Hit The Ball Straight Down The Fairway!
If your golf shots are all over the place and not down the fairway it could very well be due to the lack of stability. Stability in your body is a must for the golfer to achieve a quality golf swing. If your body can’t stabilize correctly during the golf swing you will lose accuracy, consistency and power. Instability leads to many swing faults and contributes to the potential for injury.
What Is Stability
Stability is the ability to resist dynamic forces applied to the body (golf swing) in order to transfer kinetic energy up through anatomical chain. This is a good summary of what many areas in our body that are defined as stabilizers (such as the lumbar spine or low back) are asked to do in order for us to create movement throughout the body.
What Can Cause Instability?
When performing a golf swing the body uses a normal pattern of mobile and stable segments (joints). If the pattern is altered by dysfunction (instability), compensation will occur by another joint. This compensatory action by the body leads to stiffness; lose of range of motion and increased risk of injury.
How Do You Create Stability?
It’s created by combining three things:
- Balance
- Strength
- Muscular Endurance
For example, let’s look at what physically would take place if you wanted to shoot a bow and arrow. You would need to keep the bow and arrow stable as you pulled the string back—you would need to have good balance, strength, and local muscular endurance.
This same principal is applied in creating a powerful golf swing. The ability to keep one part of the body secure (stable) while stretching and contracting adjacent segments of the body allows us to generate speed and maintain a consistent posture throughout the golf swing.
Here is what normal stability/mobility pattern looks like during a golf swing (at various joints):
Stable
Foot
Knee
Pelvis/Sacrum/Lumbar Spine
Scapula
Elbow
Cervical Spine/Neck
Mobile
Ankle
Hip
Thoracic Spine
Gleno-Humeral/Shoulder
Wrist
Common Swing Faults Caused By Instability
- Over The Top
- Sway
- Slide
TPI Movement Screen Techniques To Test Stability
Torso Twist:
Hip Twist:
Single-Leg Balance:
Ankle (pronation/supination/dorsi-flection):
Corrective Exercise Suggestions
- Therapy Ball—Myo-fascial release
- The Message Stick—Myo-fascial release
- Torso twist
- Hip twist
- Half kneeling balance (eyes closed)
- Door jam dorsi-flexion stretch