Weight Lifting and Exercises for Golf

Be confident in the outcome of your drive. Concentrate on the follow through. Narrow your focus on the target. These tips are packed with wisdom that every golfer should remember. A championship swing, however, begins long before the tee penetrates the ground, and these words of wisdom - mental guidelines for on-the-course play - are most useful to the golfer who has already developed his physical game. Like sticking Chuck Yeager in the cockpit of a plane without wings, the golfer who has the skills but not the fitness can only be mediocre. Luckily, researchers are studying golf-specific exercise more than ever, and here's how science recommends golfers should exercise to develop a deeper drive.

SCIENCE OF THE SWING
The key to a powerful drive lies in the amount of "rotational force" your body can produce. If you think about the motions of a drive, you realize that this "rotation" includes almost every major muscle group in your body. It starts with the large muscles of the thighs, glutes, hips, lower back, and abdominals. These are the muscles that allow your trunk to rotate from your backswing to a strong follow-trough. Smaller muscles - the upper back, shoulders, and arms - add control, direction, and power to your rotation.

EXERCISE YOUR SWING
Because, as you can see, a drive requires harmony and strength of all the major muscle groups, exercises that maximize trunk rotational force are best for developing a strong, long-ball drive. Here're some movements that science suggests will give you a deeper, longer drive.

BENT KNEE SIT-UPS: The old-fashioned sit up is the best for working your entire core. Developing a strong abdominal section is crucial for stabilizing your swing and empowering your rotation.

MEDICINE BALL TRUNK TWISTS: Take a medicine ball, sit on the floor with your knees bent, and slowly twist from side to side with the ball extended in front of you. Be sure to get a full twist, tapping the ball on each side as you turn. This movement mimics the rotation of a swing closely, and will help you develop strong obliques - a muscle crucial to a powerful swing.

DUMBELL LATERAL RAISES: Your shoulders are the start and finish of your swing. They initiate your backswing and complete your follow through, and are vital to developing a long drive. Lateral raises work your entire shoulder, but focus on the lateral deltoid, the muscle largely responsible for the direction and control of your swing.

TRICEP PUSHDOWN: A powerful swing is essentially an explosion that begins in your core, and works its way outward through your arms, into the club, and then into the golf ball. The power of your swing may not originate in your arms, but they are nonetheless vital to finishing your swing. Your triceps are responsible for extending your arms, and the better your extension, the more torque - or power - you can gather into the club head. Tricep extensions are a great way to do this.

REVERSE-GRIP BARBELL CURLS: As with the triceps, the biceps and forearms play a major role in the strength of your swing. They're responsible for pushing your arms through the swing, and more importantly, for rotating your wrists from start to finish. Using reverse grip curls - gripping the bar with your palms facing down instead of up - gives you the added benefit of working both your biceps and forearms simultaneously.

SIZE DOES MATTER
When lifting weights specifically to improve your golf game, it's important to remember that not only the strength, but also the size of your muscles is an issue. Golf is not bodybuilding, and developing bigger muscles should not be your goal. If your muscles get bigger, the shape of your body will change, and this will have an adverse effect on the path of the golf club throughout your swing.

So, to increase the strength but not the size of your muscles, it's best to perform sets of high repetitions. Muscles tend to grow (this is called hypertrophy) when less than fifteen reps are performed to failure; so, for golf, do between 15 and 25 reps of a weight just heavy enough to reach failure on your last set only. Since endurance, coordination, and strength are our goals here, it's enough to do a full body workout three days each week.