By Jim Fanara, CSCS
Are hours of lessons, practice and exercise still not producing improvements in your swing? Lack of progress may be the result of muscular imbalances that impact mobility and make correctly striking a golf ball difficult or even impossible.
You can start assessing your mobility yourself. Can you swing correctly without pain? Can you physically move into the technically correct positions of a golf swing? Of course, pain is a sign that something is wrong but so is the inability to move the way it’s required to correctly swing a golf club.
Injury can cause compensations that develop mobility issues. But you don’t need an injury to have restricted mobility. Muscular imbalances limit range of motion and can be caused by habitually repeating faulty movement patterns. Just as muscles adapt to exercise, the neuromuscular system adapts to all movement. Habitually flawed movement creates compensations that distort how muscles move joints.
Muscle imbalance is a complex issue but we can improve understanding with a couple of simplified examples to show what’s happening. Too much bench pressing can shorten the muscles in the front of your shoulder and chest. These powerful and shortened muscles in the front stretch opposing muscle in the back. Stretched muscles become weakened and have trouble resisting the pull from the muscles in the front. As a result, you get that “rolled forward” shoulder posture.
But sitting at your computer all day can put your shoulders in the same posture as the guy who only bench presses. Any habitually faulty movement will do. Hunching over your desk at work all day draws the shoulders to the midline; stiffening and shortening the muscles of your front shoulder and chest. They get “locked “short. The muscles stabilizing your back become stretched and weakened or “locked” long. What happens? The same thing, you get that hunched over, forward rolled shoulder posture. This imbalance has a name - Upper Cross Syndrome.
How does an imbalance like UCS impact swing mechanics? Try to get your driver all the way back in your backswing while keeping your shoulders rolled forward. You can’t do it. Your physical capacity to properly rotate will be impaired leading to a variety of swing flaws and compromising power production. But more importantly, dysfunctions like UCS can cause injury.
Practicing with the poor technique caused by muscle imbalances “locks in” the motor pattern causing the poor technique. Practice makes permanent. Now, the “locked-in” pattern makes it next to impossible for you to achieve technically correct positions no matter how many more lessons you take or buckets of balls you go thru.
Muscular imbalances can occur around any joints not just the shoulders. So, to improve your swing, rather than another lesson and more practice, you may need to first try to reduce any muscular imbalances that are impacting swing mechanics. Obtaining a movement pattern screen from a qualified clinician or strength coach can help you learn why you can’t get the swing improvements you are looking for.