Putting your off-season golf fitness program together

Dec. 13, 2006

By Sean M. Cochran
Special to PGATOUR.com

At this juncture we have all the information and exercises required for the development of your off-season golf fitness program. Remember the goal of this program is to improve your golf game through the development of your body.

Going back to the first couple of articles in this series we performed assessments to determine what aspects of your body required attention. We looked at your flexibility, strength, endurance, and power capacities. Once the physical assessment was complete we walked through a series of flexibility, strength, endurance and power exercises for your golf fitness program. It is now time for us to take all these exercises and place them into a structured program.

A structured program provides you with a plan of how and when to perform your exercises for the greatest benefit. Before beginning the development of your program, we must first ask ourselves a couple questions. The first question is, what are the goals of your off-season program? Secondly, what are the time commitments surrounding this program? This will provide you with a realistic assessment of where you want to go with this program and how much time you can commit to it.

Once you have answered these questions the set-up of the program becomes quite simple. Let’s begin with the flexibility section of your program. The goal of our flexibility exercises is to develop the range of motion required to execute the golf swing correctly. We often have muscles that are “tight”, causing restrictions in our ability to execute the swing. To counteract this situation we will “stretch” these muscles with flexibility exercises.

Flexibility exercises can be performed seven days a week. I suggest performing your flexibility exercises a minimum of four days per week and a maximum of six. If you are a golfer who is extremely “tight” I recommend completing your flexibility exercises two times a day: One time in the morning and one time at night. Allow yourself ten minutes of time per flexibility session. It is of the greatest importance to give yourself enough time to execute the exercises correctly for the suggested number of sets and repetitions. All too often I see the amateur golfer rushing through their flexibility exercises, which limits their benefits.

In the overall development of your off-season golf fitness program, the flexibility section will always be the first set of exercises performed. Once completed, you will move onto the other sections of your program.

Next week we will complete the development of your off-season program by adding the guidelines to follow in the implementation of your strength and power drills.