 2015 Functional Training Summit in Providence, Rhode Island this past week. I learned new techniques for reducing pain and isolating its causes from renowned TPI director Dr. Greg Rose, who hosted a lecture called “Pain: Is it you or your environment?” I learned more about balance and posture from physical therapist and author Gray Cook, attended lectures on new workout planning techniques, movement efficiency, and other topics.

I got to meet with Mike Boyle, one of the top athletic trainers in the world, who works with college, Olympic, professional, and top amateur athletes:

I also got to meet Dr. Greg Rose, TPI director, who appears regularly on the Golf Channel:

Over a thousand fitness professionals attended.

Interestingly, I didn’t see any other trainers from the Capital District at the conference. Not everyone is as passionate as I am about maintaining their knowledge and techniques so they can serve their clients better than the next guy.

In addition to upgrading my knowledge, I’ve also decided to upgrade my practice with a new and promising therapy known as Cold Laser therapy. It’s designed to relieve pain and increase the rate that your body can heal itself after an injury. It can reduce pain related to inflammation by lowering the levels of prostaglandins in the affected cells, and by applying heat and increasing circulation to speed the healing process.

The FDA has approved this laser device for relieving muscle spasms and joint stiffness, and preliminary research indicates that its mechanisms of action have even more beneficial effects.

If you’d like to make an appointment, or just have questions about Cold Laser therapy, please give me a call at 518-281-3772.

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In other newsletters, I’ve talked about the five pillars of the kinetic chain: flexibility, balance, strength, endurance, and power.  Now it’s time to talk about Power, the last, but not least, link in that chain.
Power is key for optimal performance, and to have it you need to develop two things: speed and strength.
In order to increase power, you must first have mobility of the joints and full range of motion in the muscles.  Power in the  golf swing is measured as club head speed.
Power is developed in stages.  Speed development begins with the lower body, progresses to the torso, and is completed with the wrist angle of the head arm.  It is a combination of all these body segments working together to develop club head speed.  It is necessary for each segment of the body to contain levels of strength.  If you’re going to increase your club speed from 95 mph to 100 mph, the distance you hit the golf ball would increase significantly.  The equipment you need are medicine balls, tubing, and TRX suspension.
With a partner or next to a wall, get in golf stance and mimic golf swing with a 2-4 pound medicine ball, ten times each side.  Then perform the same movement with resistance tubing ten times each side, then execute the TRX standing back pull 16 times.  After that, do five body-weight-only squats with a golf rotation, and do five more, this time rotating in the opposite direction.

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Client Spotlight: Morris M of Albany says: “I would highly recommend your services to anybody that is in my age bracket or younger to obtain your services as a personal trainer.  You have made a world of difference in my life, and I can’t begin to thank you for building up my body.”