Several months ago I started working with a good club golfer who started our session by stating that he always looked after his back and abs. With some more questioning he uncovered that his “secret formula” for super human abdominal strength was performing 150 inner range pulsing crunches religiously every day.  This went a long way in explaining his kyphosis, restricted rotation, poor lower abdominal control, and lower back pain.  This was a great example of just how poorly abdominal conditioning is understood.  The scary thing is that it’s not uncommon to come across these “super human abdominal workouts”.

There are a number of problems with this programme.  Golf is played standing on your feet and involves movement in the transverse and frontal planes.  Numerous studies have shown that to get maximum transfer of your training, the training exercises should mimic the event in terms of posture (Rasch and Moorehouse, 1957), movement pattern (Almasbakk and Hoff, 1996), speed and load (Ewing et al, 1990).  This inner range crunches programme missed the mark on all of these factors.

Developing abdominal strength when lying on your back will give you strong abs when you’re lying on your back.  On-the-ground conditioning has its place with patients or clients in the early stages of rehabilitation and/or learning.  However, this must be progressed to mimic the ADLs of the client to complete the rehabilitation process.

The million dollar point here is that stability and strength is position specific.

We concentrated on isolated lower abdominal work on the ground in the early stages of this golfer’s programme along with corrective work to undo the postural problems that he had created.  This particular client also had no concept of lumbar-pelvic positioning so this was a useful phase to work through.  I have found that using a biofeedback pressure cuff is very useful in the early stages of lower abdominal conditioning (Figure 1).  He also did conditioning work on his feet involving bent over positions (a posture specific to golf) - Figure 2.  Standing rotation work was included to give specific conditioning in the transverse plane (Figure 3).  The woodchop involves a lateral weight shift, rotation and upper body stability which are all important to transfer to golf performance.

Figure 1. Lower ab conditioning.  Biofeedback cuff is placed in the lumbar curve.

Figure 2. Bent over row.

Figure 3. Cable woodchop

Over several weeks lower abdominal function and posture improved considerably and we progressed from the corrective phase to a conditioning phase.

Typically a golfer swing a club with 80-90% of maximal effort with a force of 600-800N being dispersed at the point of impact, so heavy strength training and power training is very appropriate.  Loading and speeds were not aggressive in the early stages of conditioning.  Tissue needs time to adapt to the forces involved in heavy resistance training and power training.  We progressed to explosive movements as he improved the quality of his movement and conditioning.  Explosive rotational training with cables, medicine and tornado balls (Figure 4) were added to improve power.

Figure 4. Tornado ball.  This rubber ball on a rope is used for explosive core conditioning.

So far this golfer has added around 30m onto his driving distance and decreased his handicap from a 4 to a 2, with scores still improving.  He also looks less like a walking banana, and has no back pain. His golf coach has been instrumental in incorporating the changes in his body back into the swing and has been very pleased with the changes in the swing he has seen.