Golf fitness is important. Few would debate that building and maintaining one’s physical capabilities is an essential part of realizing their potential on the course. The benefits of golf fitness are obvious off course as well too. Flourishing and living an ideal optimized life is a goal shared by many and realizing that goal starts with achieving and maintaining good health.
Achieving that goal is an increasingly murky undertaking though. Pills, powders, and hacks abound promising to help you realize your peak condition with little effort or even inconvenience. Be wary of these promises. What follows is the real truth about how overall health and fitness, including golf fitness, is achieved
Golf Fitness is About Doing Something
Improving your golf fitness, and life in general, is about habits. You must identify the habits that are detrimental to your health and eliminate them and create new habits that are positive for your health. In the new habit category is a very simple one: do something.
Many shy away from pursuing golf fitness based on mistaken beliefs about what is required. Some get lured in by a quick-fix marketing campaign and learn the disappointing truth that there’s truly no such thing as a quick fix. The weight WILL come back if you haven’t changed the underlying habits. Others mistakenly believe that real change can’t happen without extraordinary interventions; grueling workouts, punishing long-term fasts, etc.
The real trick to improving your physical condition is to do something, anything, that is more than what you are doing now. If you only add a 10-minute calisthenic or mobility workout at home, you’ll make meaningful improvements. Sure, in time your body will adapt, and you’ll need to up the workload, but adding the habit of working out is the hardest part. Make working out a habit first, then fine-tune and improve the habit as your golf fitness and motivation increase.
Golf Fitness Nutrition
Garbage in, garbage out. You are what you eat. Whatever axiom you subscribe to, reforming your habits must happen in the kitchen too. Really, before the kitchen. You’ve got to start with your grocery list if you really want to tackle your nutrition.
It is simply not possible to meaningfully improve your golf fitness if you insist on consuming highly processed high-sugar foods, drinking a lot of alcohol, or simply eating a lot more calories than you’re burning. Here again, habits. In fact, some of these cross the boundary of habits and are maybe better classified as addiction. Yes, sugar can be an addiction. No, nobody is asking you to go full cold turkey, but again, do something to move the needle. First, have one to two less drinks during the week. Maybe cut the sugary snacks by half. Lower your overall calories a little bit at a time. Again, eating healthy is a habit that you can start and then fine tune as the habit takes hold and your motivation climbs.
Go to Sleep!
Lost in the formula for improved fitness is the necessity for quality sleep. With busy lives and a mountain of to-do’s it can be easy to get to bed a little later than we should, or to get up earlier than is ideal. Don’t. Sufficient quality sleep is essential for a litany of your body’s functions, including muscle recovery, proper digestion, hormonal balance, and much more. Even your attempts to learn a new technique in golf requires your brain to fall into deep sleep, the portion of sleep in which real motor learning takes root. And no, chances are you are not one of the rare specimens that doesn’t need more than a few hours of shut-eye.
Substance Over Hacks
We’re inundated with fitness trends and fads. Cold plunging, red-light saunas, massage guns, foam rollers, hydrogen water bottles, compression wear; the list goes on and on. Some of these work, some do not. Do your own research and perhaps even experiment with these therapies to see what works for you. However, do not assume that any of these therapies replace the two cornerstones of fitness: diet and exercise.
Cold plunging is purported to mobilize visceral fat and help boost your immune system, for example. That doesn’t mean you can eat whatever you want because you’re cold plunging. Similarly, massage guns and foam rollers might help loosen tight muscles, but they do almost nothing to enhance strength and mobility. The point is, don’t lose sight of the fundamentals of fitness while pursuing the latest trends.
Diet and exercise are the two cornerstone habits of golf fitness you must tackle to make meaningful gains. Golf Fitness hacks will come, and some will go, but get the basics of diet and exercise right first.