When it comes to training for golf, an efficient and powerful swing hinges on the perfect balance of strength and flexibility. If you’ve been hitting the gym consistently but find your flexibility holding you back, you’re not alone. No matter how much you stretch, barriers can still limit your progress. Here are some game-changing tips to help you break through and elevate your performance on the course!

1. Incorporate stability work into your strength training

   Our body has muscles designed to produce force and others to help stabilize joints. With traditional weight training, most exercises focus on strengthening force-producing muscles. Examples include the hamstrings, quadriceps, latissimus doris, pectoral muscles, biceps, and triceps. They are longer, thicker muscles and train well under load.

   Stabilizing muscles are thinner and usually have a smaller cross-sectional area. Their job is to create stability around a joint. Joints that require the most stability are the neck, shoulders, lower back, and knees. Though stabilizing muscles are active under load to protect joints, they are not trained well under larger load. They are best trained under lower loads to prevent the larger muscle groups from kicking in.

   If someone does not include training specifically for their stabilizers, they will often start to use their force-producing muscles as stabilizers. Those muscles then have to do double the work, which can usually lead to overuse and a chronic state of tightness. For example, undertraining spinal stability and lateral hip muscles often leads to chronically tight hamstrings and hip flexors.

   Here are three workouts that can be found in the GolfForever app Library under Fundamentals to start working on your stability:

   • Core Endurance 2 | Middle/Back Tees
   • Glute & Hip Activation w/ Tubing/Mini Band | All Levels
   • Core Stability & Strength | Middle/Back Tees
   
2. Utilizing your flexibility actively

   Flexibility describes how far a muscle group or joint can be moved through its range of motion by forces acting upon it (i.e., its passive range of motion). Many of us stretch in different planes of motion. Still, traditional weight lifting and cardio activities do not challenge the body to move actively forward/back (sagittal plane), side-to-side (frontal plane), and rotationally (transverse plane). Putting flexibility into action can lead to more consistent gains while stretching and in our daily lives and sports.

   Check out these strengthening workouts that also challenge you to strengthen in all planes of motion. They can be found in the Library under Rotational Power:

   • Follow Through Workout w/ Swing Trainer | Middle/Back Tees
   • Weight Shift Workout 1 | Middle/Back Tees
   • Wind-Up Power | Middle/Back Tees
   

In the GolfForever program, we intentionally pair Fundamental warmups (stability and flexibility focus) with specific Rotational Power workouts (strengthening focus) so you can work on your flexibility and strength in a complementary way and start seeing the gains both in your body feels and also in your swing!