A question that comes up often for our coaching staff at Hit ITGreat® is “What exercise equipment makes the most sense for working on golf fitness at home?”
Unlike a lot of fitness options being marketed to consumers these days that are elaborate in both setup and cost, it turns out you can make great progress towards golf fitness with some relatively simple tools. (Hit IT Great’s Coach Joey D has some great advice on this topic.)
This article will show you a few options to consider, along with examples of how you can deploy them to help optimize your body for the golf swing.
Bilateral Resistance Bands
Bilateral resistance bands are a staple of golf fitness training. Their versatility allows them to be used in many settings for a variety of purposes. Because they are relatively inexpensive, they offer great value for your golf fitness efforts.
These bands can easily travel with you to the course, making them a great choice to include in your game day warmup.
In the series below from our Coach Chris Noss’s Game Day Workout, Coach Marvin uses bilateral resistance bands in a Takeaway And Turn exercise.
Takeaway And Turn helps warm up muscle groups involved in -- you guessed it -- takeaways and turns!
Mimicking the motions involved in your swing, he starts by using the bands to create resistance in the loading portion of his backswing.
From there, the hands move back to center front before the opposing band is used to work the muscles involved in the follow-through, making sure to fully extend and focus on finishing the swing motion up high.
Mono Loops
Mono loops are deceptively simple: just an elastic circular band. But they can help ingrain, for example, lower-body strength and balance that will help your golf game.
Discovering golf-specific exercises that relate back to the game while working with your lower body is not as easy as you might think. Lateral lunges enhanced by the resistance provided by a mono loop does address that challenge.
Here, our Coach Marvin employs a mono loop with a twist, so it is in a figure-8 alignment, to prepare for a set of lateral lunges. First, he works stepping with his left foot as his base and loading his weight back to his right.
Once he completes a set working in that direction, he reverses it, using his right foot as his base and loading weight off to his left side.
Exercise Balls
Most of us are familiar with 55-65cm exercise balls from seeing them at gyms, as they have become a mainstay for a lot of fitness work. But golf-specific exercise allows us the opportunity to use exercise balls in unique ways you may not have previously envisioned.
That’s what Coach Marvin is demonstrating in this set of exercises, which combine the rotational motions you associate with a golf swing with the necessity to be broad enough in your upper body to hold the exercise ball, instead of just a focused narrow alignment if you were holding a golf club.
Hold a ball with the arms fully extended and your posture the same as your normal golf setup, you can enhance the overall feel of your swing by making your rotational moves while still open wide to keep the exercise ball in place.
To get maximum benefit from the exercise, keep your head still and rotate into your backswing holding the exercise ball so that your back toward the target line. Then release through impact and rotate into your backswing. Repeat up to ten times to get the feel of a connected upper body staying connected through your swing.
Conclusion
Golf fitness can be pursued in many ways. You don’t have to invest a fortune to see real benefit in your own results. Adding a few tools that offer versatility into the work you are doing on your own either at home, on the range or at the course as you warm up can pay real dividends when combined with informed instruction from golf fitness experts.
Check out our training programs to find one that's right for you!
