Struggling to get distance? It isn’t your swing or your ball, you got to get in the gym.
The big thing with golf exercising for golf, isn’t about doing huge weight. It has a lot to do with flexibility and core strength.
Here are the five best workouts for you to start doing, and you will be hitting 300 yard drives in no time.
- Glute bridges: Lay flat on your back, with your feet on the ground and your knees pointing straight to the sky. Now squeeze your butt muscles and thrust your hips into the air.
How does this help? It is the same motion you do in your golf swing when you thrust your hips through the swing, towards the target. One of the most important parts to adding distance to your drives.
- Medicine ball perpendicular wall throws: Grab a medicine ball that feels like a reasonable weight for your strength. Find a wall that will take the impact of a medicine ball being thrown, stay away from glass or sheetrock. Now you stand like you are addressing a golf ball, with the wall being your “Target”. Hold the ball out in front of you and activate your core muscles and turn and throw the ball against the wall. Switch sides and keep activating your core muscles. Also, make sure you catch the ball as it bounces off the wall.
How does this help? You are activating the same core muscles, hips and glutes that you would in your normal golf swing. Adding weight will increase your speed through the ball, making it go further.
- Medicine ball core rotations: Along the same line as the workout above, this one is all about core and activating the muscles you use when you are on your downswing trying to crush the ball down the fairway. To perform this exercise you sit on the ground with a medicine ball and tuck your knees in the air so the only part of your body touching the ground is your butt. You then turn the medicine ball from side to side tapping it on the ground on either side of you, isolating your core.
How does this help? Activating your core muscles is key to getting more distance on your driver
- Cable wood chops: A personal favorite, this exercise mimics the golf swing, just adds weight to it. To perform go to a cable cage and attach a handle type piece to it. Put both hands on it, like a golf grip, and start up top of your swing and swing your hands across your body and down. While doing this you should be in golf posture and firing your hips through, simulating a golf swing.
How does this help? It builds the necessary core and shoulder muscles to hit the ball as far as Dustin Johnson.
- Walking lunges: This is the simplest of exercises and you can do them virtually anywhere. To perform this, you simply walk in a straight line and with every step you lunge. If you want to amp up the intensity when you lunge out and then on your way up raise your knee that was behind you to your chest.
How does this help? For one it stretches out your hips. But most importantly it teaches you to push off the ground and create power through exploding off the ground. So when you are swinging you can generate power from your legs.
Fitness was overlooked for many years in the game of golf. We saw guys like John Daly on the PGA Tour and figured golf was a game you could just kind of power through. But today with golfers like Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson, we realize how important fitness is.