Continued isolation and social distancing for now another couple of weeks is a stressful undertaking during the Covid 19 pandemic. People are anxious to get back to their work and recreational activities. Once we do though we will have less time to take care of ourselves. That leaves a couple of more weeks to improve our physical capabilities and get ahead of others as we prepare to golf again. We discussed how important hip mobility was in our last blog. Hopefully you have committed to some of the exercises and your hip tightness is diminishing.
The next area you must be concerned with is your shoulders. We all have spent more time on our computers the past month. As a result the muscles in your chest and front shoulder areas have gotten tighter. This will inhibit your ability to open up with your golf swing. If swing width decreases distance will suffer. Concurrently the muscles in the posterior shoulder will deactivate and weaken, further allowing the shoulder to be comfortable rolling forward in posture. Standing upright your posture starts to look as if you are round shouldered.
To address this postural change you to have to do exercises that stretch the front of the shoulder and chest areas. A couple of safe exercises would be: 1. Putting hands on an open door casing at chest height and leaning into the doorway (you can move the position of your hands higher or lower to alter the angles of stretch); 2. put one hand on a wall so your arm is parallel to the floor, turn your body away until you feel a stretch in the chest and front of your shoulder, then do the other arm. Hold both of these stretches for 30 seconds, then squeeze your shoulder blades together for another 10 seconds to activate the posterior shoulder and mid back.
To restore posterior shoulder and mid back strength rowing motions, T, Y, and W's with weights and bands are a good place to start. Other exercises can be found on www.tomlafountain.com.
Focusing on mobility in your hips and shoulders will help you regain the mobility that we tend to lose over time. Under normal circumstances our busy schedules make it difficult to devote the time necessary to restore and maintain hip and shoulder mobility. Now is a perfect time to personally improve your well being and feel ready as you hit the golf course.
