If you’ve embraced golf fitness as a pathway to lower scores, good on ya. Increasing your strength, power, and mobility will help you play better, and help you play pain-free. There’s also that little benefit of living a longer healthier life too.
But proceed with caution. There are exercises available to you in the weight room that are potentially detrimental to your golf swing. If improving your golf swing is priority number one in your golf fitness routine, avoid these common weightlifting exercises.
Upright Rows
Some staples of the weight-training game are just bad in general, never mind your golf swing, and the upright row comes pretty close to being a bad idea for most people regardless of their goals. The exercise is widely used to develop the upper trapezius (traps) and shoulders. Many go far too heavy with this exercise and with poor form though and develop shoulder impingement and rotator cuff problems instead.
Your traps stabilize your shoulders, so having sufficient strength is important. But if you develop excessively tight traps you will severely degrade your shoulder mobility. Your pursuing golf fitness to improve mobility, not sacrifice it, right?
Ditch upright rows altogether. They are not worth the injury risk. And stop doing shrugs too; they’re a bodybuilding move that you don’t need for golf fitness. Your traps will get plenty of stimulus from the deadlifts and rows that should be in your routine.
Leg Extensions
Leg extensions in and of themselves aren’t necessarily bad, but they suffer from two main downfalls. One, there’s not a lot of juice for the literal squeeze since you’re only getting to your quadriceps and ignoring the hamstrings and glutes. In other words, there are more efficient ways to train your legs for the time you’re investing. Second, it’s another exercise that’s easy to perform wrong and hurt yourself in the process.
Many gym-goers will violently kick the weight up rather than use a smooth, controlled action. Worse, they’ll often overload the weight and then try to squeeze at the top of the movement. The result: a ton of pressure and strain on the joint and tendons. If the point of your golf fitness endeavor is to play better, putting your joints and tendons in harms way probably isn’t going to help.
Stick with the tried-and-true squat in one of its many variations. You’ll get more bang for the buck across all the muscle groups of your legs. Done properly, squats can help you avoid the inherent injury risks of a leg extension too.
Crunches & Sit-Ups
It’s not true that every exercise must mimic a sports movement to be valuable. That said, it’s not hard to see that crunches and sit-ups do very little to approximate the athletic requirements of most sports. Think about it: when’s it necessary to shrink the distance between the torso and pelvis like that?
What crunches and sit-ups are good for is teaching you the exact rounded posture that you don’t want for golf. Don’t do them in your golf fitness routine, period. Go with planks instead, and the many variations of planks available to you as your ab strength increases.
Bench Presses?
I know, say it ain’t so. Few things are more “alpha” than slapping several wheels on the barbell and repping out some bench presses. And if you’re going to hit the gym for your golf game, it’d be nice to get the secondary benefit of looking a little more jacked on the beach too, right? Unfortunately bench pressing is another exercise that often gets abused and misused, ultimately compromising your game.
Many lifters tend to overly prioritize the exercise for any number of reasons, not the least of which being it’s working a muscle you can see in the mirror. The net result of all that pec development is a tight and potentially overly developed chest that inhibits your ability to make a full turn. That’s a golf fitness fail.
People will often exaggerate the range of motion as well, lowering the bar all the way to the chest in the name of “total development” but increasing injury risk significantly. To avoid these risks, try adopting single-arm cable presses and other single-arm movements that help you isolate the pectoral muscle.
One note here: there’s a question mark in the heading because bench presses absolutely can be performed safely and be an effective part of a golf fitness routine. The problem is ego. If you have one and aren’t willing to NOT overprioritize the pecs trying to impress everyone else in the gym, get them out of your routine. If you can do them safely and with some measure of reason, hit the bench.
Golf fitness pursuits will lower your scores, but you need to make smart choices to fully reap the benefits. Avoid movements that risk injury unnecessarily, or don’t give you enough bang for the buck. Lower scores await if you train the right things the right way!